Good links, I will go back to his blog and read more.

But rather depressing too, when will schools change? When, when, when? Too many kids rely on school to abandon reform.

Rachel C, regarding alternative approaches, one of those would be the Democratic Free Schools briefly mentioned in the article – Sudbury Valley Schools, Summerhill, and their kin. Another avenue, not mentioned in the article, is James Tooley’s research into parent-funded, unregulated private schools in the poorest provinces in India, China, Africa, and S. America, which are teaching 50-80% of the students. His book The Beautiful Tree is a starting point.

There’s also Sugata Mitra’s research. I think we as a society are finally making some serious innovations. One thing I’d like to see is qualitative research about successful educational outcomes – what are skilled practitioners, in and out of school, doing? How are home-school educators sending so many children to college at age 12 or 14? Why are their students so successful?

I have no study, but I can offer anecdotes from my personal experience and observation which can point the way for research. Home education tends to be very aware of the individuality of the child; even those who seem to be using formal curriculum and methods tend to keenly observe and adapt to the needs of their child, and those toward the unschooling side, even more so. Consider a child who knows how to read by age 4 or 5 — as many home-schooled children do. It is deeply inefficient to have that child spend an hour in “reading” class of the sort which is typical in most schools – wait your turn to read two lines, then do the same tomorrow. Instead, if the child is fluent – and many are – she will spend a lot of time reading independently. A parent will ask “can you read a few pages to me” from time to time, listen, and offer tips. For instance, when I hear a pause before a word, I ask “Do you know that word?” — and a quick vocabulary lesson ensues.

In the same way, we don’t need math drills. I teach deep understanding, not rote memorization. My students know at a young age that addition is just an easy way to count groups. They learn how to optimize the process – take the bigger number and add the smaller. They learn, incrementally, to group things into tens and break them apart. The learn to visualize multiplication as a rectangle; to break it apart and recombine it in different ways; they learn to be competent with mental math at early ages. I don’t do 45 minute lessons; I have very brief conversations, each one about a useful idea, at whatever level the child is. The proof is in the pudding: kids often learn addition, subtraction, negative numbers, exponents, squares and cubes and roots, binary arithmetic, fractions, decimals, by age 8. The “traditional” curriculum is way behind what a child of even modest gifts can easily attain. I try not to bore the child, not to waste her time or mine. This is a lot easier in a small-group setting.

There’s a recent article about Juarez Correa, teaching in Mexico, published in Wired. He captured the small-group dynamics by letting his students do much of the thinking, solving, and sharing of knowledge. He’d simply put an interesting problem on the board, and wait. If asked, he’d answer questions, but the students had to do the thinking. The results were remarkable – ten of his students scored at the 99.99th percentile level on the standardized national math test.

Around the 1930s, Louis Benezet had similarly interesting results with math students. He wrote a few articles which are available on the ‘net.

I’ve heard of teachers who have “inside out” classroom strategy. This means: ask the students to learn material at home via Khan Academy, and use class time to do exercise, to “show their work” and ask specific questions of their teacher, to get past any “rough spots.” The teacher moves from group to group, and has the ability to monitor progress on Khan Academy. I am told that some of the students are several years ahead of grade level.

I don’t know exactly how to organize the future, but I can see a lot more adaptation to the individual, a lot less assembly-line processing, a lot more flexibility, and a lot more of what I call “micro-testing” — tiny, small sampling methods which tell the teacher where each individual student is, and suggest where any help might be offered.

One of my talents is as a math tutor. Each problem, in my view, is a chance to discover how a child solves problems, and a teaching tool to improve that process. I do not teach One True Way to solve problems; I teach each child A True Way which a) fits that child’s current development and b) is robust.

What I mean by “robust” is that it must be completely correct. It must include self-correcting strategies, ways to check for error and correct it. It must be understood, not memorized. My students have done well. An inspiration was Georg Polya’s How To Solve It.