This is the sentence I can't get past: "listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way". I don't doubt that many people experienced school that way, or even that there are plenty of classrooms where that is the primary mode of instruction. But the belief that that kind of classroom environment is the best the field of education has to offer is really difficult for me to fathom because if you picked up one book or talked to a single expert it would immediately disabuse you of that belief. I think the relevant question is not "How can we use technology to personalize learning for students?" but "How can we spread 'personalized' learning experiences to more classrooms?" (like the type Dan describes here) which is more of a societal question than a technological one. But tech billionaires only have a hammer and that makes everything a nail.
Another, wonderful example of authentic teaching and learning mathematics. A real problem solved in a community of math curious kids with a teacher who underscores understanding her students' thinking... The public nature of the work and collaboration is so important. Thank you Dan for sharing this.
Amen!! I just wrote something (https://jendycksprout.substack.com/p/the-best-education-is-not-in-our ) along the lines of what you are arguing here and a reader directed me to your piece which has me clapping at my desk. Especially loved how you summarized the problem in this paragraph:
"The idea that computers should personalize instruction, flattening the human differences that learners would much rather see celebrated and developed, maintains an absolute stranglehold on the imagination of the billionaires who fund education technology. Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why. What accounts for the appeal of this idea? "
I have been reading your blogs for the last year or so and feel so inspired by them as a new math teacher. I believe in group learning and hear my students complain about feeling isolated in personalized classes all the time. This year I am working on designing a gifted education math program in a school that already exists on a mastery learning module. When I bring up the cons of personalized learning to the school leaders, they argue that having such a predesigned curriculum is helpful because not all teachers are trained or experienced enough to have a class that can be successful otherwise. We do live in a place where there is hardly any teacher training and if there is, its not sufficient at all, and yet I do not believe that our only solution is personalized mastery learning courses but I am not sure what to offer instead. Do you have any thoughts?
Thanks for another great piece, Dan - you've been on fire lately. (My lifelong educator mom agrees - she excitedly emailed me this post this morning).
As someone who's also spent time at Summit, I have to point out that you're actually in violent agreement with much of their model from ~2015. They positioned creative group work, led by an excellent teacher like Liz, as the place where the most important learning happened. I actually remember observing a lesson pulled out of your playbook - something to do with creating graphs in Desmos to match an observed phenomenon.
To me, Summit's model accepted as necessary that kids needed "fundamentals" - to acquire a bunch of knowledge and do a bunch of repetitive practice, and the best & most efficient way to get that done was with headphones, laptops, and student independence. I imagine you'd argue that doing that kind work outside of an engaging & meaningful context is ineffective. And the results from Summit Learning may prove you right – maybe any attempt to separate "rote learning" and "meaningful learning" is doomed to failure.
" "listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way".
I think this is the disconnect. If you're Zuck or Gates, forced to spend time in a classroom with an inferior teacher with nothing to offer such fine minds as theirs, all they want to do is acquire the information themselves. Education isn't, for them, a social act. They either want all the teacher's attention spent on the "smart" kids or the teacher left for the unworthy, letting the superior kids learn at their own pace, far past the one that mere mortals can manage.
They aren't saying that *now*, of course. I think they are genuinely trying to help. But what they remember from their own classrooms is their own boredom and the wide range of abilities. They never saw school as a social event or interaction.
In that context, it's significant that they are both college dropouts. They didn't want to learn what they didn't want to learn, and there was no value in the social action.
I think this is a valid critique and an important conversation, but you’re not really engaging with the problem as envisioned by these philanthropic non-educators.
In their view, it is a fundamental problem that all of the students are working on pool border problems at the same time because “that’s what on the schedule.” It’s inefficient and maybe even unjust that kids that already understand the algebra involved have to stay and twiddle their thumbs, and kids that aren’t ready yet have to fake it, because that’s what the logistical constraints of the classroom demand.
Education outsiders observe (I think correctly) that a universal timeline for all learners is really wasteful. We don’t do this because it’s good for learning, we do this because it’s cheap. I think most people would agree that if kids were in much smaller classrooms or received individual tutoring that was targeted to their level, they’d learn a lot more and/or experience much less frustration and grief at being left behind.
The thesis then is that maybe digital technology would make it economical to allow each student to have their own timeline, or at very least, to have some variation based on their ability and prior knowledge. This usually goes poorly because solutions under this thesis tend to ignore all of the social elements of learning that you’re alluding to, because they don’t scale well.
I have long been an advocate of mastery learning which recognizes the damaging consequences of differences in learning rate that accumulate as groups of students move ahead whether students have learned or not. Some of the original forms of mastery instruction argued that reading was an ideal content presentation mode as it allowed individualization. I don’t see time spent with computers or tablets any more isolating than I see time spent with books. An approach such as Newsela allows the same topic to be addressed at different levels because the same core ideas can be presented at different reading levels. However, learning in some subject areas is heavily sequential (math) and rate of learning is more consequential. Social experiences need not be the same in all content areas even in the elementary grades.
I think Education Realist is right that it is the anti-sociality of Zuck and Gates that trips them up here; they dream of going at their own pace because they think of themselves as better than other people and of reliance on others as dependency.
For everyone else, I think it's incredibly easy to process "learning requires sociality". I was just saying to a student yesterday who wanted to know more about some bodies of 19th Century social theory that I haven't read in a long time that I'd need to re-read some of it in collaboration with colleagues, because I couldn't make much progress all by myself.
Spot on, Dan. Spot on. I nearly shot tea out my nose when I read what they were pivoting to after Summit... AI. They learn nothing ... to your point, the burner is hot and they just can't stop touching it. The universals of good teaching and learning aren't flashy, they don't sell well and therefore doesn't catch the eye of the billionaires. If you were given $100 million to have a positive effect on education, what do you think you would do with it?
Thank you for this great article. Given their influence, I understand the focus on billionaires, but the allure of personalized learning is much, much broader than this exclusive club. I engage with many edtech companies, none of them funded by a tech gazillionaire, and more often than not they pursue the dream of exercises and instruction tailored to individual students. When pressed for a rationale they cite the 2-sigma study of Bloom in the 1980's. But more fundamentally, personalized learning just makes a lot of sense intuitively for people who are not versed in learning science, irrespective of their bank account. This even extends to those working in education (some teachers, many administrators). By rejecting the mirage of personalized learning the billionaires may actually be ahead of the curve ;-)
I believe the reason that this idea has a "stranglehold on billionaires" is that there is tons of research that shows a coach can help a student progress faster than uniform instruction. A student will advance faster at piano, programming, math, or any other discipline with someone helping them when they hit roadblocks.
It's also possible Zuckerberg's initiative failed due to a poor incentive structure. What did the teachers have to gain in implementing the personalized system with enthusiasm? It probably felt exactly as you described it -- as a billionaire reaching down from on high to tell a group of teachers what to do. That's not a likely recipe for success.
Would like to hear more about the seemingly fluid back-and-forth between teacher and machine. I have yet to master this transition.
"Students then take time on their own to figure out how many tiles are around several different pools, each time getting automated feedback on their efforts."
Could it be that the technonerds preferred learning alone and assume all other students share their preference? Is all this because some uber-rich guys were socially awkward teens, preferring their high-tech toys to interaction with people?
Amen!! I just wrote something (https://jendycksprout.substack.com/p/the-best-education-is-not-in-our ) along the lines of what you are arguing here and a reader directed me to your piece which has me clapping at my desk. Especially loved how you summarized the problem in this paragraph:
"The idea that computers should personalize instruction, flattening the human differences that learners would much rather see celebrated and developed, maintains an absolute stranglehold on the imagination of the billionaires who fund education technology. Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why. What accounts for the appeal of this idea? "
This is the sentence I can't get past: "listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way". I don't doubt that many people experienced school that way, or even that there are plenty of classrooms where that is the primary mode of instruction. But the belief that that kind of classroom environment is the best the field of education has to offer is really difficult for me to fathom because if you picked up one book or talked to a single expert it would immediately disabuse you of that belief. I think the relevant question is not "How can we use technology to personalize learning for students?" but "How can we spread 'personalized' learning experiences to more classrooms?" (like the type Dan describes here) which is more of a societal question than a technological one. But tech billionaires only have a hammer and that makes everything a nail.
Another, wonderful example of authentic teaching and learning mathematics. A real problem solved in a community of math curious kids with a teacher who underscores understanding her students' thinking... The public nature of the work and collaboration is so important. Thank you Dan for sharing this.
Amen!! I just wrote something (https://jendycksprout.substack.com/p/the-best-education-is-not-in-our ) along the lines of what you are arguing here and a reader directed me to your piece which has me clapping at my desk. Especially loved how you summarized the problem in this paragraph:
"The idea that computers should personalize instruction, flattening the human differences that learners would much rather see celebrated and developed, maintains an absolute stranglehold on the imagination of the billionaires who fund education technology. Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why. What accounts for the appeal of this idea? "
I have been reading your blogs for the last year or so and feel so inspired by them as a new math teacher. I believe in group learning and hear my students complain about feeling isolated in personalized classes all the time. This year I am working on designing a gifted education math program in a school that already exists on a mastery learning module. When I bring up the cons of personalized learning to the school leaders, they argue that having such a predesigned curriculum is helpful because not all teachers are trained or experienced enough to have a class that can be successful otherwise. We do live in a place where there is hardly any teacher training and if there is, its not sufficient at all, and yet I do not believe that our only solution is personalized mastery learning courses but I am not sure what to offer instead. Do you have any thoughts?
Thanks for another great piece, Dan - you've been on fire lately. (My lifelong educator mom agrees - she excitedly emailed me this post this morning).
As someone who's also spent time at Summit, I have to point out that you're actually in violent agreement with much of their model from ~2015. They positioned creative group work, led by an excellent teacher like Liz, as the place where the most important learning happened. I actually remember observing a lesson pulled out of your playbook - something to do with creating graphs in Desmos to match an observed phenomenon.
To me, Summit's model accepted as necessary that kids needed "fundamentals" - to acquire a bunch of knowledge and do a bunch of repetitive practice, and the best & most efficient way to get that done was with headphones, laptops, and student independence. I imagine you'd argue that doing that kind work outside of an engaging & meaningful context is ineffective. And the results from Summit Learning may prove you right – maybe any attempt to separate "rote learning" and "meaningful learning" is doomed to failure.
" "listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way".
I think this is the disconnect. If you're Zuck or Gates, forced to spend time in a classroom with an inferior teacher with nothing to offer such fine minds as theirs, all they want to do is acquire the information themselves. Education isn't, for them, a social act. They either want all the teacher's attention spent on the "smart" kids or the teacher left for the unworthy, letting the superior kids learn at their own pace, far past the one that mere mortals can manage.
They aren't saying that *now*, of course. I think they are genuinely trying to help. But what they remember from their own classrooms is their own boredom and the wide range of abilities. They never saw school as a social event or interaction.
In that context, it's significant that they are both college dropouts. They didn't want to learn what they didn't want to learn, and there was no value in the social action.
I think this is a valid critique and an important conversation, but you’re not really engaging with the problem as envisioned by these philanthropic non-educators.
In their view, it is a fundamental problem that all of the students are working on pool border problems at the same time because “that’s what on the schedule.” It’s inefficient and maybe even unjust that kids that already understand the algebra involved have to stay and twiddle their thumbs, and kids that aren’t ready yet have to fake it, because that’s what the logistical constraints of the classroom demand.
Education outsiders observe (I think correctly) that a universal timeline for all learners is really wasteful. We don’t do this because it’s good for learning, we do this because it’s cheap. I think most people would agree that if kids were in much smaller classrooms or received individual tutoring that was targeted to their level, they’d learn a lot more and/or experience much less frustration and grief at being left behind.
The thesis then is that maybe digital technology would make it economical to allow each student to have their own timeline, or at very least, to have some variation based on their ability and prior knowledge. This usually goes poorly because solutions under this thesis tend to ignore all of the social elements of learning that you’re alluding to, because they don’t scale well.
I have long been an advocate of mastery learning which recognizes the damaging consequences of differences in learning rate that accumulate as groups of students move ahead whether students have learned or not. Some of the original forms of mastery instruction argued that reading was an ideal content presentation mode as it allowed individualization. I don’t see time spent with computers or tablets any more isolating than I see time spent with books. An approach such as Newsela allows the same topic to be addressed at different levels because the same core ideas can be presented at different reading levels. However, learning in some subject areas is heavily sequential (math) and rate of learning is more consequential. Social experiences need not be the same in all content areas even in the elementary grades.
I think Education Realist is right that it is the anti-sociality of Zuck and Gates that trips them up here; they dream of going at their own pace because they think of themselves as better than other people and of reliance on others as dependency.
For everyone else, I think it's incredibly easy to process "learning requires sociality". I was just saying to a student yesterday who wanted to know more about some bodies of 19th Century social theory that I haven't read in a long time that I'd need to re-read some of it in collaboration with colleagues, because I couldn't make much progress all by myself.
Spot on, Dan. Spot on. I nearly shot tea out my nose when I read what they were pivoting to after Summit... AI. They learn nothing ... to your point, the burner is hot and they just can't stop touching it. The universals of good teaching and learning aren't flashy, they don't sell well and therefore doesn't catch the eye of the billionaires. If you were given $100 million to have a positive effect on education, what do you think you would do with it?
Thank you for this great article. Given their influence, I understand the focus on billionaires, but the allure of personalized learning is much, much broader than this exclusive club. I engage with many edtech companies, none of them funded by a tech gazillionaire, and more often than not they pursue the dream of exercises and instruction tailored to individual students. When pressed for a rationale they cite the 2-sigma study of Bloom in the 1980's. But more fundamentally, personalized learning just makes a lot of sense intuitively for people who are not versed in learning science, irrespective of their bank account. This even extends to those working in education (some teachers, many administrators). By rejecting the mirage of personalized learning the billionaires may actually be ahead of the curve ;-)
I believe the reason that this idea has a "stranglehold on billionaires" is that there is tons of research that shows a coach can help a student progress faster than uniform instruction. A student will advance faster at piano, programming, math, or any other discipline with someone helping them when they hit roadblocks.
It's also possible Zuckerberg's initiative failed due to a poor incentive structure. What did the teachers have to gain in implementing the personalized system with enthusiasm? It probably felt exactly as you described it -- as a billionaire reaching down from on high to tell a group of teachers what to do. That's not a likely recipe for success.
Would like to hear more about the seemingly fluid back-and-forth between teacher and machine. I have yet to master this transition.
"Students then take time on their own to figure out how many tiles are around several different pools, each time getting automated feedback on their efforts."
Love your content and approach! I write my own education newsletter. It is nice to discover kindred spirits on Substack. Keep up the amazing work. 👍👍
Could it be that the technonerds preferred learning alone and assume all other students share their preference? Is all this because some uber-rich guys were socially awkward teens, preferring their high-tech toys to interaction with people?
Amen!! I just wrote something (https://jendycksprout.substack.com/p/the-best-education-is-not-in-our ) along the lines of what you are arguing here and a reader directed me to your piece which has me clapping at my desk. Especially loved how you summarized the problem in this paragraph:
"The idea that computers should personalize instruction, flattening the human differences that learners would much rather see celebrated and developed, maintains an absolute stranglehold on the imagination of the billionaires who fund education technology. Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why. What accounts for the appeal of this idea? "