Warning: This is what Swiss Cheese Learning could lead to….
In all seriousness, reading this chapter really got me thinking about the purpose of education. Is it to push kids into the next topic/lesson/unit regardless of what they’ve learned, or is it to make sure our kids are leaving our classroom masters of their learning? In the previous chapters, Khan laid out his beliefs on the broken model of our educational system. A system that was put in place over a hundred years ago for a variety of reasons, many of which are no longer relevant. A system that was built on a model of making a bunch of followers instead of leaders. Learning was divided into increments of time instead of mastery. “Subjects” were taught in isolation. And 120 years later, not much has changed.
When looking back at my own schooling, I absolutely fell victim to Swiss cheese learning. I was always a good student, who got good grades and was tracked into the more advanced classes. But the year I took algebra, I never fully grasped the concepts beyond rote memorization. I passed the class, but when I took Calculus, I felt lost. I struggled at keeping up with the material and eventually fell into the mindset that “I didn’t need Calculus anyway.” As Khan said, “A shaky understanding early on will lead to complete bewilderment later” (pg. 83) and that we are “setting them up to fail” (pg. 84).
Reading this was really disheartening, especially since I had experienced this type of learning myself. But fear not! Sal has a way to fill in the holes: mastery. In order for students to be truly successful, they need to gain a deep understanding of the concepts and then continue to revisit them through active experiences. This is the idea Khan Academy was founded on. If we could give our students the time and opportunity to revisit concepts, teach others, and have authentic experiences, then they will have a strong foundation on which to grow from. Focusing on mastery instead of time increments requires a change in mindset though. The model we have been operating under represents a fixed mindset. It seems impossible to change. But if we could all shift to a growth mindset, we could see that our system needs to change: less focus on checking off standards on a curriculum map and more focus on fully understanding a concept.
Khan made a statement at the end of the chapter that really stood out to me. He said that students see school as “a class rather than a gateway” (pg. 89) Our job as educators should be to make learning relevant, connected and purposeful. It should reveal new ways of thinking and open up new worlds to discover. But according to Khan, “one of the central shortcomings of our broken classroom model” is the “failure to relate classroom topics to their eventual application in the real world” (pg. 88). This is a direct result of Swiss cheese learning.
We are extremely lucky in Kipling to have a brand new STEAM lab in the LMC. My class started their first unit this past week and I’ve already seen how students need to incorporate and integrate multiple disciplines. STEAM gives students the space and the permission to explore, to be active with their learning, to connect with real world applications. The letters in the acronym spell it out: we are not teaching subjects in isolation here. We are trying to fill in those holes in the cheese.
Caitlin,
Great post. I am glad your students are enjoying the SmartLab. I am loving the feedback on it.
I feel like I had the same experience in school that you did – particularly with math. This is why I think not only mastery learning is important but also the approach that we have taken with the new standards and how you learn. Just learning computation without the underlying reasoning and thinking will run for students eventually.
I vividly remember sitting in my first year of education classes in college and FOR THE FIRST TIME realizing that what I was doing in one class “overlapped” other classes. It was a total A HA moment….never before in high school etc…had things seemed to mesh together so well. Or, never before had teachers TRIED to help us connect ideas and concepts to other disciplines. It may seem silly, but it never occurred to me that all of these classes I signed up for individually could fit together so well AND further my understanding of what I was studying. 😉
I think we try to help kids connect things a lot more now. Several years ago there was a huge push in reading to make kids connect their ideas and world to what we read. We may have gone overboard and forgotten to do as many deep questions but it was a paradigm shift. At this point, we have a good balance. I think we hear things like: “How can you connect to the text?”, AND “Why do you think what you think and what support do you have?” all the time. These types of queries fill up those cheesy holes ;-).
Caitlin,
Great post! The part of the chapter that really suck out to me was towards the end when he was talking about the CFO.
Khan said, “This failure to relate classroom topics to their eventual application in the real world is one of the central shortcomings of our broken classroom model, and is a direct consequence of our habit of rushing through conceptual modules….” (88).
I could not agree more with Khan. We not only need to teach the concept, but why learning it is important and how to apply it to the real world. I think that this is one of the key things about teaching. In order to engage students and make them wonder about their learning, we need to make sure that they understand that they will actual use the concepts in the real world. By forming this connection, we are making the learning more meaningful for our students.