I will be reviewing another Edutopia podcast, today, Big
Thinkers: Salman Khan on Liberating the Classroom for Creativity. Creativity is
an important aspect of learning and education.
Salman Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, and only faculty
member. He makes videos on nearly every imaginable academic area, from basic
addition to the economic debt ceiling. These programs focus on mastery before
the students progress. Schools buy the
videos to use with their students.
Students watch the videos on their own. Then they work on
the concepts together. The students work collaboratively to master the concept,
similar to the idea of a college study group. Students are able to teach each
other and review through practice and the video.
Salman stresses that these videos are not a cure-all to
bring every student up to mastery level. However, he thinks the greatest
accomplishment of the videos is to “get the lecture out of the room.” The idea
that students work together to teach each other could be very helpful in the
classroom. Students will remember and
understand different aspects of the video in the same way that students
understand different parts of a lecture. The collaborative learning and
teaching would likely help the students to understand the concepts on a deeper
level, because they have had to explain them.
However, teacher
supervision and appropriate intervention would be key. No matter how good the
videos are if students are not grasping the concepts there should be plenty of
opportunity for a more knowledgeable other whether it is a classmate, tutor, or
teacher to step in and help out.
Khan argues that the real magic of this program comes from
the collaboration of the class. The students are then free to talk to each
other to better understand and master the program. But in any class this will
take teacher supervision to keep the conversation on the math concept, not the
most recent movie.
Khan is attempting to move from micro-managing teachers.
Instead of forcing teachers to teach on a specific topic on a specific day,
essentially the lecture is taken care of. So now the teachers can focus on
making fun creative projects to really help the students to internalize the
concept. This could create a really neat classroom environment where the
teacher has more time to work with students, but also on the development of
interesting projects based on the concept, allowing creativity to flow from the
teacher and the students.
Khan Academy has really created a no line of thinking for educators. How students receive content instruction. I've seen this work for some students and not for others. Some teachers have taken it upon themselves to create their own video instruction then their students can watch it over and over again and anywhere they want. (and the teacher doesn't have to repeat it). Teachers using the Khan videos entirely for instruction, causes hesitation. I want the classroom teachers to be knowledgeable the content, so reteaching and additional instruction are accurate. But, again, it is a great resource. What are your thoughts?
ReplyDeleteI think it is a great resource if used well. The teacher HAS to be knowledgeable and able to answer questions effectively. No matter how well any video, or other resource, is made it won't answer all of a student's questions.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem with this idea is how a teacher uses their time. Using the Khan videos will give a teacher more "downtime" which theoretically should be used to develop creative projects to aid understanding. However, this time would be quite easy to take advantage of for the wrong purposes.
What I really love about video instruction, is that it doesn't have to be done in class and class time can be used for student work, application and teacher interaction.
ReplyDeleteThat definitely does offer a lot of potential, and free a lot of time. However, I would personally be hesitant to make too much of the video watching an out of class assignment. High school students are notorious for their lack of homework skills and making the main emphasis of instruction an out of class assignment could be a disadvantage and possibly take up more in class time.
ReplyDelete