Leilani CauthenLetting humans be human
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series. Part one can be found here.
The crux of the issue is that teaching is defined by nearly all traditional public schools as a one-to-many construct. And a stage. It’s a normalizing construct that retains its shape even while decrying a lack of equity because of its body. It’s not built for equity. Teachers will quietly triage their students, noting who can’t keep up and trying but letting a few falls behind to save the many. Those behind get low grades, the failing marks. Not because teachers don’t want to catch them up but because they are constricted by time and upcoming testing dates. It’s built for the many, not the one.
Every other industry, including retail, has perfected one-to-one with extreme personalization, even recommendation engines for what to do/ buy next. Schools just aren’t organized like this for this Age. Or they think in terms of two rails, either the regular bell schedule in buildings or the online kids – but not a new hybridization of both in magical ways, like how FedEx can get a package anywhere in the world in under 24 hours, or how Uber matches you up with a driver and you have a transactional ride somewhere and then move on with your life. Teachers have not been shown or provided systems that precisely use direct instruction skills and student progress independently except within subject-specific professional-grade courseware. Teachers are going digital, much like the old days of assigning textbook chapters. The entire thing is built around teacher distribution rather than teacher-as-premium.
Nationally, only about 30 percent of schools use subject-specific adaptive digital courseware, mostly supplementally. Teachers think it replaces them and rarely uses it. Most vendors are even afraid to call it core curriculum, yet much of it is core. They tip-toe around the fundamental transformation they could bring because of the delicate sensibilities around whole group teaching.
Teachers consider that tech can stay in the shallow end of what it’s capable of, such as being a scrap of text that is now a digital document, a video, an image, a quiz, a mechanism of the display, or a communication relay. But it can’t go into the deep end. It can’t possibly automate the lesson sequence, giving each bit of knowledge, assessing along the way, remediating automagically, using active animations and digital manipulatives, and then relaying the student to the following sequence. That’s going too far. Many can’t even imagine this potential because tech is “just a tool” for them. They’ve usually never seen the good stuff, the fully loaded adaptive digital curriculum. Yet, for increasing numbers of students in the voraciously digitally consuming public, it’s not just a tool; it’s the way they bypass the ancient model of human teaching by 3Xing the speed of a YouTube video to learn about gravity and then skip out to play with the other kids in the real world.
Let’s make sure we all get one thing very clear. Tech is replacing the old whole-group model; it’s not replacing accurate human direct instruction and making direct instruction a premium.
The delicate question is:
Will we let human teachers be human?
Will there ever be a day when human teachers are used precisely and fortuitously only for their human qualities in direct instruction? Never leave any student behind, but work like maestros of direct instruction and unfettered depth of digital accouterments to pull off any student “getting it” in any subject?
Will teachers and entire schools and districts become subsumed into a myriad of digital functioning bits and pieces until they are veritable megaliths of tools and systems, as teachers still do fairly “flat digital” text-based lessons to remain the center point? If so, the digital EdTech sophistication already here will go elsewhere and, like water going downhill, seek the least path of resistance to reach its destination. It will build up the consumer markets as it has been doing until public education loses its lust. Already several CIOs from districts have mentioned that a forthcoming master system for consumers that uses on-demand tutoring and all sorts of paths and side trails of standards-based and testing-aligned adaptive components could not just replace teachers but all schools.
The threat to the traditional public and its structure is here and not going away. Leaders are the ones who must lead their schools into a new distribution structure, one that uses teachers for their premium humanity with direct instruction, not in digital lessons and distribution functions to whole groups. The only thing missing is professional-grade logistics and workflow management of schedules, spaces (campus or remote), and student pace logs so that the entire student body is managed despite being on normalized paths at independent points and not necessarily based on competency, just pace.
It’s a delicate question about how we help teachers digitally transition, one some leaders never let float through their minds. Some will reject it forcefully because the old way is the only way they know. They are happy with the mild change and, put another way, with systemic inequity. One has to imagine how an alternative system would distribute all learning to every student in a personalized manner and not necessarily only competency-based, but follow a similar sequencing that education has always had, just with a change to using human teachers at precise direct individual instruction intersections and some small or whole group intervals.
What does it mean to be “human” anyway?
Most people in education still don’t get this distinction between human teaching and classroom leadership. They think it is a “teacher replacement” when speaking of software’s full capacities and function and that it would be human-less. All service markets have a premium on the human aspect of their services. Doctors do not do everything for all patients, they have an array of nurses and administrators who do the bulk of the heavy lifting, and their software systems are highly complex to routing, records, and prescriptions. In the news business, the newscasters are in front of the camera but do not do all of their hour’s work in the spotlight. Whole armies of behind-the-scenes people do that scripting, yet in an interview-style interaction, that newscaster’s style and professionalism matter. The purpose of a model shift is so that schools and teachers retain relevancy, perhaps even supremacy, over fully consumer models, which will be less teacher humanized.
A hybrid logistics interchange is an ingenuity that supposes a fast or slow mutation of current school delivery models. The components are:
• Automated and algorithmically adjusting pacing, schedule, and lesson sequencing with live teaching intersects auto-cohort and auto-calendared. (Doing this with existing learning management systems and some manual work is possible but more complex.)
• An anchoring organizational principle is the course, not grades, classes, and classrooms. This is even true for the youngest students, provided there is a lot of time for group activities, drilling, and learning play.
• “Teaching” is transactional. Students are anywhere.
• Teacher time is a premium primarily leveraged for individual direct instruction.
• Most learning is asynchronous.
• Remodel physical spaces into House(s) and classrooms as meeting spaces, teacher offices, and the rework flow and oversight.
Those are the basics underlying hybrid logistics, the operative terms, each having a particular meaning. Hybrids are for remote and physically present students, and flexibility of those two things. Logistics manage individuals in association with an institution delivering learning to them individually while ensuring efficient intersection with teachers and meaningful social activities and learning with other students.
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