Transcriber: Tracey Hill-Bensalem Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
[Sajan George, The Future of Education]
What does the future of education look like?
At Matchbook Learning, we dream of designing the future of education.
But where do you start?
We would argue that you would start at the very bottom --
The very worst-performing public schools in our country,
that are serving our most desperate children.
And why start there?
If we don't design a system that meets the needs of those children,
we'll never have a future education system that meets the needs of all children.
But what does the bottom look like?
Brenda Scott is a K-8 school in Detroit, Michigan.
If you were to visit the school,
you'd immediately be impressed by the architecture.
Amazing. Impressive. Expansive. Modern.
But the building doesn't tell the whole story.
You see, last year, before we arrived,
out of 832 students, only 7 were proficient in either reading or math.
Seven.
Now, if you think I'm overdramatizing the impact
of public education at its current state in this country,
by pulling this one example, consider this:
That we could have gone to any zip code in America
that's in the bottom 25% income-wise,
and the chances of those kids getting a college degree
by age 25 is just 9%.
The number of schools like Brenda Scott,
that are chronically failing, are projected to reach 20,000 in number,
in just two years.
And in two years an amazing thing will happen.
For the first time in our nation's history
we'll adopt a single set of national education standards,
called the "Common Core".
And these Common Core standards
will be benchmarked to the very best in the world.
To education systems like Singapore and South Korea, Finland.
And what do you think's going to happen
to the number of chronically failing schools
when we significantly raise the bar
on what our kids are expected to learn and to know
in order to be internationally competitive?
The number of turnaround schools is likely to skyrocket.
But these schools in these bottom 25% zip codes
are trapped inside cycles of poverty,
homelessness, abandonment.
Is it fair to ask any school to overcome these gravitational forces?
I can show you many images like this one,
that surround our schools.
But that would be an incomplete story.
I'd rather show you an image of inside the school.
You see, inside the four walls you get a different image.
You get hope.
You get kids like Jalen, a fifth grader,
who dreams of one day becoming a CIA agent.
He wants to be a patriot, and defend our country.
Jalen doesn't know that, statistically,
he's got a 9% chance of making his dream.
So the future of education rests, for us, on one single question --
How do we help Jalen?
I don't mean how do we help him in a one-off way.
How do we help him systemically?
So that every Jalen, in every zip code,
not only dreams their dream,
but realizes their dream.
In order to understand our future we have to go back to the past.
The picture on the left is a 1913 classroom.
The picture on the right is a 2013 classroom.
Side by side, there's a 100-year difference between these two pictures.
And yet, very little else differs.
In both pictures, students are grouped by age.
They sit in rows.
A teacher lectures them through a printed curriculum,
moving them at the same pace, sequence, and learning style.
I dare you to find another industry that has changed so little
in a hundred years.
In fact, we know in the last ten years alone
technology has completely disrupted entire industries,
with companies like Google, and Facebook.
They're leveraging technology to transform industries.
So what about technology transforming education?
Well, there's been some.
Obviously smart boards have replaced chalkboards.
We have computers and computer labs.
But, if we're honest, it really hasn't transformed
teaching and learning.
And the minute we push this conversation a little bit further,
about how technology could play a role in the classroom,
parents, and policymakers alike, become concerned that we're creating
too disconnected of a system.
We don't want robots teaching our kids.
We don't want our kids becoming robots.
And so we're wrestling with this question --
What about great teaching?
While there's a lot of debate around how to fix public education,
one thing that isn't debatable,
that the research undeniably supports,
is the impact of quality teaching.
The single most important determinant
of your child's academic success
isn't technology, isn't poverty or economic or family background,
it's the quality of the teacher that stands in front of him or her.
Think about that. Quality teaching trumps poverty.
Benjamin Bloom, a researcher, thirty years ago
did some amazing research that actually provides us a clue,
a window on what the future of education could look like.
He studied a group of elementary students
that were being taught in a conventional class:
One teacher, thirty kids.
At the end of the unit they were assessed,
and, not surprising, there is a bell curve
of performance on that assessment.
He ran a second experiment,
this time similar students, same content,
and still one teacher to thirty students.
But now, instead of just doing an assessment at the end,
they did assessments throughout, as the material was being taught,
to see if the kids had mastered what they had learned.
If they did, they moved forward. If they didn't, they'd repeat.
Under this mastery-based approach,
these students outperformed their conventionally-taught peers
by an entire standard deviation.
He ran the experiment a third time.
And this time, what he did was
in addition to this mastery-based approach of frequent assessments,
he gave every student their individual tutor, a college student.
And in this one-to-one mastery-based environment,
these students outperformed their conventionally-taught peers
by two standard deviations.
Now think about what Bloom stumbled upon.
By simply changing the delivery of instruction
to be more of a one-to-one mastery-based environment
96% of those students outperformed their conventionally-taught students.
Bloom's solution is elegant, simple. It's beautiful.
But unfortunately, for us, it's not scalable.
We can't give every student their own teacher.
We couldn't financially afford it,
and even if we could, where would we find the teachers?
So we come back to this question --
What should we do for Jalen?
On the one hand, you have technology transforming entire industries,
and yet there's obvious constraints and challenges
around how we do that in education.
On the other hand, you have this compelling research that says
the impact of a teacher on a child's learning,
and yet there's constraints and challenges
around how we scale great teaching.
Maybe the answer isn't either technology or great teaching.
Maybe it's a both/and, that intersection.
The blend of great technology and great teaching,
or what we would call a blended model of school.
You see, in a traditional classroom we start the year in September.
Let's say it's a 4th-grade class,
and we move that class through
in a linear fashion through a 4th-grade curriculum,
assess them at the end of the year,
assuming they have mastered that 4th-grade material
in the linear fashion, and are ready to go on to the 5th grade.
But if we assess those kids
at the beginning of the year, in September --
in Jalen's school we would find,
and in many schools like it --
These kids aren't ready for the 4th-grade.
They're one or two or multiple years behind.
And if all we do is move them through a 4th-grade curriculum
we'll find at the end of the year they're not ready to advance.
So rather than optimize this broken system,
we decided to blow it up.
Metaphorically speaking. (Laughter)
We went into Jalen's school
and we created every classroom to be a blended classroom,
and here's a picture of that.
Every student has their own individual learning path.
Let me deconstruct this classroom for you.
In the classroom there are four distinct groups.
Along the far left of the classroom, are a group of students
that are working individually on their computers.
They could be listening to an online lecture,
doing a game-based problem,
reading a narrative.
There's a group at the back that
are working intensively with a teacher.
The teacher's giving direct instruction, from him or her.
This is a group that may be behind the curve.
A group in the middle has gone through the first two groups,
and is now applying what they've learned, demonstrating mastery.
They could be doing group work, or project work,
writing an essay, doing a scientific experiment.
And, finally, there's a fourth group, along the far wall,
that are now online, assessing what they just learned
in those different rotation groups,
to confirm that they in fact learned it,
but also, to extend their learning curve,
to figure out now what to do next.
You can see how this model would be great for students,
different modes of instruction,
meeting them where they are, different pacing,
but how does a teacher begin to teach in this environment?
In the old way, they knew what they were going to teach on Monday,
on Tuesday --
Now you've got kids at different paces,
taking assessments at different times,
each with their own individual learning path and learning style.
At Matchbook Learning we do three things with these teachers.
To not only enable them to teach in a blended classroom, but to thrive in it.
First, we give them real-time data on each student.
They pull up a dashboard on a computer,
and they can see every student plotted,
both on their current performance,
and on their year-to-date performance.
Now we obviously want to optimize both of those axes,
but the reality is --
Kids accelerate and decelerate their learning at different times,
get stuck, unstuck, at different points in the curriculum,
and so what we do with this data is we can see trends,
and on that real-time data, we give them real-time feedback --
what instructional strategies are working well, with which groups,
which kids are working well with what instructional strategies.
And then the third thing we do,
is we sit down with these teachers,
one-on-one, every two weeks.
And we ask them a series of questions
that actually they're best able to answer, not the technology.
Are the students engaged in their learning?
What are you observing?
What's evidence that they're mastering what they're learning?
What's their work-product look like?
And, finally, based on the data, what will you do next?
How will you regroup the students over the next two weeks?
What new strategies will you use?
What existing strategies will you tweak?
This enables them to prototype rapidly.
Real-time data. Rapid feedback. Constant prototyping.
These three things have enabled other industries
to completely transform themselves.
And this combination of daily feedback, and bi-weekly sit-downs
enables us to coach and mentor teachers over a hundred times,
individually, in a given school year.
You'd have to be a professional athlete or a Hollywood actor
to get that kind of coaching in your career.
But that's where we're elevating the profession of teaching.
That's how we take ordinary teachers and make them extraordinary.
Our hope is that in September, at the beginning of the school year,
if we start these kids not at their age or grade level,
but where they actually are, academically,
and move them through individual learning paths, within small groups,
within classrooms led by a teacher in a blended environment --
We can see by June, that some of these kids will make
a year's worth of growth, some two, some even three.
And let's face it, if these schools are that far behind,
they have to make this kind of growth
if they're ever going to catch up.
But can it really work?
Well, in Jalen's school, in our first year last year,
we took assessment at the beginning and the end of the year,
and compared the two points to figure out what their growth was during that year.
And what we found was 74% of those kids in reading,
and 83% of those kids in Math
made a gain of at least 10% or more.
That's statistically significant, because
10% represents at least a year's worth of learning within a single year.
And then we looked at the data a little bit further on these kids.
And what we found of those kids was
38% of those kids made a gain between 10 and 20%.
33% made a gain between 20 and 30%.
And get this -- 29% made a gain of greater than 30%.
That's more than 3-year's worth of learning in a single year.
We wanted to bring the very best
in blended school turnaround design
to the very worst schools,
to create a powerful proof point at the very bottom
that would serve as a proof point
not only for this school and its community,
but for the city, the state, and maybe even the nation.
Our inspiration for this was Chuck Yeager.
Chuck Yeager was a 1947 U.S. Air Force pilot.
He was the first ever pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Prior to him, no one had ever broken the sound barrier.
Chuck didn't have a faster plane,
or better technology, or even better training.
He had a belief. No, a conviction
that what everybody else said was impossible, he believed was possible.
And his proof point was so powerful, that after he did that
a generation of pilots after him attempted the same and succeeded,
because they then knew that it wasn't impossible.
So much so that today the sound barrier really isn't a barrier.
It's routinely broken.
What would happen, within this unending sea
of chronically failing schools,
or turnaround schools, as they're deemed,
that within this sea of turnaround schools
we could create a few powerful proof points?
At the very bottom, those worst-performing schools,
and take these schools
and in a four to five-year period
enable them to become the very top,
with those same kids?
We believe that those proof points
can become tipping points,
that can reverse the trajectory
of under-performing schools across the nation.
But not just show a way to transform under-performing schools,
but actually show a way to transform all schools,
and design a future of education that we all can be part of.
It starts and ends with Jalen.
You see, we believe that Jalen
not only deserves to dream his dream,
he deserves to realize his dream.
And when we help Jalen realize his dream,
he and his peers will help realize ours, as a nation.
Thank you.
(Applause)