Customized Teaching

by Chris Bodenner

As a complement to the race and education thread aired recently by Dish readers, I've been meaning to link to Ta-Nehisi's wonderful piece in The Atlantic on the experimental School One program in NYC:

Here’s how it works: first, the student and his parents and teachers are surveyed about his classroom habits. Then the student takes a diagnostic test to see how well he understands basic math. Those data are then sent to the New York Department of Education’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, where School of One’s algorithm produces a tentative lesson plan. That lesson plan is then e-mailed to the student’s teachers, who revise it as they see fit. At the end of every day, the student takes another short diagnostic, which is used to create another tentative lesson plan that appears in the teachers’ inboxes by eight o’clock that evening.

The result is that one student might learn to add fractions at a dry-erase board with a small group, while another student uses the Internet to practice calculating the area of a circle with a tutor in Kentucky, while still another student learns about factoring through a game on his laptop.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan