{"id":8407,"date":"2012-03-23T07:00:57","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/?p=8407"},"modified":"2018-12-15T09:19:13","modified_gmt":"2018-12-15T09:19:13","slug":"khan-academy-teacher-proof-curriculum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/23\/khan-academy-teacher-proof-curriculum\/","title":{"rendered":"Khan Academy: \u201cTeacher-Proof\u201d Curriculum?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I follow Dan Meyer\u2019s blog quite closely, and find the discussions over there really stretch my thinking sometimes about how we teach math, and the best ways to engage students in thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Dan Meyer on the Khan Academy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I first encountered Salman Khan on his\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk\">TED<\/a>\u00a0video, perhaps like lot of others. (Incidentally, that\u2019s also how I first heard of Dan Meyer, watching\u00a0<em>his<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NWUFjb8w9Ps\">TED<\/a>\u00a0talk.) I found Sal Khan\u2019s methods surprising and challenging, and incidentally, his business practices pretty remarkable also. If you look at his site, it\u2019s hard not to be impressed by the sheer volume of material he has there, with a huge list of videos, all free for watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-ted wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-ted wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Sal Khan: Let&#039;s use video to reinvent education\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.ted.com\/talks\/sal_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education\" width=\"525\" height=\"296\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Recently Dan has posted a couple of articles about the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.khanacademy.org\/\">Khan Academy<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mrmeyer.com\/?p=13296\">Sal Khan on 60 Minutes<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mrmeyer.com\/?p=13364\">I Would Have Loved Khan Academy In Eighth Grade<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Dan points out several really important points about the Khan academy\u2019s approach, including an apparent shift in emphasis from supporting the work of teachers via flipped lessons to supplying an entire curriculum for students. Crucially, Dan comments that students actually find watching the Khan videos quite boring, which surely is a critical flaw in the program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u201cFlipped Classes\u201d \u2013 a Solution to Bad Teaching?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To summarise, in case you haven\u2019t been keeping up with this debate, the idea put forward by Khan at the TED conference which has captured the attention of many educators, is \u201cflipped classes\u201d. In this model, instead of the teacher teaching in class and then assigning practice work for homework, students watch the teaching at home via Khan\u2019s videos online, then in class the teacher gets to follow up the video presentation, offer one-on-one tutoring help, and generally support and troubleshoot students\u2019 learning, freed from having to spend hours planning and teaching didactic lessons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What\u2019s the philosophical idea behind Khan\u2019s approach? Note the low-tech quality of the videos: it can\u2019t be able visual engagement, hooking students with exciting music, animations or the like. No, what Khan is attempting, without really admitting it, is to produce a set of&nbsp;<em>perfect<\/em>&nbsp;teaching videos. If you like (and I doubt you do), a&nbsp;<em>teacher-proof<\/em>&nbsp;syllabus. How does that strike you? I find it insulting: why does Mr Khan feel that a disembodied voice track and a screen showing the teacher\u2019s written notes for a math process is better than what real teachers do in a real, physical classroom, with students who are present in the same space?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only way to accept KA as a replacement for what teachers in general do in classrooms is if you subscribe to the idea that most teachers suck at teaching math. If that premise is accepted, then the idea that a single source of \u201cexpert instruction\u201d, delivered uniformly to all students, could supply all the teaching might look pretty attractive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, critics point out, often with some heat and passion, that there are several problems with this scenario:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>lecturing to students is not the best pedagogical approach to teaching<\/li><li>video recordings lock every student into a single lesson for each topic<\/li><li>there is no opportunity for students to ask questions of the video teacher, to have something explained again, other than replaying that part of the video<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>What do you think?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I follow Dan Meyer\u2019s blog quite closely, and find the discussions over there really stretch my thinking sometimes about how we teach math, and the best ways to engage students in thinking. Dan Meyer on the Khan Academy I first encountered Salman Khan on his\u00a0TED\u00a0video, perhaps like lot of others. (Incidentally, that\u2019s also how I &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/23\/khan-academy-teacher-proof-curriculum\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Khan Academy: \u201cTeacher-Proof\u201d Curriculum?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[84,85,11],"class_list":["post-8407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lesson-plans","category-teaching-mathematics","tag-computers","tag-lesson-plans","tag-teaching-math"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8408,"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8407\/revisions\/8408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}