2 Sigma in Summary

Today one of the guys from my apartment complex made the mistake of walking with me on my way to campus. No, that wasn't the mistake. The mistake was when he asked me "So, I have a question about pedagogy in general. How do you balance the needs of an individual learner with the needs of our programs and the demands of giving everyone a free public education?"

I then unloaded the entire 2 Sigma arsenal on him and he was saved only by our merciful arrival at our destination and need to part ways.

But now that I think about it, I think maybe that's one of the key issues here, and where it will be most helpful for 2 Sigma research to take us.

The real Question: how do we address the needs of an individual learner in a group setting?

Things I've learned this semester that I would say answer or at least hold promise for answering that question:

1. Mastery learning. No, really. How do we effectively implement mastery learning in our current system? OR, how drastically can we get away with re-vamping the current system (like, maybe assassinating Nickleby?) to accommodate mastery learning systems?

2. Computer mediated instruction. I don't want to say "computer instruction." I think we've learned that robot tutors don't work. But I think there is great potential for humans in robot skins, like the Open High School. According to Willingham there is a fundamental difference between humans and computers: computers can beat any human in chess; however, they can't walk. They can only perform in a totally predictable environment. What makes a human a human is the feedback-feedforward capabilities that cannot be programmed. And that's the key to a tutoring environment and why it can't be automated.

3. Pedagogical approaches - the Zone of Proximal Development. The real question here is how to implement what we already know is pedagogical best practice. How do you monitor where every student in your class is and where they have the potential to be? This is what my Ed Psych students ask me every week. And it's what we still need to solve.

I'm excited about the challenge here - I think there really is the potential to change the way our students are expected to learn and I think we really need to hold ourselves accountable for making sure students aren't slipping through the cracks. がんばります!