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A few thoughts I shared with Teach for America recruits at the Latino Summit on Saturday

I dropped by the TFA Offices yesterday to talk to some of the Midwest recruits about leadership and Education Matters.  It’s always great meeting up and coming reformers, and supporting college students in figuring out what to do next and what type of impact they want to have on the world.

The event was co-organized former TFA core member and current employee Jonathan Chaparro. I originally connected with Jonathan when he shared his story with Education Matters.

I had a lot of good ideas I wanted to share with the group though time was pretty limited.  During the Q&A portion, one question TFA threw out was “[W]hat is wrong with education and what ideas do you have to fix it?  This is a pretty big question which makes it hard to narrow down to a few specifics.   But here are a few of the ideas I remember bringing up to the group.

Flip the classroom to do homework during the day and watch lectures at night. This is the Sal Kahn model, where at night you have access to world class lecturers online for free.  Anyone with an internet connection can find the courses they want and watch them. And the next day (e.g. during the day) they can sit with a human being, face to face and ask question and explore the edges of the topics with experts who can push them to learn more.

Make courses open book and open note.  In general, there’s not much need to memorize things anymore. Even as a lawyer I never have to memorize anything.  Anything worth memorizing is also usually worth looking up.

Move towards more focused education instead of one sized fits all education. Being focused is how everything else works in the world today.  Think about the automobile industry. The idea used to be you can only buy the same model of a car in black, but now you can get any car you want in any color.  Education should be the same – more options for more people depending on what they want/need.  And we have the people and technology to do it.

Spend more time measuring experiences and less time measuring test scores.   In today’s world, experiences matter a lot more for employers.  How you solve problems, how you work with other people and times when you bounced back from failure.  This might suggest no more multiple choice exams.  Multiple choice exams were created because using them was an easy to come up with a score and differentiate people in a mass market where all jobs were the same.  But with better technology, more differentiation and more experience based projects, education needs to start thinking about a change.

Find more way to embrace cooperation and to get rid of isolation. Why do anything where we have people do it all alone? It’s not how the majority of jobs work.  Most of us work in teams a lot.  And the skill is critical to underprivileged communities where the skill isn’t taught early enough and where first generation students are at a big disadvantage.

These are just a few thoughts I remember sharing with the group yesterday.   There were a lot more questions/remarks, which I’ll try to share a bit had later in the week .

As a sidenote: is anyone reading this from the event? If so, please do drop me a line. I’d love to stay in touch and help you out however I can.