Rethinking How We Teach - XQ: The Super School Project and Khan Academy

This week Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of the late Steve Jobs, announced a pledge of $50 million to XQ: The Super School Project, a new project dedicated to rethinking American schools[1]. Through Emerson Collective, her philanthropic venture, Powell Jobs will assemble a team of education experts to look to students, teachers and others for ideas on how to change our current education system. Powell Jobs and her team would be wise to include Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, in these conversations as his lessons have been disrupting classrooms since he began to upload videos in 2009.

Powell Jobs and her team will need people willing to suggest wide scale changes to how we teach our students. Khan and others advocate for the idea “flipping the classroom” - where students are responsible for watching the lectures and class time can be used for working on problems.[2] In his 2001 TED Talk, Khan elaborates on this saying that, “by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.” [3] As of 2012, Khan Academy lectured were being used in over 20,000 classrooms and they’ve only increased their presence and library of lectures since[4]. Khan has established a successful way to provide students with thoughtful lessons that they can tackle at their own pace and a way to provide teachers with a tool that can allow them to focus more time in class on doing problems, not just lecturing. They’ve figured out a way to use technology in the class room. For Powell Jobs and her team, I’d suggest that as they look at ways to disrupt the education system, Khan Academy should be one of the first places they stop.  

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[1] Medina, Jennifer. (2015, Sept. 14). Laurene Powell Jobs Commits $50 Million to Create New High Schools. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/us/laurene-powell-jobs-commits-dollar50-million-to-create-new-high-schools.html

[2] Noer, Michael. (2012, November 2). One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education. Forbes. Retrieved from http://onforb.es/SgVGq3.

[3] Khan, Salman. (2011, March). Salman Khan: Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education?language=en

[4] Noer, Michael. (2012, November 2). One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education. Forbes. Retrieved from http://onforb.es/SgVGq3.