
The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning - seek3r00
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-messy-reality-of-personalized-learning
======
wefarrell
_The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons
while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging
reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where
personalized “ed tech” is offered as a balm for budget austerity. “There’s
been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to
radically transform schools,” Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of
education at Brown University, told me._

This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves
to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers.
That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the
poor.

Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for
teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as
segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating
collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and
digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout
based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety
of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.

Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA
(the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less
secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education
(such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by
HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.

~~~
tentboy
_...but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction_

Curious as to why you say this because recently it seems like people are
realizing you DON'T need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, and
more and more people are turning to the wealth of education at our fingertips
instead of traditional schooling.

~~~
wsinks
In my experience as both a student and a workplace educator (informal learning
only, ex: "I can't figure out how to do a fuzzy match in excel, can you help
me?"), I think you've got the emphasis wrong.

Educators know that not everyone needs a teacher, and most people don't __need
__a teacher all of the time. The trick with high quality educators is two-
fold, creating motivation for students to want to learn and stepping in to
guide a student one on one when a student gets stuck.

While I haven't needed a teacher 50% of the time, I get stuck when learning. I
then need a new perspective, or a new mental model, to get me thinking
differently. This happens less and less as I get older, and find ways to
replace a teacher with other stimuli.

A child isn't an adult. They need and __want __to have their hand held at
certain times.

There isn't a substitute for a social interaction that goes beyond "did
student 9471827 learn topic 14536?". Humans need to go over things multiple
times to remember how to do it. Sometimes there's new learning. Maybe they
think they know how to do it, but it doesn't feel right, and they need a
partner or authority figure to say "yes, that's a good way to solve this
problem or frame a perspective".

So to come all the way back around, I think most people know that we don't
need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, but we do want it at
times, and the interaction definitely speeds up learning.

I'd argue even more anecdotally that a human will not trust a robot teacher
unless they've had a good human teacher, and that the robot teacher resembles
some characteristic of that teacher.

I realize that all of this is my opinion, but I hope it was interesting to you
as a potential answer for the previous comment! Have a good one today

~~~
tentboy
Thanks for your thoughts! Perhaps I am a bit jaded as I went to a large
university and I don't think a single professor could recognize me as a
student, even the ones I went to office hours for. (always just help I never
really struck up a conversation).

I will concede that for K-12 education, especially closer to the K side,
having a patient teacher is certainly going to help students learn, and guide
them when they are frustrated.

~~~
filoleg
>I went to a large university and I don't think a single professor could
recognize me as a student

I was in the same situation, and that's where the TAs (Teaching Assistants)
stepped in. And most of the time, it made all the difference. Professors for a
lot of classes (but not all of them) were just glorified lecture material
recital machines, however, the value of TA office hours was insurmountable.
The difference between classes that had great TAs vs. classes that had bad TAs
was extremely noticeable in terms of the amount of material I learned.

I agree with the rest of the sentiment in the thread though. I didn't need
professors or TAs 80%+ of my time, but whenever I got stuck, a good
explanation or hint from TA made all the difference. You could easily tell by
looking at everyone's scores and knowledge who went to TA office hours and who
didn't. Ironically enough, the scores didn't seem to correlate almost at all
with lecture attendance.

This inspired me to become a TA myself later on, and I am very glad I did
that. It felt really rewarding to be able to figure out that one extra little
nudge of information that, if given to a student in struggle, made it click in
their heads.

------
mattferderer
I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe
using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results
in social skills & physical health.

Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could
be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having
open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means
throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I
think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose
life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the
internet & computers in the 90s.

Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster &
better than a teacher. But at what cost?

While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try
multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had
reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do.

I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads &
focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many
others have started preaching this as well.

You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we
don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue...
    

You're right. And that DOES WORK.

It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like
"Harkness Method" ([https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-
learn](https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn)).

The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public
schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that
individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've
demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics.

This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite
colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them,
learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-
behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out
of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed
public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared
for college.

~~~
mr_crankypants
Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.

I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the
teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around
a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of
course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the
teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at
each one.

I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American
perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection.
You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-
choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. .
. at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what
they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on
multiple-choice tests.

I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in
me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything.
"Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be
studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding,
intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their
activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify.

To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out
there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll
never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in
American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach
second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers'
mandate to always be quantifying.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.
    

I think it could to some extent. For some students doing self-paced, online
learning for lectures and then following that up with individualized/small-
group problem-solving and discussion with peers/tutors/teachers certainly does
work.

But kids in early high-school and younger? Someone _really_ needs to be there
for them all the time.

BTW, I also had a math instructor that got miraculous outcomes by finely
grouping students within each classroom according to skill. She would
individualize attention to each group, and then move individual students up or
down to different groups depending on their ongoing performance/mastery. She
literally had what I would recognize today as a kan-ban chart on a blackboard
in the classroom and we, the students, were the projects/products. Thinking
back about it now, it must have been a herculean effort. It was also the 70's
in a Catholic school and she had total autonomy. I seriously doubt a talented
teacher could get away with something like that today.

~~~
ticviking
> I seriously doubt a talented teacher could get away with something like that
> today.

That's so much of the problem right now. My wife teaches and to be blunt, she
is not treated as a professional. She is subject to the exact same kind of
intrusive rules that minimum wage phone reps are subject to.

------
jasode
_> Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from
another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the
needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of
personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher?_

It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for
administering tests.

This is a long article and headline of _" personalized learning"_ and how it
was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of
"personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The
laptop/Chromebook is the _primary_ transmission of material. The teacher
becomes a _secondary_ role -- help answer extra questions/etc.

The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that
are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the
material. This is _theoretically_ possible but reality is that you often get
an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and
frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning,
you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual
teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local
teacher where you happen to pay your taxes.

As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high
school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs
might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off
with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in-
classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative
of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math.

That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live
instructor to transmit information. This is where we can _personalize_ the
curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live
teacher.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/videos)

~~~
godelski
One of the things that learning through a laptop does it give people access to
world class teachers. I don't think even the biggest proponents of online
learning would disagree that having that world class teacher in person is
better through the laptop. The question is, is a world class teacher through a
laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile? (Or x
percentile)

~~~
jasode
_> The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a
teacher that's under the 50th percentile?_

I would separate the question into different parts to isolate the different
roles an in-classroom teacher performs:

(1) a 1-way communication -- the act of purely transmitting information: E.g.
compare effectiveness of on-site teacher saying, _" sine is the opposite side
divided by hypotenuse"_ vs virtualvideo teacher saying the same thing. For
this info-transmission activity, many high-quality Youtubers seem to be better
at explaining the topic. They have more insightful metaphors, better graphics,
better presentation, etc. (Unscientific survey.[0])

(2) a 2-way communication -- providing a realtime feedback loop of skills
assessment to the child. E.g. watching the child work out the problem on the
sheet of paper and _immediately_ noticing that she's not carrying a minus sign
across a calculation and intervening at that moment. Of course, answering any
questions the child has is also in this category.

The emphasis in my previous comment is that laptop-led teaching doesn't have
to detract from activity (2) because that's the superior value that in-
classroom teachers can provide over virtual teachers.

\-----

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8)

Some viewer comments in that video:

\+ 2.6k thumbs up: _" Crazy how an 8 minute video, helps more then a paid
teacher"_

\+ 690 thumbs up: _" you are better than my math teacher"_

\+ 115 thumbs up: _" I want you to know my math teacher sucks and you're the
only reason I get A's. Appreciate it dude"_

For whatever reason, the viewers' local on-site classroom teacher didn't
"click" with them but virtual Sal Khan did. This is the missing pedagogy angle
the author of The New Yorker article didn't highlight.

~~~
ticviking
My money is on the fact that their teacher was managing some other student
doing something stupid.

So much of our school problems are rooted in insufficient resources for
classroom management, and an unwillingness to impose significant consiquences
on the student and their guardians.

~~~
jasode
_> My money is on the fact that their teacher was managing some other student
doing something stupid._

But an ineffective teacher _also happens in college_ where professors do _not_
need to deal with any misbehaving adult students.

Surely many of us have experienced a college class (in USA) being taught by a
TA that can barely speak English. Even though the students are all _quiet and
respectful_ , nobody understands the lecture.

In those situations, the advantages of on-site presence of the professor is
_overshadowed_ by the disadvantages of the ineffective teaching presentation.

That's why many Youtube mathematics videos have comments such as:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8)

\+ 261 thumbs up: _" Your videos are what college should be like. And isn‘t."_

------
sandGorgon
I'll give you the other side. Think of this from a developing country
perspective - we don't have enough teachers. But we have a billion people. We
need to educate them.

We can't train teachers fast enough. Not to mention the 20 different languages
that India has.

We need this to work.

~~~
em-bee
_We can 't train teachers fast enough_

i don't believe this is true in the actual sense of the words. the problem is
rather that we are not spending enough money on education. we could get many
more teachers if that would change.

and it has to change regardless. with automation replacing all manual un-
educated labor, education is the only way to avoid unemployment for a large
number of people.

we need more teachers. many more teachers, and more effective teaching
methods. but i believe financially this is all solvable if we are willing to
solve it.

~~~
freehunter
Agreed. Both of my sisters became teachers. Both of them left the profession
after a few years. One even went back to college, negating the “we cant train
them fast enough”. She already had a masters degree but still went back to
college for more education to get away from teaching.

This is speaking from an American perspective but teaching is absolute hell.
Teachers are more and more expected to pay for their own supplies, work 12
hour days, become counselors and therapists, plus advocates for special needs
or abused children. Many students coming into kindergarten cannot read or
recite the alphabet, but even worse many are not potty trained. The parents
expect the schools to take care of 100% of the child’s education. And more and
more in America, teachers are expected to shield students from real, actual
bullets. One of my sisters left the profession when the state started talking
about giving teachers guns.

All for $30-$40k per year. It’s not worth it. It’s too much work for too
little money. Your job is constantly under fire and political scrutiny. It’s
not even education anymore.

~~~
metafour
Former teacher here with a similar experience. It's not only that it's not
worth it, teaching for the most part doesn't even pay a living wage. You can't
make up the difference with a summer job since the "summer vacation" has
gotten shorter and shorter over time it seems. In addition, teachers usually
have to do professional development over the summer as well as we always
started back before the students did.

One of the districts I worked at didn't have an attendance policy and allowed
students to do credit recovery with online courses. It's incredibly difficult
to convince middle and high school students to struggle through learning when
they know from their fellow students they can make up the credit later and
just google all the answers since the proctors for credit recovery didn't
really pay attention. They all had their phones on their leg under the table
searching for all the answers while the proctor sat and ignored them.

~~~
em-bee
what's really sad is, it's been like this for decades. when i was in
highschool in the US in the 80s i was told that teachers salaries were very
low.

now i had fantastic and very motivated teachers, and at that time i concluded
that the low salary would help select for teachers that really believe in
their work, and weed out those who are in it just for the money.

but paying less than a living wage is likely only attract the desperate who
can't get a better job.

this is insane.

------
tzs
> If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber
> classroom and learn at her own pace.

Who determines what her own pace should be, and how do they do that?

One of the biggest problems I've had when learning things on my own has been
pacing. Suppose learning the subject requires first learning A, then B, then
C, and so on, each part building upon the previous parts.

I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get
stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even
though my B is actually sufficient to support C.

Other parts I don't spend enough time on. Let's say I find D uninteresting,
but am really looking forward to E. I'll tend to rush through D, just getting
a superficial understanding, and move on to E without adequate preparation.

~~~
lunchables
>I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get
stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even
though my B is actually sufficient to support C.

I would think integrated testing and feedback could be built in and even done
in "real time" as students are learning. For each section you can do a brief
quiz, or constantly ask questions to measure engagement and comprehension.

------
moosey
I think that the main problem of a customized and changing over time
curriculum is that it's hard to maintain connections to information in long
term memory over time. Ever since I started using a spaced
repetition/interleaving program, I find that I can start learning something,
then walk away for as long as I like, and be able to come back to the subject
not just fresh, but with the previous information far more entrenched than
before.

This allows me to jump around my interests rapidly within the limited time
that I have for learning difficult subjects, and means that the time that I do
spend on particularly difficult subjects that require deep understanding isn't
wasted.

I think that meta-learning is a key subject that any learner should start
with, then messiness isn't a problem anymore. If I had learned it 20 years
ago, I probably wouldn't have lost all of that wonderful college expertise.

~~~
misiti3780
completely agree. i use spaced repetition for most things these days, and i
justify the time spent on the card making by saying i will keep this this
info, with minimal effort, for the rest of my life

------
ilaksh
It's hard to believe there is no hard data as far as test scores. I would
expect more of that in an article like this.

I assume there are studies that show significant improvement in test scores as
well as some studies that show no improvement or even regression.

I think how well it works depends on how well the students are supervised, the
actual content of the programs, the parameters such as required learning rate,
how well the particular software works or not, how closely the software tracks
or does not track with the standardized tests, etc.

For things like algebra I had to use pencil. How do computer instructions
handle work like equations and math?

------
thelock85
I am patiently waiting (in fear?) for the day when we have "educational ad
exchanges". The Gates Foundation and CZI put up a $500M slush fund for
"rockstar" teachers to bid on impressions, while publishers lobby to abolish
CIPA, COPPA and FERPA in the name of a "quality" education for all.

------
hereme888
Not a good example of personalized learning. This is more of a hyper-
virtualized school system. I'd say ot's obviously bad for children to be so
immersed in technology and not get the necessary personal interaction people
need to thrive.

Personalized learning is perhaps best observed in a homeschool-like
environment.

------
rdtwo
Personalized learning would work super well if the US has a standard national
criculum. Then a student could take the same module online if it wasn’t
clicking at school and learn the same concept from a different instructor and
perspective. Otherwise it’s super difficult to match concepts up

------
harry8
In the utterly amateur teaching I have done the key thing, which someone will
never get from a computer, has always, always, always been convincing the
student that they are smart and that they can learn this stuff or indeed
anything. Next most important is generic how to learn stuff, which for the
people I have taught usually starts with relaxation exercises and other
techniques to overcome their fight or flight reactions to get to a place of
relaxed enjoyment.

I don't know how that replicates to other, better, more experienced teachers
observations of it. If it is as important as I think, I don't know how you get
that from a computer.

Learning and study abilities are tortured and murdered by the constant re-
enforcement of "you can't, you're not smart enough, them over there, they are
better."

Maybe I'm over emphasising a point that is less important than I think but
also maybe _not_. It's a point that needs an airing here either way.
Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have experience.

------
ggm
Lower teacher pupil ratios and more personal attention to learning. Machines
have a role but denying the role of the pedagogue feels wrong. And
corporatism. Why is education hold hostage by big data outcomes? Ethics
potholes.

------
purplezooey
It sure seems like nobody under 25 can read a damn book anymore.

------
jklinger410
The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning in Underfunded Public Schools _

------
em-bee
individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been
championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a
computer to every child. so this is not new. most of all, montessori is doing
it without computers.

~~~
ticviking
Note that most Montessori schools have the ability to reject disruptive
students.

They also literally have a term for a student who needs to learn the
behavioral prerequisites for successfully learning. A "poorly normalized"
student will be held back until they have developed enough to see that that
need to change behavior to move on.

~~~
em-bee
i get your point, however i am not sure if disruptive students are actually a
problem in a montessori class. i'd really like to see some actual reports from
the field here.

since in a montessori class each student does their own thing, a disruptive
student can do far less damage than in a traditional class.

in a traditional class the disruptive student takes away attention of the
teacher from the class. and class learning is indeed disrupted while that
happens. in a montessori class, the teacher can take care of the disruptive
student individually without disrupting attention from other students. oh,
sure, it may happen that a a teacher-student interaction is disrupted once in
a while, but in that case the teacher can tell that student to work on
something else while they deal with the problem child. further, if we assume
that most students are disruptive because they seek attention, i expect that
such students will actually be much less disruptive than in a traditional
class.

also, one of the key points of montessori is to teach children individually to
work with their material on their own.

this goes so far that in some schools the beginning of the year is split in
stages. on the first day only a handful of children are coming to school. the
smaller group makes it easier to get each child to calm down and get used to
the classroom setting. once they are fine, the next batch of children enters
(the next day or a few days later). the first group is already quiet at work,
and so the teacher now can deal with the next group, and so on until all
children are present.

this not only allows the teacher to adjust their ways for each child
individually, but doing that is the very point. therefore a montessori teacher
has much more powerful tools at their disposal to deal with problem children
and help them integrate into the classroom.

chances are that a child that is disruptive in a traditional class simply
won't behave like that in a montessori class.

------
spurmboy
The education industry is not doing its job? Who knew?! Me! Because I went
through it and had my life ruined by it. I say this as a 30 year old man. I
went to public school where the following happened:

\- I was not only intellectually neglected, I was intellectually poisoned. The
result was worse than if I had just been left by myself as far as education
and intellectual development. They don’t just not do their job, they sabotage
kids

\- I was subjected to bullying that has had mental health ramifications that
persist even now. Everyone knew and nobody did anything. The teachers don’t do
anything and the admins don’t do anything. They watch knowingly as kids under
their care are viscously bullied, doing nothing.

Teachers are stupid. There is no other way to put it. Public education is a
free daycare service. The kids who succeed in public school succeed in spite
of the teachers and their circumstances, not because of them. It is not an
exaggeration to say that subjecting a child to public education is abusive.
Look at the average Americans understanding of maths and geography — they are
basically retarded compared to other western nations. But nobody cares and
nobody does anything. Saying that any alternative is too expensive is
bullshit. Utter bullshit. Take grandma, who is starved for human interaction,
and move her in. She watches over the child while he does assignments given to
him by you and while he is tutored by starving PhD candidates and
undergraduates who are actually smart and passionate. They will do it for
peanuts. I know I would have when I was a starving student. Socialize the
child by engaging in social activities such as soccer leagues and other
things. Sleepovers, whatever. I just invented a method of education that is
guaranteed to give you better results than a public school and probably costs
a similar amount when you account for all the therapy you’d have to pay for
from the bullying and whatever.

