Sal Khan and teaching for mastery

Sal Khan's TED Talk makes a lot of sense to me.

His point is, don't set a fixed time to cover some learning material.  And don't be satisfied with a passable level of understanding of that material, before moving on to the next topic/level.

Instead, set the content of what you want learnt, and make sure that is mastered before moving on to the next topic.  The length of time taken to master it is not important.  He says:

Instead of artificially constraining when and how long -- fixing when and how long -- you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F, do it the other way around.  What's variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what's fixed is that they actually master the material. ...

It will reinforce the right mindset muscles.  It makes them realise that if you got 20% wrong on something, it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow.  It means that you should just keep working on it.  You should have grit.  You should have perseverance.

Very well said.  I agree completely.

For those of us who homeschool, and with only a few students to teach, it is easy to have this sort of mentality.

For teachers who have more students, it can understandably be trickier to accomplish.  Khan addresses this issue from 5 min 45 sec onwards, and is optimistic that new technologies in on-demand learning make it possible to do this in the classroom.

And while this all sounds very exciting and hopeful, I still do wonder how easy it is to find the right teaching point, with just the right nuance of explanation, with on-demand video teaching.  At this stage, I still don't feel confident to leave Mulan and Miya unsupervised on Khan Academy to watch the instructional videos and answer the questions on their own.  They still seem to do much better with my in-person interactive explanations than with the video explanations.

Nonetheless, good on Sal Khan for doing what he does, and I have no doubt that as these on-demand teaching materials get better and better, it will get easier and easier to find the right teaching point at the right time, and at least sometimes they will take over from teacher-dad's explanations.

Home educated students trialling school

As I am sure you all know, Mulan and Miya are homeschooled -- we have Certificates of Exemption (from enrolment at a registered school) for them.

The quick reason that we homeschool the girls is that it works for us.  Our teaching them has been ongoing from their births; it is the default option.  Why change to a different system when the current system is working successfully?

What helps make it work for us is:

1. We have enough financial security that I can treat it as an (unpaid) job,
2. I have a solid educational background to know what and how to teach,
3. My personality suits working with children, and I enjoy it,
4. We also have expertise in subjects that we think are important, but are generally not taught in schools (such as Chinese, critical thinking and moral education).

But even though we have chosen to homeschool Mulan and Miya, I believe that schools can be, and for the most part are, good places for children to be and to be educated.  I am not anti-school.

So, I am all in favour of more interaction between homeschoolers and registered schools.

So, while preparing the exemption application for Miya a few months ago, I was very interested to see on the New Zealand Ministry of Education website a section about trialling school.  This is what it says:

Trialling a school

Home educated students may trial attending a school. For more information about this process, contact your local Ministry office.

Your Certificate of Exemption and home education supervision allowance may be impacted, depending on how long your child attends school:

• 0-28 days – no effect on your Certificate of Exemption or allowance

• 29 days – 10 weeks – no effect on your Certificate of Exemption, but your allowance will be reduced, based on the length of time that your child was attending school

• More than 10 weeks – your Certificate of Exemption will cease. If you want to go back to home educating your child you will need to apply for a new Certificate of Exemption.

I thought, what a great idea, homeschool children can trial attending school.  They can learn what attending school is like, and so have a better understanding of what most children experience.  Since school life is so ingrained into our culture, giving homeschoolers a time at school can allow them to enter into local mainstream culture in a more direct and personal way.

This can also be an awesome bridge between the homeschooling community and the registered school community -- shared experiences, better communication, closer relationships and improved community interactions.  As I see it, anything that improves community relations is surely a good thing.

So, I made contact with our local primary school, Takapuna Primary, introduced ourselves, explained what I had found on the Ministry of Education website, and briefly explained my thinking as above.

I got a very positive email back from the Principal of Takapuna Primary, who was very welcoming of us.  We both agreed that it would make sense for this to happen at the beginning of the new school year in 2017, and we would make contact again in November when they had sorted out which teachers would be teaching which classes.

Since the Ministry of Education website said to contact the local Ministry office for more information, I sent them an email today, also explaining my thinking.

Within a couple of hours I got a phone call from the person at the local Auckland Ministry office who is in charge of working with homeschoolers (no need to give names).

If I had to describe her manner on the phone, I would say that she was adversarial rather than cooperative.  As I see it, a cooperative conversation is one in which the other person's ideas are always treated charitably -- seen in the best possible light and in their strongest way -- to work together to jointly find the best solution.  An adversarial conversation is one in which one tries to beat the other, using rhetorical strategies such as misdirections and uncharitable interpretations.  Words and meanings get twisted to one-up the other, and the truth can get lost in the struggle.

But despite the adversarial nature of the conversation, I learnt a few things from it.

Firstly, and most tellingly, she said that the nature of the homeschooling exemption is that it is a complete opting out of the state education system.  Consequently, the state has no responsibility to assist in any way with the educational needs of homeschoolers.  Moreover, she seemed to go so far as to imply that this meant that it was inappropriate for the state to help in this way, perhaps even to the point of it being offensive to suggest it.

I think she was treating schooling as an all-or-nothing concept.  Either the children enrol at a registered school, and in which case they are required to attend for the long term.  Or they get an exemption, and then the family unit is entirely on its own, using its own resources.  No middle ground, and no cooperation or interaction.

My armchair sense of this is that it is surely not in the best interests of either the children or society.  But I would be interested in her reasoning for seeing education in this absolutist way.  (I wonder if her political orientation is more lone horseman than Amish?)

Secondly, she emphasised that the policy of trialling a school was intended only for students who were intending to continue on at that school.  It was not intended for students trialling it for the purposes I was suggesting.

I can accept that, though I am puzzled why that was not made clear on the website.

But more importantly, just because something is originally intended for one purpose, there is no reason to think that it cannot be used for other purposes also, and especially if those other purposes are good.

To put it more directly, just because a policy was intended for children planning to return to a registered school, it doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be also used by those who want to trial school for other reasons.  Pointing out the original intent doesn't necessarily exclude my idea.

In the course of the 12-minute conversation, she raised an objection that if the policy is opened up to other purposes, then homeschoolers will take advantage of it and there will be too many homeschoolers overburdening schools, and with many doing it for the wrong reasons.  She gave two possible wrong reasons homeschoolers might use: (a) lazy parents wanting a break, and (b) lazy parents wanting to use it for "socialisation", when they should be providing opportunities for their child's socialisation themselves.

Her argument is very weak:

1. I doubt that many homeschoolers would be that interested in sending their children to school for a short time -- many, if not most, homeschool parents who I have talked with have withdrawn their children precisely because their children were having problems in school.
2. It is unlikely to be the case that sending children to school for a term would give caring homeschool parents a break.  If anything, there would be more parental work involved in preparing them beforehand, as well as helping them throughout to adjust to a different environment and system.
3. The "socialisation" thing is really not a thing for homeschoolers.  When she implied that my real, more selfish, underlying, reason for wanting to send my children to school was to provide them with "socialisation", I listed out some of the regular social activities we do -- ballet, swimming, music, art, athletics, tennis, critical thinking, Chinese, basketball, netball ...

She also expressed an objection to my reason for wanting my children to trial school (which I briefly explained above).  She pointed out that there are about 6000 homeschoolers in New Zealand.  If I understand her correctly, the aim of her point was to weaken my claim that attending school is mainstream culture.  But her objection is weak, as my point relies on proportions, not direct numbers.  The latest statistic is that 0.7% of children in New Zealand are homeschooled.

Thirdly, she directly contradicted the Ministry website regarding the effect trialling at school will have on the exemption.  Note above that the website says that trialling school for under ten weeks will have "no effect on your Certificate of Exemption".  She said that it will have an effect.

She said (and I hope I am using the proper terminologies):  When the student trials a school they will enrol there, and that enrolment information will be sent to the Ministry, which will then record that the student is registered at that school.  It is not possible for a student to be both registered at a school and also have an exemption certificate, so the exemption will immediately be deactivated.  If, within the ten weeks, the student decides not to continue at that school the school will notify the Ministry and the student's school registration will be deleted.  But the exemption will not be automatically reactivated.  The student must then contact the Ministry within the ten weeks to ask for the exemption to be reactivated (if it is after the ten weeks then the exemption cannot be reactivated and the student must apply for a new exemption).

Given all of this, I am inclined to think it best to not pursue the idea of the girls trialling school.  While I think it would have been good for the girls to get a better understanding of school culture, as well as for the school and local community to develop deeper community interactions, I'd only want to do it with the support of the Ministry and schools.

Naturally I am disappointed for the children, but not sending them to school does mean that I'll have less work to do now!