Mass customization in education
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 06:31AM Seth Godin and Ken Robinson have again taken schools to task for their industrial model of educating students, complaining that we are turning out robots and fail to encourage the natural creativity and problem-solving abilities of every student. Read Godin and watch Robinson. It's hard to disagree with anything about which they pontificate.
What neither acknowledge, however, are the benefits that mass production have brought to society - the affordability of more goods for people at a wider range of economic levels. Mass producing cars, washing machines and blue jeans essentially made these items sufficiently inexpensive that almost everyone could purchase them. The wealthy still had the means to buy customized goods and tailored clothes, but most of us were pretty happy to have a good car - even if it looked just like the neighbor's.
So too with education. Unlike Godin, I don't believe schools were intentionally designed to turn out a brainless. conforming set of workers. I don't know of a teacher who deliberately put kids through a creativity strainer.* I don't even mind that divergent thinking isn't a big part of dental school or that airline pilots take a "one right answer" kind of test. Creativity is great, but there is also something to be said for learning a rigorous discipline or skill. Are good plumbers or architects in shorter supply?
Public schools were (are) designed to be economically efficient enough to provide a basic education for everyone. In the educational assembly-line model, the square pegs do get rounded out (or drop out) but the majority of children receive enough schooling to participate in society and succeed at post-secondary education. One teacher with 30 kids does mean whole-group instruction aimed at the middle. And those of us who are within one standard deviation of the norm do OK and still somehow wind up being at least a little creative and somewhat divergent in our thinking. And of course the wealthy could provide private schools, tutors, and other customized educational opportunities.
What Godin and Robinson argue for is an individualized education for every child. No argument there. But individualization and customization are expensive. What we need is mass customization, which is not as oxymoronic as it sounds.
At one time, Levis had a website to which one could submit one's physical measurements. Your unique numbers would be programmed into a computerized machine that would then make a pair of blue jeans specifically for the size of your butt. And because the process was automated, the cost of the "customized" jean was not much greater than those at Target.
Here's the thing: We have lots of data about our kids - test scores, ability measurements, learning inventories, teacher observations etc. We have a lots of different ways to teach and a wealth of diverse teaching resources. What the classroom teacher lacks in the time to analyze and match the individual numbers with the intervention.
Crude, early mass customization programs are starting to be created. Input the data and output the instruction necessary to meet the needs of the individual. Automated IEPs.
I am sure there will be plenty of objections (de-professionalizing, de-humanizing the profession), but this is the direction we are heading - individualized education results at a mass production cost.
* I've always felt school encouraged creativity but the workplace discouraged it. A lot of lip service is paid by business to "out of the box thinking," but most places are frightened by it and want employees to conform.
Reader Comments (4)
Left, right, middle...everyone has a strong opinion how it should be. I like what Robinson has to say, but I feel Godin's recent blog post was kind of preachy. My question to those with strong opinions is "what does it look like?" I had to laugh this summer in a grad school class, a fellow student works in a district that proclaimed "we're moving to merit pay" but sheepishly added "...we don't know what it looks like." There's the rub. They know what they like in their head, but have no clue how it would be executed.
We definitely need to figure out how to use all the info we have. What's the point in all the testing if we don't use it? The only good idea our drop-out governor over here in Wisconsin has had is a state-wide student information system that can track kids across districts. Some are pretty nervous about it on the IT side, but I think it's absolutely the way we need to go. Automated IEPs could be a starting point, that can be adapted as teachers see fit. NWEA data from MAPS tests does some of that, but I feel teachers get bowled over by the amount of information that the site spits out. Need to find a happy medium, good data that is easy to read. Shouldn't have to be a stats major to make sense of it.
Do you know what 4th graders have in common with their 4th grade peers? The fact that all of them were 3rd graders last year and that all of them will be 5th graders next year.
And no, that is not commentary on retention, it is to point out that schools have tremendous amount of structure that drives the factory model. Grade levels are almost meaningless in terms of learning, but schools are designed for teaching - and for teaching, they make all the sense in the world. The list goes on: Grades (what in the heck does a B+ mean and does it mean different things to different teachers?), Grade Point Averages (parents and colleges have a stake in these), Standards (holy cow, do those promote mass production - we break those suckers up into grade levels and try to march every kid along at the same pace hoping we can get them through all of them by the time they hit the next set), summers off (if summer off is such a dumb idea for learning, how come all schools haven't switched to year around schedules?)
Schools, by their design, are structured well for teaching, but learning is a hoped-for byproduct. The design doesn't fit well for learning. But, the talking heads these days oversimplify the issue - and it is not that simple to make these sweeping changes, otherwise it would have been done already.
And... technology is too immature to make the kinds of decisions that a skilled teacher makes when she looks a kid and realizes his father passed away a week ago and today, he is just not present in his willingness to learn (I know, extreme example, but the reasons why kids don't grasp a new concept are nearly limitless and sometimes out of reach of computers and technology). What most skilled teachers would say is that when a child isn't "getting it", something different needs to happen - not over and over again as many pieces of technology tend to do.
Hi Nathan,
The "what does it look like" has been my focus for 20 years! I've always been enchanted by the visionaries and the futurists, but I am in total admiration of the pragmatists who actually make things work. There needs to be a way to use all this data we are collecting that is both simple and respects the professionalism of the teacher. I hope we get it figured out.
Hope you are having a great start to your school year.
Doug
Hi Joel,
I agree with you completely. I've seen the current educational system do a disservice to many children, including my own son.
My question is: Why do we, as a society, not demand educational reform? I suspect more parents feel the way you do than don't. Businesses aren't happy with the product from schools.
I also liked your comment about the "immaturity" of technology. We forget that too often. I think we will be amazed by what will happen over the next 10 years.
Thanks so much for the comment. It was pleasure to read.
Doug
"My question is: Why do we, as a society, not demand educational reform? I suspect more parents feel the way you do than don't. Businesses aren't happy with the product from schools."
I once read an interesting quote from an economist. He said something similar to, "the public feels entitled to more than it is willing to pay for." He was speaking specifically about public education.
Benjamin Bloom once did a great study about the impact of one-on-one tutoring (paired with mastery learning). The effect on students showed that students performed at 2 standard deviations above their peers (who received traditional instruction methods).
This was probably an example of skillful differentiation, but it is massively expensive. It is what is right, what we should do, but not what people are willing to pay for.
Instead, we will pump massive amounts of time, energy and money into high-accountability systems of reform - with little to no research back it up.
Sigh.