Explore to Learn

A number of articles have cropped up over the past few days about the importance of art in education — something that warms my heart! A few notable ones:

- NPR’s inspiring “50 Great Teachers” series highlights art teacher Jimi Herd in a lovely illustrated piece.

- NYTimes Learning Network gathers some rich resources for thinking about color in a recent post. 

Wonderful Moth story from former teacher Micaela Blei about a hilarious experience in her third grade classroom with Legos.

Blei now works as the Senior Manager of Education Programs for the Moth, which brings storytelling workshops into schools. On her website you can listen to a number of her other stories, a couple of which originate from her experience as a teacher. 

The New Yorker’s recent article “Learn Different,” by Rebecca Mead, examines the personalized learning movement empowered by digital technology and perhaps best exemplified in the AltSchool company. 

(Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli, the New Yorker)

A “full stack” company, AltSchool encompasses a Silicon Valley-like start-up business developing software to personalize learning as well as six brick and mortar schools — all located in the Bay Area or New York City — where teachers actively test out their product. Through fish eye lenses installed in every room, student-specific software tools, and both teachers’ and students’ contributions to the continually growing Learning Progression software that powers the school, AltSchool is set up to collect an impressive amount of realtime data about its students. 

In theory, and bolstered by the quick, iterative practices of the tech product world, this data becomes the fuel for more effective teaching and a more customized education for AltSchool’s students. Teachers are able to review any moment of logged classroom camera footage to reflect on a student’s behavior, comment directly on their work in an online project and essentially drill down to a previously hidden & detailed degree into their students’ work. 

The article helps to contextualize this effort in terms of both the proliferating digital technology industry & culture — AltSchool’s founder is a former Google employee and start-up owner — as well as the national educational reform efforts seen in expanded standardized tests and government initiatives such as Race to the Top. While those programs aimed to gather more data to enable more informed decisions about student, teacher and school performance, the leaders of companies like AltSchool would argue their data arsenal is much more equipped and efficient.  

While it’s possible to foresee some of the benefits of this effort, many questions remain. What happens when a school, a learning institution, is also a company? Where are the seasoned teachers in the equation? (Many of the practices described in the AltSchool approach, for instance — including allowing students to choose what types of projects and activities they work on at school — are akin to progressive education principles that prioritize inquiry and student’s instincts; educators who have been working in this vein for roughly a century, albeit without laptops and smartphones, would undoubtedly have a relevant perspective). Is it possible for ‘boutique’ efforts to reform education outside of the public school system to ever successfully integrate with it (as the AltSchool founders claim is their eventual goal)?