Do High School Teachers Need to Teach?
What's the best role of teachers in tech-enabled schools?
Introduction
It is no secret that American education greatly underperforms expectations. It is strife with inequality, poor outcomes, and inefficiencies that lead to countless downstream effect on our economy - employment, income inequality, depression, health, etc. Education is a top of the funnel process and is subsequently a heavy topic of research and discussion.
In this post, I want to sketch out what would be a size-able refactor of today’s high school system that tries to build upon the idea of “flipped classrooms” to give students better instruction, direction, and purpose through eliminating redundancy in our system.
Problems
For The Student
There are many reasons for educational inequality. To name a few:
Poor access to truly good teaching
Unstable family/home situations
Lack of physical resources
Poor community mentorship
Part of the issue with (1) above, is that we have incredible redundancy in our teaching system today. Across the country, there are one million high school teachers teaching a handful of subjects: math, science, english, etc.
Teachers are building their own syllabus, delivering lessons to students, and administering and grading custom tests - all year over year. How many times is the same content delivered to students across the country? The only justification for this is if each individual class delivery was personalized to the students in that classroom - an ideal objective, but something that rarely happens in practice. In reality, students often doze off in classes and catch up on their own after school - at least this was surely my experience in high school.
One million teachers are delivering a fairly constrained set of material individually and repeatedly. How many teachers are truly exceptional at delivering this content? Clearly some will be better than others. Assuming a normal distribution of teaching talent, we could say that 16% of teachers are above one standard deviation of the average → these are the solid teachers. Roughly 2.5% of teachers are better than two standard deviations of the average → these are the exceptional teachers.
This means that 2.5% of students are getting exceptional teaching quality and more often than not, these teachers are going to be concentrated in richer neighborhoods for students with more resources. Is this unfair? Well great teachers often want to be supported by great administration, great resources, greater pay, etc. Over time, on the margins, great teaching will gravitate to things that make them happy and capable of doing their best work. This is fair to them.
Meanwhile, a fraction of the rest of the country gets good but not great teaching, and half the country gets below average teaching quality. How would you characterize these teachers? Most if not all teachers truly enjoy helping students but not all are the most equipped to teach relatively challenging content in math, science and english. There are simple economics forces at play. If a prospective teacher had exceptional math or science ability, they would command higher salaries working in industry. Then only the ones truly passionate about teaching would stick around in high schools - and they will fall in the 2.5% of exceptional teachers.
For The Teacher And School
There is no question that teachers are overwhelmed. From designing course plans to grading homework and tests, teachers often don’t have much time for “high-touch” teaching. They also spend 19 days/year in training. That is, they spent most of their time organizing the class and not much time delivering one on one support to students.
Schools on the other hand are spending 80% of their budget on teacher salaries. If teachers aren’t able to provide the right one on one support, then who is? Students miss out not only on personalized teaching but also mentorship. Our current system focuses on delivering content and examples, and forgets to deliver mentorship, coaching, and curiosity.
This raises the question. With modern technology, do teachers need to actually teach? Should teachers’ responsibility focus on delivering content or are there better ways to educate students, unlocking teachers to help students grow in other ways.
Proposal
What if we took those exceptional teachers and reproduced them across classrooms around the country? What if we democratized their great teaching and gave access to it to all high school students? Could this help deliver great educational and instructional content to students with less time and effort from the rest of America’s teachers?
This partially occurs in the idea of flipped classrooms. The idea is that students listen to recorded lectures from their teachers at home, and do homework in class. This way, students can learn the content at their own pace and then get high-touch help when practicing and applying the concepts.
We can reduce lots of redundancy by standardizing a curriculum (note: I recognize this is a fairly hot and controversial topic in educational circles) and having the best teachers in America record timeless lectures that can be re-used across all classrooms in the country. For a given course, we could teach once for all 15 million students.
This removes the burden on teachers to brush up on content, form lesson plans, create and grade their own tests and homework. Instead they can focus on the parts of teaching that inspired them in the first place. That is, molding students, enriching them with a curiosity to learn, helping students one on one to apply concepts to real world problems.
In this world, are teachers really teaching at all? Perhaps not. Perhaps we actually need more guidance counselors than teachers. More people to help students discover their passion, gain confidence in themselves, or discover how they can apply what they love to the world that awaits them post school.
What would be the responsibility for these counselor-teachers?
Help tutor struggling students
Help students discover what they love
Introduce students to different career paths
Support students emotionally as they go through their maturation process
Facilitate and guide classroom discussion
This is what is missing in high schools today. A problem for students today is not necessarily that they haven’t been taught important content or cultivated skills - it’s that they don’t seethe bigger picture of how this will lead to them leading successful lives. Students need incentives and motivation to learn content, and for that they need someone to help them find their north star.
This problem is especially pronounced in low-income schools where community and family support is lacking. Students don’t know what options they have for their life’s work, or they don’t know what path to follow to get to one they’d be happy with. All the content anyone would need is available for free today online, students need a spark and a path to follow - not for content delivered to them by less effective teachers in a non-stimulating environment.
Challenges and Questions
How to provide tutoring support?
It is true that not all students will be able to master content without more hands on instruction. They may need to ask questions, or have content explained in different ways. For this, employing groups of students (perhaps college students) to help with after school or weekend tutoring could be an effective and affordable complement to content instruction. Students can often connect with high school students better and this also provides more surface area for high school students to get exposure to mentorship and college programs.
Why only high school teachers?
There’s a certain amount of autonomy that is required to be able to follow along with pre-recorded classes. Also, most of the content taught in high school is less interactive. At the elementary and middle school level, where basics of reading and math are taught, it is more imperative to have hands on, creative instruction. This is important for students’ development.
Does this work for non skill-based classes that rely on discussion and not lectures?
This model would place more emphasis on discussion than lectures. Teachers’ role would be to facilitate and guide conversations as opposed to teach content. Students should be encouraged to have opinions about what they learn and to learn the skills to articulate their positions and persuade others.
Would teachers be good guidance counselors?
There is definitely uncertainty regarding this question. Optimists will say that teachers care about students’ development, learning, curiosity, and futures. That they get into teaching because they want to influence students’ lives. However, on the flip side, there are certainly many disinterested teachers across America. Might they be disinterested in mentoring and supporting students too? Perhaps. But it is also possible that by reducing the strain they currently have on running the class content, they may be more freed up and enjoy the new role, leading to better performance.
Will students pay attention to recorded lectures?
Students don’t listen to teachers today, so the tradeoff is minimal. The hope is that the exceptional teachers are able to deliver content in imaginative and enthusiastic ways that make learning compelling. Is this wishful thinking? Perhaps it won’t resonate with all students, but with the right associated guidance and coaching, I think it would surely be an upgrade to the existing status quo.