I listen to a lot of podcasts. This morning, I was listening to a new one (to me, anyway), called Tea for Teaching. The podcast describes itself as “a series of informal discussions of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.” The hosts are economist John Kane and graphic designer Rebecca Mushtare, who run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego. For episode 30, their guest was Charles Dzubian, the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida. Chuck talked about UCF’s journey with developing adaptive learning systems.
There were two major ideas that got my attention in this. One was Charles talking about trying to move away from the “teach then test” model, and integrating assessment into the teaching. In one-on-one teaching, the only value I see in traditional testing is as practice for other testing situations (like the ever-present standardized test system). Apart from that, the best learning happens when assessment is rolled into the learning process, where it has a valuable role as a guide toward future learning.
The other idea was that, in adaptive learning scenarios, the “course” is an artificial silo. I teach mostly math and science, and there’s a lot of skill progression in both fields. That skill progression is important, but it is much more of a continuum than it is a series of steps. One of the things I love about one-on-one teaching is that I have some capacity to ignore the silos of the course, and instead focus on the part of the continuum where the student really is. I believe that the more we can do this, the better we can serve our students.
Randomness & Life 