Flipping Learning: Reimagining Education in the 21st Century One World Schoolhouse

Having read and reviewed two works on rethinking professional development as the development of teaching practice and not technique, I move on now to think through works in educational theory and leadership that disrupt conventions and norms.

Introduction to Salman Khan's hit Khan Academy and One World School House (2013)

To start with Salman Khan's The One World School House is, perhaps, to start with one of the most popular works in educational technology circles. Written following the success of Khan's self-placed video instruction channel on youtube, the Khan Academy, Khan is a self-taught teacher who intuits his way--and quite successfully, at that--through the history, current challenges, and possible futures and best practices of education and educational technology.

Khan's goal is an ambitious and I would admit, as a teacher, a noble one: he wants to align education as closely as possible with "the world as it actually is." (11). He writes, for example, towards the end of his book that instead of learning coding in a series of classes, students should be grappling--over the course of months--with projects and challenges that they would encounter on the job as interns at Google or Microsoft. (238) Though much of his work is based on speculation, anecdotal experience, and loosely applied research--all subject to critique, of course, and found by others to be baseless in educational research--his work is one of the central and successful case studies for thinking through shifting learning towards a flipped model, and by way of the internet and digital technologies.

Disrupting the Industrial Educational Complex

Khan is right to note that educational institutions and systems need disruption--and that technology can provide that disruption. He is right, as well, that modern education, in its most basic form, is an outcome of the Industrial Revolution--the Prussian Model that optimized schools' production of successful students through the artificial divisions of grades and subjects while controlling their indoctrination carefully, leaving behind both bored and challenged students in the process, and leaving behind any student inquiry into the subjects at hand. (76-77)

Instead of producing students with "good grades" but "without learning much of anything" (11), Khan notices how students actually learn, as opposes to how we teach them: people learn at different rates; the pace of learning is also a form of style, not a reflection of intelligence; slowness in one aspect of a field does not foreclose the absolute creativity possible within the same field, and by the same student (20). Standardized and assessed modular learning, in other words, at a uniform pace, fits and benefits very few students' advanced and enriched learning. 

The first step, for Khan, is putting the teacher aside--less focus on the need for face time in lectures, more exposure to concepts and content. (35-36). With the focus on content, a student's responsibility for mastering the content becomes, itself, the educational process. Many think, in other words, that taking responsibility operates independently as a value from the learning itself (42); Khan argues, instead, that "taking responsibility for education is education; taking responsibility for learning is learning. From the student's perspective, only by taking responsibility does true learning become possible; students of mastery learning dynamics make this clear." (43)

This, I found, to be truly helpful in thinking through an active, more modular classroom--the fact that we bracket personal responsibility as a secondary value to "actual learning" speaks to the deeply traditional model in place of passive learning and consumption at the teacher's pace. Teaching commitment should mean, in other words, teaching responsibility for the learning itself. 

Active Education as Self-Education

For Khan, as for many progressive theories of education, education is fundamentally a process of self-education. (45) What follows, through modern theories of long-term memory, is an understanding that learning is continuous and need to be built on. Again, this counters the tendency for students to "forget" their learning--it's not that teachers need to find ways to make their classroom experiences memorable. It's that they need to think about the continuum of learning as open for the duration of their students' schooling experiences. (51)

An active stance for students towards their education maintains certain instructional goals but allows students self-pacing, self-motivation, and access to prior lessons. Technology, for Khan, enables this process (58). Through the internet, students not only review but explore interdisciplinary connections and deepen inquiry into the subjects, too. 

Tracking creativity is a failure of the modern industrial-education complex--in its tracking of standards, assessments, and, finally, grades. It fails, for Khan, to be appreciated as essential to every student's success as a learner, and it fails to be seen as at all essential to some of the more scientific disciplines. (98) Of course, we don't assess student writing based on mastery of the technical skills of grammar and masterful vocabulary. What should we be measuring for greatness, then?

Homework, too, is a product of the industrial model. It only becomes necessary "because not enough learning happens during the school day" in the "broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture" model. (114) I agree entirely with Khan here: the students in our classrooms suffer at home--their quality of life suffers, their family lives suffer--because we can't think about education otherwise. 

The core of Khan's solution is, essentially, flipping classroom learning. Instead of a lockstep, uniform classroom, untracked classes (as the English classes I teach now) would benefit from self-paced student learning that is, essentially, flipped. With students hearing the broadcast aspects of the learning on their own, they could pursue the mastery of learning outcomes at their own paces, thus self-differentiating. Most importantly, they could optimize class time for the reviewing, application of, and inquiry into the learning.

Some Conclusions; Next Steps

How might all of this work in an English classroom? Well, it certainly has application for the writing classroom. The discussions of literature are driven through Socratic seminars, in my classroom, but the responses and preparation for such discussions--usually through writing--could be easily flipped through digital instruction and online fora. The composition outcomes could be varied but  kept to certain core standards of expression and understanding, perhaps along the lines of Kathleen Duddan Rowloand's recent "Replacing Form-First Pedagogy" (July 2016), which offers a particularly good critique of the assumption of one-size-fits-all composition instruction and outcomes. 

Khan's work is itself modular--part memoir, part intuition, part prophecy, part critical history. You can read any section in isolation and grasp the essence of the whole, I think, but different fields will find that particular sections speak to them. In particular, the final few chapters offer a vision for Khan's model beyond the Khan Academy--in schools, colleges, and in adult education, though the core vision of self-paced and independent learning as a core value of 21st Century education is consistent throughout. 

Up next: Joe Sanfelippo's and Tony Sinanis's Hacking Leadership (2016) for a foray into 21st Century educational leadership. Then, I'll return to theories of 21st Century education with a review of Classroom Habitudes: Teaching Habits and Attitudes for 21st Century Learning (2012).