How to Waste a Teacher

Edtech isn’t replacing teachers. It's wasting them.

Khan Academy’s Chief Academic Officer Kristen DiCerbo and I were passing notes to each other in The 74 this week:

Dan has very good classroom experience and is extremely knowledgeable about teaching math. [..] Dan actually just this week had another Khanmigo post. The thing he misinterprets about us is that he thinks we’re trying to replace teachers, and he thinks we don’t value teachers. That’s what that whole post was about. And that is just not how we see what we’re doing. We see Khanmigo as a tutor that’s also working in the same ecosystem, but the teacher is fundamental to this whole process.

I snipped that first sentence just to prove to you all that, see, there are some areas where Khan Academy and I agree.

DiCerbo then responds to concerns I don’t have—that edtech is trying to replace teachers. Many edtech operators would like to replace teachers, I have no doubt. Some think they have when in fact they have just replaced one kind of student with another—the kids who really need teachers with the kids who need them less.

But I’ll wager I could ask any teacher in any school here in Oakland, CA, “How worried are you about being replaced by AI?” and I would have to invent, on the fly, a response item more dismissive than “Not at all.” The people who entertain this idea earnestly either don’t understand the work of teaching, the limits of AI, or both.

Edtech wastes teachers.

My point, instead, is that Khan Academy, like most edtech, wastes teachers. This isn’t so much a worry or a critique as it is a statement of fact: much of edtech has no idea what teachers do and consequently wastes them.

This should be easy to understand. Write down the most common ways teachers interact with your software. If those interactions improve when a teacher has more years of experience, more pedagogical content knowledge, more technological fluency, more socioemotional skill, etc, then you have formed an effective partnership with teachers. If they don’t, then you haven’t.

Put another way, here is the relationship between a teacher’s years of experience and student math achievement found by Sorensen and Ladd in 2017. You grow a lot as a teacher in your first twelve years on the job.

The best that a lot of edtech can hope for is an additive relationship with teachers across the experience continuum. A 15-year veteran teacher can log kids into a website just as well as a first-year novice. The veteran’s skills are wasted by the tool.

By contrast, here is a partnership between teacher and tool:

At Desmos and Amplify, a bunch of very opinionated and very experienced teachers had an uncommon level of influence over edtech product direction. Consequently, we built an edtech product that partners with teachers in an uncommon way.

In our curriculum, teachers use their technological fluency to facilitate the student experience. They engage kids using their socioemotional skill. They use their pedagogical content knowledge to monitor and develop student ideas as they surface in the dashboard. We are greedy and grateful for any capacity or skill that teachers bring to our partnership and we promise to waste none of it.

DiCerbo, meanwhile, says “the teacher is fundamental to this whole process,” but she doesn’t say how and that is where her answer ends.

Featured Comments

You get at least two graduate units for reading the comments of my last newsletter, which invited you to describe a teacher’s feedback in a video I posted. Here are a few favorites:

John Warner:

For me, I was struck by the teacher responding "interesting" to the student's incorrect answer and then following up with "I think I see what the student saw."

I see this as respecting the fact that there was intention behind the student's answer, a thinking process which we can see as interesting in and of itself, and then showing that while it might not have been the correct answer, the thinking itself wasn't all that far off target. It's a relatively small adjustment.

Samaila Goje:

Clearly, a device can be effectively integrated into classrooms without disrupting the crucial eye contact between teachers and students or becoming a distraction.

Dan M (not my sock puppet account I swear):

Super impressed with how easily and (apparently) without fear a student both 1) offered up an answer that was wrong, and 2), when asked, "did that capture a sand dollar?" the student - again, apparently without fear or embarrassment - just calmly says, "No." This teacher must've created an incredibly safe and respectful learning environment!

Connor Wagner:

"Oh interesting..." What an easy and powerful thing for a teacher to exclaim. I have a new goal as a math coach: encourage and then catch a teacher using these two simple words.

Odds & Ends

¶ If you are trying to follow the trajectory of AI in education, you might contrast Sal Khan’s remarks two years ago …

… we are at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.

… with DiCerbo’s this week:

I would still characterize how I feel as cautiously optimistic. I don’t think this is The Golden Ticket that’s going to save us all and be the sole reason that educational outcomes improve. I do think it still can be an important tool in the toolbox.

¶ Dylan Kane takes on one of the Really Lazy Narratives about teaching and learning, that education was established then and now as a factory model.

The first large expansion of public education in the US was the common school movement of the early 1800s. The main goal of this movement was to strengthen the young country's democratic institutions, not to turn out efficient workers.

¶ I use AI weekly and sometimes daily but never to help me write. Margaret Renkl in the New York Times sees me:

But letting a robot structure your argument, or flatten your style by removing the quirky elements, is dangerous. It’s a streamlined way to flatten the human mind, to homogenize human thought. We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words — messy, imprecise, unexpected — to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world. The world which no one else sees in exactly that way.