Three Ways to Start Changing Education From Outside the Classroom

with Dennis M. Bartels, Ph.D., lifelong STEM educator and Managing Director of Endless Network. 

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Many schools struggle to keep up with the current pace of changes in demography, technology and the economy. Whether it’s lack of funds, teacher shortages, or institutional rigidity, education is a space ripe to be transformed by the digital age. There are serious barriers to improving our school systems, but there’s also big opportunities right now that wouldn’t necessarily require systemic change. 

The Big Barriers

The Playmaker School in Los Angeles is a great example of starting from scratch. These folks totally went back to the drawing board and said, ‘What if you had a school that’s just a 20,000 square foot space, and we filled it up with whatever we thought we needed that day, and had students determine their own curriculum.’ 

I do think there are many such innovative school models, working around the edges, but they're not really penetrating deep inside the system yet. 

The current system is so constrained by law; in funding formulas, entrenched practices, and outdated governance models, that nobody's been able to figure out how a promising, competitive model could work, scale for growth, or generate enough resources to attract widespread attention. I thought you could change the system from the inside out, but I just don't think so anymore. Plus there is the troubling question of equity—who benefits first and most from these changes—when you significantly transform the system, or worse, abandon it.

The possibility for educational technology is vast, but it hasn’t found the appropriate relationship with the instructional pedagogies or leading research from the learning sciences to take off. I am confident that some new institutional models will be born and gain traction in the future, but I think innovators are going to be on the periphery for a while. 

The first real changes are already occurring, largely in the “rest of the waking hours outside of school” space.



Opportunity #1: Rockstar teachers take to Youtube

I really thought that by now there would be several hundred rock star math teachers and scores of rock star science teachers online helping every student still struggling in the traditional curriculum. If you just don’t get your eighth grade algebra, you could tune into this YouTube channel, and this amazingly gifted person will teach you everything you need to know to get you through the lesson. We've seen rock stars emerge in so many other areas (such as in the arts or DIY communities), and I'm surprised it hasn't happened in the more academic areas yet, because there already are teachers who just are so talented at making fractions and proportions understandable in areas like mathematics, where so many students fall behind.

The only significant breakthrough is Sal Kahn, and his success seems to have stalled (interesting that one of the highest usage cases at Kahn Academy are parents trying to help their kids with homework assignments—not exactly what I had in mind.). Why don't we have superstar teachers teach every kid in the world? Imagine the tens of thousands of students in LAUSD who are failing 8th grade algebra (literally) when there must be a dozen of these rock star teachers in LAUSD alone. Wouldn’t even part-time exposure to the very best be a virtue for those struggling students? 



Opportunity #2: Interest groups let kids apply traditional subjects

There's something about technology that changes not only how we teach, but also what we teach. It can transcend physical scale, in terms of studying everything from the galaxies and the cosmos down to a virus or protein molecule. Technology can make all those levels very available with visualizations, simulations and modeling, and can appeal to different ways of learning the same concept. There are big opportunities to discover how to apply the technology correctly to make teaching complex or dense subjects much more interesting. 

A great example of how technology is being expertly utilized in teaching embodied physics-- a method that utilizes bodily movements, allowing kids to get jazzed about physics and mathematics through their own gymnastic, athletic, or playground movements. Cameras capture these motions and show graphs of acceleration and particle movement in real time. It is a much more appealing way for some kids to learn than a  physics textbook or demonstration in the classroom. 

But we're just not seeing these new technologies in schools yet, instead they find homes in small clubs, after school programs, and among at-home enthusiasts. I’m so pleased to see students, even adults, pursue these ways of learning on their own time, often via digital resources, and I’m excited to see how technology can enrich and refine in-school learning in the future.  



Opportunity #3: Games are a gateway to learning beyond the classroom

One of the most difficult things to teach in science, but one of the most important things to learn in life, is the difference between binary relationships and multivariate relationships, the latter being the key to systems thinking. We often get stuck at ‘A causes B’. Developmentally speaking, our minds aren’t even ready to move beyond that until pre-adolescence. But it's hard to understand something like climate change, for example, unless you can appreciate a lot of different variables changing at the same time. You’ve got to map them all together, including their relationships with one another. 

One of the best ways that I’ve seen kids accomplish this particular learning transition is playing SimCity. There’s a moment when you’re playing that you realize, ‘hey, my neighborhood is in decline. I don't know what's going on. I’ve lowered taxes as much as I can.’  Then you realize tax rates are only part of the equation and by itself not helpful or harmful. You need other resources for amenities. So you raise the taxes, provide more services, build more parks, and your city regains health for a while, until taxes get too high, and the neighborhood goes downhill again. It’s so confusing! Just like real life. So you start playing with the different variables and realize, ‘Oh, it’s not just taxes, but crime, schools, parks, all of that matters.’ And suddenly you're starting to do multivariate mapping, a really important mathematical and scientific skill.

SimCity helps kids grasp multivariate relationships that they weren't learning from their science classes alone. Educators have started to think, ‘maybe we should bring SimCity into school hours?’ Let’s have every kid be mayor of a city for a week so they can experiment with complex, multivariate relationships. Technologies can help give students access to these kinds of simulations to enhance learning (and allow teachers to focus where students get stuck, instead of being captain of the whole curriculum). Not having access to these technologies, or the freedom to utilize them in the classroom, can be terribly frustrating for educators, especially some of our most creative ones, and that really does a disservice to our kids. 
But even if kids don’t have access in school, they can at least have access at home, with a multitude of interesting games children often choose to play when they don’t even appreciate that they are learning (and does it matter?). The Zoombinis Logical Journey did that with math set theory and more recently the Endless Mission game with game design and programming skills.  Get ready, because we are going to see a lot more of these “games for impact” in the near future, and in the best designed ones you won’t even realize you’re learning.  You are just having fun. The most magical kind of learning of all.

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