Commencement

This is the time of year when we get to read commencement speeches, commentary on commencement speeches, commentary on the commentary on commencement speeches, and so on into recursive bliss.

There tends to be a great deal of focus on the graduates themselves in these speeches — but to those of us who are educators, we should view this as our own final exam. How have we done our job? How well have we equipped the students who have been under our care to deal with the economic, social, and spiritual challenges ahead of them? And more importantly, what could we have done better — what must we do better for the next cohort?

There is a natural inclination in teachers to excel by trying to replicate their own best educational experiences, or avoid mistakes they feel were made by their own teachers. For example, Sal Khan said recently that “I teach the way I wish I had been taught.” But as we age, and the distance between ourselves and our students increases, this benchmark becomes less and less useful. In my own teaching, I found that the pop culture references I laced my lectures with — to Monty Python, Star Wars, Cheers, Arrested Development — fell flatter and flatter as my students’ cultural experience grew more distant from my own. We would do well to remember the words of George Bernard Shaw: “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”

The cultural gulf between teachers and students is exacerbated by an increasingly widening technology gulf. The hyperconnected world children grow up in presents them with a new set of challenges and tools: my own children can’t imagine a world in which any piece of information isn’t accessible through a quick search on a device held in our pocket.

What do the educational tools of the future look like? At a fundamental level, they’ll help students with four types of information:

1. Non-time-sensitive information. There is no reason for a student to memorize the height of the Hoover Dam, or the year in which Buchanan was elected, or what the methods on an obscure Java object are. If you can get it from a quick Google search, don’t waste your own internal memory cache storing trivia. The tools students need for this kind of information are a facility with search engines and an ability to parse their results. (These are also key job skills!)
2. Time-sensitive information. While you could look up the Spanish phrase for “Is that train about to pull out of the station the one going to Madrid,” you probably want to have those words at the tip of your tongue. Foreign language vocabulary is just one of a slew of examples of declarative knowledge which is best internalized, rather than retrieved. The tools students need for this kind of information are enhanced flash cards like the new Spanish app published by Brainscape, which uses cognitive research to help acquire and retain this kind of information.
3. Procedural knowledge. There are any number of procedures which are taught in school, especially in the area of math. This is one area where students can “learn by doing” at their own pace: there is nothing gained by having all the students go through a procedure in class at a uniform pace which will inevitably turn out to be too slow for some and too fast for others. The tools students need to learn procedural skills will be self-paced learning videos and exercises from sources like Khan Academy, Guaranteach, Virtual Nerd, or iTunes U.
4. Analytical frameworks. As information becomes easier to retrieve, the need for students to have analytical frameworks within which to place this information becomes more important. In teaching introductory economics, I often told my students that what I was giving them was a lens through which they could make sense of the information stream bombarding them every day. (If you read something on Wikipedia — or for that matter, the New York Times — how do you choose whether to believe it or not?) The tools students need for this are traditional classroom discussions, paired with exercises that encourage critical thinking like those in Aplia.

The role of the teacher in this new world will be more akin to a guide than a lecturer. The existence of easily accessed information means that the teacher doesn’t need to waste precious time explaining facts or demonstrating procedures; technology can take care of that. The teacher can spend that time more effectively helping the students under his or her care make sense of the information stream that’s bombarding them every day.

In this brave new world, teachers, students, and parents will all need to work together to navigate their way through a changing educational and technological landscape. And that is going to require a whole different suite of tools. More on this soon…