On September 13th, 2012 I attended the New York
Times Schools for Tomorrow Conference-Building a Better Teacher in New York
City.
The list of speakers included the Times Op-Ed columnists
David Brooks, Bill Keller, and Nick Kristof. Speakers, such as Stanford
professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Aneesh Chopra the former Chief Technology
Officer for United States under President Obama, Lori Breslow, Director,
Teaching and Learning Laboratory, MIT, and Daniel Russell, Uber Tech Lead,
Search Quality and User Happiness, Google.
For a complete list of the speakers go to: http://nytschoolsfortomorrow.com/speakers.php
The conference opened with a panel about the importance of raising
the low social status of teaching. Linda Darling-Hammond stated that students
have a romantic notion of teaching until they actually do it. The American
system of how we train and mentor teachers is in the dark ages.
The Chicago teacher’s strike was addressed, and the issues
surrounding teacher evaluation based on students test scores was discussed.
Darling-Hammond also made some simple yet important points.
Teachers need time to learn from one another, and to learn together. Teachers
need time to plan, think and develop curriculum. Technology was one of the
major conversations at the conference.
Vivek Wadwa, Vice
President of Academics and Innovation, Singularity University, made the point
that technology has changed the entire educational paradigm. He went on to
introduce Jim Coulter, the co-founder of the private equity fund TPG Capital who
spoke about the Top Ten Technological
Evolutions in Education. Too see his
talk go to:
- Education needs to be more
adaptive moving from a rigid model to adaptive model.
- We need to teach
technology--curation, search, digital health
- Evolution of the units in
education, different ideation of segmenting learning, Textbooks can be
adapted quickly in the digital world. Semesters are no longer
meaningful-just look at Coursera.
- Classroom and student
management will change, paper planners versus cloud based knowledge
regarding student relationship management.
- New concept of classrooms
and study groups, 20 to 200 person lectures versus 100,000 people enrolled
in an online class. Social Media helps support study groups. (Twitter
etc.)
- Crowd sourced approval,
content will be approved through teacher based feedback rather than
government approval
- We need to learn from
other countries national policies; Korea, Singapore etc. have been very
effective in developing policy. We must learn from them. They have a vast
infrastructure in the schools.
- The role of the teacher
will change from Sage on the stage versus guide on the side.
- We need to move towards
learning paths; the concept of 7th grade math is absurd. The
Khan Academy model
- We have to Wi-Fi
schools-we are moving to mobile learning-it is all about tablets and
mobile phones.
In closing, Coulter stated: “Technology can fundamentally
change the student-teacher relationship in a very positive way. It is happening
now, and we have to get behind it”.
