Why Teaching Is Harder Than Surgery

And why your app or product or thing might not be helping.

If you are creating tools, products, or support for teachers, I cannot recommend to you more highly Chapter 5 of David Labaree’s book Someone Has to Fail. Labaree’s book on the difficulty of changing schooling in the United States was somewhere near the top of “education books I would be ashamed to admit I haven’t read” until I finished it last week. Now I shall refer to it in terms that strongly imply it was read to me in utero.

So anyway, as I have always said, there are few writers who understand and describe the challenges of teaching like David Labaree in his book Someone Has to Fail.

First, there is his comparison of the client-practitioner relationship in teaching to other professional work like surgery and law:

A surgeon can fix the ailment of a patient who sleeps through the operation, and a lawyer can successfully defend a client who remains mute during the trial; but success for a teacher depends heavily on the active cooperation of the student. The student must be willing to learn what the teacher is teaching. Unless this intended learning takes place, the teacher has failed.

Then he compares the narrower focus of their work to the broader focus of teaching:

The doctor focuses on the client’s fever, the accountant on the client’s tax liability, and the therapist on the client’s compulsive behavior. To get involved with the client in the more intense and wide-ranging manner of a close friend [as required by teaching] may be counterproductive in handling the problem that brought the client to the professional in the first place, and therefore may well be defined as unprofessional conduct.

So the teacher has to balance relational and cognitive goals, but:

Balancing these two kinds of roles in the same position is difficult at best. It is not surprising that teachers often resolve the tension between the primary and secondary elements in one direction or the other: by leading a forced march through a curriculum in which no one is motivated to learn, or by settling for a feel-good classroom in which no one is pushed to learn. In the latter case, teachers get so caught up in the need to be liked by their students that they lose track of the pedagogical purpose of establishing an emotional link with their classes, and they convert the teacher-student relationship in to a simple primary connection, where the positive feeling in the group becomes its purpose.

Why have so many attempts to change teaching run aground in the classroom?

Only one thing is certain about the map that reformers create in their effort to see schooling: it leaves out almost everything. The complex ecology of the classroom disappears into the simplified columns of summary statistics.

If you’re building a support for classrooms, you have to be a full stack educational designer. You have to understand that the numbers, text, and booleans in your database were produced by students having an experience that was cognitive, technological, and relational simultaneously. You have to understand that one hundred different teachers will mediate those experiences in one hundred different ways. You have to understand that your support, therefore, must be bendy, extremely adaptable to the personalities and capacities of those different teachers, all without compromising its core.

You also have to enjoy this madness. You have to imagine yourself happy here. You have to take some pleasure when your work underperforms your expectations because it means you’re going to get into some classrooms, talk to some teachers, watch some students, and if you are very, very lucky, unlearn one more lie you once believed about this work. To do anything less is to blame students for being students and teachers for trying to work within constraints we wouldn’t dream of setting for other professionals like doctors or lawyers.

Odds & Ends

¶ A new Play With Your Math poster dropped just in time for the start of school. It’s Xi Yu and Joey Kelly’s first in years.

¶ Over on r/Teachers, no one likes the software their school uses to make their master schedule of classes. Am I wrong to think this could be a useful application of artificial intelligence? Can I persuade any of you to go do that with AI instead of the stuff many of you are currently doing with AI?

¶ MagicSchool released an “AI Teacher Twin” tool. Founder Adeel Khan announced it:

This tool allows educators to "Twin" themselves by creating an AI teacher twin as a chatbot to help their students as a resource.

Educators can include things like your personality quirks (mine would say a lot of "Go Hokies" for my alma mater), attach large knowledge bases, and additional instructions to instruct the AI to respond how they would for your students.

After various teachers said, “this doesn’t sound great,” founder Adeel Khan responded to their concerns.

We've compromised by creating an "AI Resource Bot" tool that does something similar, but takes out the personality features.  We hope this still gives the utility that we intended while removing the feelings associated with the original tool launch.

I can’t find either the “AI Teacher Twin” or the “AI Resource Bot” on MagicSchool anymore.

¶ Newark Public Schools was one of Khanmigo’s AI pilot sites last year and is expanding its use of the AI platform this year in the district’s ten-year strategic plan. Jessie Gómez writes in Chalkbeat “Khan Academy is also helping the district analyze state testing data to determine the impact of Khanmigo on student growth and achievement.” Can’t wait! It’ll be especially interesting to see if that study takes a rigorous “once randomized, always analyzed” approach to study design. In the past, Khan Academy has taken an approach that has looked more like “once randomized, analyzed only if the participants meet high usage thresholds,” which raises the question, “which students meet the threshold and why?”

¶ People are starting to ask Sal Khan more often what he makes of the large group of students who don’t meet those thresholds. In the past, Khan has punted those students to teachers. (“You need to figure out ways to engage them more.”) In a recent episode of The TED AI Show podcast he offers a different hypothesis. These kids are disengaged from everything, not just his platform.

We’re seeing a certain class of students—immediately when we have access to the AI, they’re off to the races. I always call it 15 to 20% of students who immediately understand what they can now do. I would say the other 80% of students, it’s interesting, some of them are having trouble articulating what they need or how to communicate. And at first I thought this was a problem with the technology, or with the AI, but the more we talked to educators, they said, “You don’t understand. This was a problem all along.” These kids would raise their hand and the teacher would call on them and say, “Okay Sal, how can I help you” and “Uhhhh … never mind. Uhhh … I don’t know. Huh?” They weren’t able to articulate it. So these teachers are telling us, “It’s really important for these students to practice these skills.”

It is always fortunate when potential product liabilities actually turn out to be, after serious consideration, an asset to users.

¶ MIT Technology Review on the state of play in AI edtech as the school year starts:

So how eager are teachers to adopt AI to save time? Earlier this year, in May, a Pew research poll found that only 6% of teachers think AI can provide more benefits than harm in education. But with AI changing faster than ever, this school year might be when ed-tech companies start to win them over.

Very possible! But it would be nice to read some or any analysis of what will change to win teachers over to AI—the release of GPT-5? more professional development? pumpkin spice latte season?—or how we’d rule out alternative hypotheses like “there is a fundamental mismatch between current AI products and the needs of teachers and students.”