Alpha School wants AI to teach a billion kids. Should it? is a recent article in Scientific American.
It’s been receiving a fair amount of attention, particularly about some quotes in it from education researcher Carl Hendrick.
Though I disagree with a fair number of Carl’s perspectives on education, I also think he’s done some very good work. I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt that he might have been misquoted or quoted out of context. It’s difficult for me to believe that any educator would actually compare the teaching of a student to the training of the Waymo self-driving car, as he appears to do so in the article.
Here, I primarily want to take issue with another quote attributed to him in the article – “You can’t scale good teaching.”
I think you absolutely can!
Sure, there’s disagreement about lots of different types of education methods. But there’s almost universal agreement on many. They include:
* The importance of teacher-student relationships
* The value of creating the conditions for students to develop intrinsic motivation
* The need for providing effective scaffolds for English Language Learners and students with learning differences
* The value and importance of formative assessments and checking for understanding
* The usefulness of retrieval practice
* The need for classroom routines
I’d say there are other instructional strategies that are equally important, though some may disagree. These include:
* Inductive learning and teaching strategies
* Social Emotional Learning
* Project and Problem-based learning
* Collaborative and Cooperative Learning
* Learning Games
If you provided teachers with professional development opportunities on these strategies, including instructional coaching and the time to observe colleagues in action, I think you could certainly “scale good teaching.”
Would it look the same everywhere like an Alpha School software program would operate the same?
No!
But I don’t think we want that for our students.
As education researcher Dylan Wiliam says:
“Everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere.”