Key words (a.k.a. tags): Charles Chen Yidan, Yidan Prize, Yidan Prize Foundation, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, XQsuperschool, education, education reform, NSF, National Science Foundation, education funding, education research, teachers, teaching, STEM, STEM graduates, teacher professional development, professional development, MOOC, learning, laws of learning.
Dear Dr. Charles CHEN
Yidan,
I know this statement
will upset you, but the Yidan Prize will not make an impact on the state and
evolution of education in an individual country or in the world.
This post provides logic
behind this statement.
However, there is a way
to turn things around. I also present that way in this post.
Will the Yidan Prize Affect the Evolution of
Education?
When Priscilla
Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Initiative announced their goal “to eradicate all diseases”
(https://chanzuckerberg.com/) I
only hoped it would go better than the project of changing education in Newark
(New Jersey). It did not go well: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AXS6BIE/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb.
However, it seems they
have learned a lesson: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/jeremy-freeman-chan-zuckerberg-initiative-disease.
The same approach must be
used to eradicate all “the ignorance” in the world by
reforming the way education currently is being reformed.
This task however is even
more difficult than “eradicating all diseases” (http://www.teachology.xyz/30uS.html).
Like in medical and biological research, research in education is being
conducted by many independent groups, with a very low level of sharing data –
mainly, because there is no comparable data (http://www.teachology.xyz/FW.htm).
Many of the activities are not even a research, but an attempt to advance some
elements of social reality in the field of education.
When the widow of late
Steve Jobs, Ms. Laurene Powell Jobs announced her XQsuperschool initiative, I
wrote her a letter, warning that there is a mismatch between the goal
(reshaping ALL high schools in America) and the actions (reshaping 5 high
school): http://www.teachology.xyz/xq.htm.
There are 10 XQsuperschools now, but my premises in the letter still stand.
I got a hope again when
Mr. Charles Chen Yidan announced the establishment of the Yidan Prize
Foundation (http://www.yidanprize.org/en/).
This is the first philanthropist who seems understands the difference between a
social project and a scientific research. The distinction is very important for
advancing education (http://www.teachology.xyz/wwNSF.html),
and I applaud Mr. Charles Chen Yidan.
If I had a chance, I would tell Mr. Charles Chen Yidan
the following.
***********************************************************************
Part I: Initiating a
discussion.
Dear Mr. Charles Chen
Yidan,
I sincerely admire your
intention to support education. I have been in education for almost twenty
years, and it pains me to see who slowly it changes to the better.
However, I need to inform
you that most probably you will be spending your money with achieving much less
than you would expect, at least at first.
I believe that reading
the following letter could help you to solidify your views on the functioning
of the Foundation.
But first, I want to
inform you that very often my views on education – its state, the way to
improve the whole system – are “perpendicular” to the mainstream views.
To describe the
current state of affairs in education we can use one word – chaos.
There is no science of
education, it is in a rudimentary state, similar to alchemy before chemistry:
More on this at: http://www.teachology.xyz/30uS.html
Currently, educational
publications rarely lead to more than a simple statement “more exercises =>
better student outcomes”.
More on this at: http://www.teachology.xyz/msm.html
R&D projects are
focused on local goals incoherent with each other.
More on this at: http://www.teachology.xyz/FW.htm
There are three large
fields within education which need a serious reformation:
* Teacher professional
development
* Big Data in
education
* Detailed study of
the time scale of all elementary learning actions and teaching acts
More on this at:
Of course, teachers and
schools keep doing the best they can to give students the best education they
can. They would appreciate any additional funds which would let them teach
better. But simply giving extra money would not lead to a development of a
science of education, would not advance a progress in new teaching technologies.
The latest reports show
that U.S. system does not help many students to be ready for getting college
education, especially in science and engineering.
“The number of U.S.
citizens and permanent residents earning graduate degrees in science and engineering
fell 5 percent in 2014 from its peak in 2008. At the same time, the number of
students on temporary visas earning the same degrees soared by 35 percent”.
“Nearly half of PhD
aerospace engineers, over 65% of PhD computer scientists, and nearly 80% of PhD
industrial and manufacturing engineers were born abroad”
At this stage, any
“innovations” at a college level are more like a game. The focus must be at the
advancing pre-college education on a broad scale. However, at a K1 – K12 levels
all “innovations” fall into two categories: (a) give teachers more workshops;
(b) give students more toys (like tablets, Lego robots, etc.) – they do not
represent a scientific research.
Politicians, unions,
professionals are stuck debating what is better “charter schools” or “regular
school”.
This debate is
irrelevant to the real needs of educational reform.
More on this at:
If you really want to
make a difference, you need to go beyond orthodox views on what education is,
and how science of education should be developed.
For example, you could
start from creating a completely new type of a school (a.k.a. a new type of a
research facility in education).
More on this at: http://www.teachology.xyz/chs.htm
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
Part II: Widening the
discussion.
Dear Mr. Charles Chen
Yidan,
I have
spent some time to study the materials related to the Yidan Prize.
I truly
admire the mission of the Foundation, which is to create a better world through
education.
I have
watched the videos, I read all the information about the Yidan Prize.
The video
and the Forecast point at several important problems the world is facing right
now, for example how many children are not having any formal education, or that
education does not guarantee a job, or on youth unemployment, and STEM
graduates.
The
Forecast shows the tendency of the future.
But
education also has a long history.
We can
imagine a long line which represents the trajectory of the evolution of world
education. The Forecast indicates how this line will continue in the future.
I assume,
that when the Yidan Prize was established, the goal was to alternate the
current trajectory, to “bend the line”, so to speak. The actual trajectory of
the evolution of the world education should become different from the projected
trajectory (without the establishing of the Yidan Prize) due to the fact of the
influence of the Yidan Prize.
But the
Yidan Prize Foundation is not the only organization with a similar mission.
For
example, the U.S. Department of Education appropriates about 69 billion dollars
per a year. About 500 million dollars from the budget are spent to support
innovations in education.
In addition
to it, the National Science Foundation spends about 61 million dollars on
research in the field of education.
Largest US
foundations and corporations put together about 500 million dollars to advance
education (https://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2010/04/04292010a.html).
Your
foundation has an extraordinary team of experts. Those people have been helping
to advance education for decades.
I also have
been in this business for about 20 years.
I have seen
innovations come and go without leaving a mark.
I am pretty
sure that when creating the Yidan Prize you also have asked yourself the
following two questions:
1. How
would you make a difference; how would your actions influence the evolution of the
world education; due to what mechanism the Foundation would change education?
and
2. How
would you know it; how would you assess the effects of your actions; how would
you measure the impact of the Foundation?
My personal
answer would be to concentrate on the projects in three areas:
1. Teacher
professional development
2. Big Data
in Education
and
3. The
study of the processes of individual learning.
The first
area does not involve a scientific research, it is mostly based on the projects
of a social type (http://www.teachology.xyz/wwNSF.html).
Those
projects usually fall into one of the two categories:
1) “We want
our students to do better. For that we plan on trying - this.” – this project
mostly involves faculty or teachers who directly teach students.
or
2) “We want
our school teachers to teach better. For that we plan on trying - this.” – this
project mostly involves faculty from a university or a school of education
helping teachers to teach better (usually via workshops, or other forms of
communication).
The second
and the third areas represent the areas of a scientific research.
For the
second area, the main idea is that data must be collected from a vast number of
sources (at least hundreds) – only then it will become the Big Data.
For the third
area, I would use an analogy.
Among many
new things America brought to the world is potato. There are more than 4000
types of potato. For each type, we know exactly how to grow it: what type of
soil is good, when to plant, how often to water, what microelements to add,
when the first leaf should start growing, what signs of a good or a bad growing
process, etc.
But when we
teach, we only know in general how people learn. But we have no idea about
specific stages needed to learn a specific skill of a specific subject
depending on the economical, racial, geographical, background of a student, his
or her age, gender. And so far, no one does this type of a research.
When my
students tell me that they want to make a difference in the world, I tell them:
“You want
to make a difference? Be different!”
Being
different is simple - to paint your hair in pink. But, of course, this type of
difference will not make any difference in the world around you. The true
difference comes from thinking and acting differently, and from finding people
who think and act differently and supporting those people.
What I see is
that the Yidan Prize is expected to be different from others by making a clear
distinction between scientific projects in education (Education Research), and
social projects in education (Education Development).
I only
want to warn you that sometimes it is not easy to recognize the type of a
project based only on its textual description.
I wish you
good luck!
Dr.
Valentin Voroshilov
Part
III: Topics for further discussion
Education
is the most important human practice. If I had to think about how to change
education as a whole practice, at first I would ask myself, what is the
missions of education
in general? Then I would apply this view to the actual practice of
education and compared.
The Yidan
Prize is “to embrace outstanding achievements in education research and
development”; but those achievements might belong to different social scales –
individual, institutional, regional. It is advisable to keep in mind that in
social practices (like education) an outstanding achievement on an individual
level might have no effect on other levels.
The
systemic approach to funding education should include this question: “How to
manage funds more efficiently”. The society does not really want to know how students
get good education. The society just wants to have students with good
education. That is why in principle, it does not matter where and how students
have been taught. But we really have to establish a uniform procedure for
assessing the quality of education. That will mean that we will be able
separate the process of learning from the process of assessing the results of
learning. The quality control should be decoupled from a teaching process. This
approach will eventually lead to more effective distribution of funds in
education.
Every large
research university has a long line of students who want to get education in
those universities. That is why any internal research in such a university does
not really make a broad impact, even if the university has structures which
create many teaching tools. But an external outreach to schools, school
district might make a big difference.
Why do
people select a massive open online course? Because they do not have another
option (due to financial, time, geographical restrictions). Currently, there is
no MOOC which would be as good as a good regular face-to-face course. Creating
such a MOOC would be a true breakthrough (but even bigger achievement would be
creating a system of MOOCs: http://www.teachology.xyz/chs.htm).
The
challenges education faces today have been facing education for decades.
Education has “survived” many waves of innovations, so to speak. Big
corporations and small startups develop a vast amount of various teaching
tools. Teachers are flooded by innovative tools. It is like you buy a car, but
instead of a car you get a kit, a collection of parts, and you need to assemble
it, like a chair from IKEA.
Creativity,
communicative skills are important. But if people cannot read or count,
creativity will be useless. The current discussion is framed as “creativity
versus basic skills”. Instead we need to be able to teach basic skills and develop
creativity. Teaching creativity is not about what to teach, but how: it is not
about the content, but about the process.
Good
teaching leads to good results. Period. This statement is a law (http://www.cognisity.how/2016/12/handbook.html).
If there are no good results, the teaching was not good. Simple. The quality of
teaching is based on the quality of teacher professional development; the low
quality of teaching is the direct result of the low quality of teacher
professional development. Teacher professional development often goes
top-down, which is one of the least effective ways. Essentially, the quality of
teacher preparation should be defined by teachers (http://www.cognisity.how/2016/10/facilitating.html).
When I said
that the Yidan Prize will not make an impact on education, I was purposely
vague. The right statement is that
Yidan Prize
will not make an impact on education on its own.
The approach
to advancing education in general and science of education in particular has to
follow the approach developed in the oldest and the most successful science -
physics. The field of education needs projects and institutions similar to the
Large Hadron Collider - a collaboration of experimentalists and theorists and
administrators and philosophers from many countries all over the world. It's not enough just to find and celebrate exceptional educators. The next step is building the network of such professionals. Who does it first will become the real game changer.
Large scale
changes require systemic approach. As an analog to the Large Hadron Collider or
to the Institute for Advanced Study I would recommend to establish “Yidan
Institute for Advancing the World Education”. This Institute would become a
coordinating force for some of the teams nominated for the Prize, not received
it, however, expressing a certain potential (according to the criteria). Yiadan
Prize recipients would govern research areas in the Institute. The Institute
would provide some financial, logistical, organizational support (a.k.a.
incubator). Even though all the teams would work in different countries, via the
Institution they would develop, use, and when necessary modify a common
protocol for observations in education, collecting data, sharing the data,
analyzing the data. A draft of the proposal for the Institute is available
here: http://www.cognisity.how/2017/11/PILT.html.
Thank you for visiting,
Dr. Valentin Voroshilov
Education Advancement Professionals
To learn more about my
professional experience:
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