by Mr. Hillel Rapp
Sal Khan, the founder and primary educator of Khan Academy, in a recent TED Talk posed the following question: Consider a builder who lay the foundation for house. If the surveyor came to assess its quality and noted that it was only 70% complete, would it make any sense if the next step was for everyone to agree that 70% was good enough, a passing grade, and give the builder a green light to construct the rest of the house on this shaky foundation? Yet, in education, we do this all the time. Consider a student who never quite mastered adding fractions but managed a passing grade. Our current educational model will move this student on to the next stage without a fluent and secure knowledge of this one critical process and eventually expect the student to learn algebra. We will build upon this insecure foundation a whole new set of learning expectations. When the structure begins to wobble, we will move fast to brace it and try and keep it standing – practice more, try a new method of problem solving. But the problem is in the foundation. All the patches in the world won’t address the core issue that was overlooked and passed along years before.
A standard mathematics education is much like a house, where core skills taught in the early years of school form the intellectual foundation upon which newer and more complex topics are introduced. But we are not actually working with bricks and mortar. We are working with sweat and tears. A student who fails to master a concept, resulting in subsequent struggles, is more prone to consider themselves a “bad math student” and experience all the negative feedback loops that get created when hours, days, weeks, and years of hard work do not result in improved performance. And it’s not just math. A student who never masters proper sentence structure will struggle with expository writing and organizing ideas and sources for a research paper. That knowledge structure will strain even further at University when the assignment is a 20 page research paper with an expectation that the skills required to do accomplish this have already been established.
How many labels have we attached to our students, and to ourselves, that may have cascaded from a small gap in the foundation of our learning that was never noticed? “I’m not a ________ person.” Fill in your choice, math, science, English, history. Can we honestly say that we could not have achieved a better understanding of this material had we been given more time and individualized attention to master each learning goal as we encountered it?
So why have we allowed this to happen? Because, like any industry, education needs economies of scale. To make it affordable and manageable it was most effective to group students by age and allocate one teacher to groups of 15, 20, or 25 students. To evaluate progress toward learning goals for such a large group, we created a numerical evaluation system that conforms to a curve, placing the majority in the middle of achievement measures. Such a system essentially implies that the the number of students who fail to achieve almost any knowledge should be roughly the same as the number of students who fully master the knowledge. The majority will just get passed along at various stages of incomplete knowledge.
Khan argues that the time has come to replace this system. Technology has afforded us the opportunity to scale a new educational model that teaches to mastery. Each student can move through material at their own pace using guided computer-based learning, advancing only when a skill has been acquired. No more courses covering some large selections of material, with a long list learning goals, and a final numerical grade attached. Instead there would just be individual learning goals, each taken one at a time with no arbitrary time frame that requires a final judgement on ability. The only thing that would matter is if the student has achieved that learning goal.
It remains to be seen if such a model is truly scaleable and if technology holds the promise of providing large scale and effective educational communication. However, for educators in the Jewish Day School system, this raises an entirely different set of questions. Families that make the substantial sacrifices required to send children to Jewish Day Schools do so for many of the reasons Khan identifies as critical systemic flaws. In a Jewish school, grouping students by age allows for highly effective guidance in social and emotional development. Students find lifelong friendships that build the foundations of a binding community among peers who share their heritage. Students of the same age group can grapple with spiritual growth in a like-minded way and reinforce in each other in various degrees of isolation and protection from a secular value set that is challenged by traditional Judaism. Shabbatons, Color War, and student activities are all built on group divisions that have no bearing on academic success, and may actually be a detriment to optimal learning.
In the fifteen years since I started teaching, I have been fortunate to bring technology into my classroom in ways that have produced better learning results for my students. I have also come to deepen my appreciation for a Jewish school system that has proven itself as not only the greatest bulwark against assimilation the modern world has known, but as a vehicle for facilitating a vibrant Jewish communal existence that is enriched with tastes of modernity while remaining grounded in age old structures and traditions.
It stands to reason that the trend of technological innovation and integration in education will continue, and it seems to be guiding us to a head-on collision with the very structure upon which our system is built. As it turns out, that structure may also be at very core of what makes Jewish schools so successful.
Hillel Rapp is Director of Education at Bnei Akiva Schools of Toronto.
