Quartz – Miles Kimball
If I were to make a nomination for the most destructive belief in our culture, it would be the belief that some people are born smart and others are born dumb. This belief is not only badly off target as a shorthand description of reality, it is the source of many social pathologies and lost opportunities. For example:
- Those who get low test scores think they are just not as smart and avoid tough majors that lead to some of the best jobs.
- A strong belief within an academic field that talent is innate goes along with that field having fewer women and African-Americans.
- Many people utter the black magic spell “I’m bad at math” and it becomes so. A lucky few have that spell broken, and find they can become good at math after all.
People misunderstand the past and imagine a dystopian future, not realizing that each generation is smarter than the last.
Too much of our educational system, both at the K-12 level and in higher education, is built around the idea that some students are smart and others are dumb. One shining exception are the “Knowledge is Power Program” or KIPP schools. In my blog post “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School” I gave this simple description of the main strategy behind KIPP schools, which do a brilliant job, even for kids from very poor backgrounds:
- They motivate students by convincing them they can succeed and have a better life through working hard in school.
- They keep order, so the students are not distracted from learning.
- They have the students study hard for many long hours, with a long school day, a long school week (some school on Saturdays), and a long school year (school during the summer).
A famous experiment by Harvard psychology professor Robert Rosenthal back in 1964 told teachers that certain students, chosen at random, were about to have a growth spurt—in their IQ. These kids did wind up having their IQ grow faster than the other kids. If we had an educational system that expected all kids to succeed, and gave them the kind of extra encouragement that those teachers unconsciously gave the kids they expected to do well, then kids in general would learn more.
Kids whose teachers had low expectations can expect more typecasting in college. Too many majors fall into one of two categories: (a) majors in which there is no easy way to tell whether a student has mastered any skills that will help get a job or make life richer, or (b) majors designed to weed out all the slow learners and only try to teach the students who catch on quickly. Behind the practice of weeding out slow learners is the misconception that a slow learner is a bad learner, when in fact a slow learner who puts in the time necessary to learn often ends up with a deeper understanding than the fast learner.
The good news is that a total transformation of education is coming, whether the educational establishment likes it or not. I draw my account of this transformation of education from two prophetic books by Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and his co-authors:
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clay Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn
The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out by Clay Christensen and Henry J. Eyring.
The road ahead is clear: the potential in each student can be unlocked by combining the power of computers, software, and the internet with the human touch of a teacher-as-coach to motivate that student to work hard at learning. Technology brings several elements to the equation:
- customized lessons adapted to each student’s individual learning style at a cost that won’t break the bank
- lectures from some of the most talented instructors in the world (such as this course in financial asset pricing by the impressive John Cochrane and many other economics classes by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok)
- the kind of software motivational tricks that make it so hard for kids to pull away from video games
- flexibility for students to learn at their own pace.
But since motivation—the desire to learn—is so important, a human teacher to act as coach is also crucial. In particular, without a coach, the flexibility for students to learn at their own pace can be a two-edged sword, because it makes it easy to procrastinate.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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