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Thinking
about becoming a STEM teacher? Think again!
Valentin Voroshilov, teachology@teacgology.xyz
Thinking about
becoming a STEM teacher? Think again! Soon you may be at risk of being replaced
by a robot.
Current progress
in artificial intelligence (AI) is fascinating. Various devices can see and
recognize us, understand our questions and tell us the answers, guide us toward
our destination, advise us on our health, even buy and sell stocks without
human intervention.
IBM’s Watson
computer has beaten the world chess champion and won Jeopardy. Recently in
Japan AI Todai Robot passed a college entrance exam
with 80 % chance of being admitted into more than 400 universities. In the US
AI GeoS system can solve SAT geometry problems at
least as good as an average student.
So, it is not
totally unreasonable to expect that soon computers will learn how to solve
standard high school math and physics problems after reading them or listening
to them. And then it would not take too much time to combine this AI with an
advanced computerized tutoring system, and here it is – a robot teaching
math or physics.
We talk about
math, or physics, and maybe other STEM courses, because those subjects are
highly structured and have a very well known reasoning logic, which can be
described in terms of specific models and algorithms (similarly to the game of
chess).
There are only
two reasons for delaying the upcoming “invasion” of robots teaching STEM
courses.
Firstly, teaching
is more than just managing human knowledge; it also involves managing students’
behavior during a lesson (the simplest model of teaching is: teaching =
tutoring + class management). So, we could imagine a class where a robot (or
robots) works hand in hand with a human assistant helping managing a class (and
who does not require a deep knowledge of a subject). That would require however
a major change in education policy.
Secondly, even
one-on-one teaching involves a lot more of interpersonal communication than can
be provided by even the best computerized tutoring
system.
All such systems
are based on the logic dictated by a subject: e.g. “if you need to learn H first you need to learn G, and before that F, etc”. Those systems do not take into
account the fact that different people learn differently. In fact, currently
there is no computerized tutoring system which could
recognize learning style of a student and tune up accordingly the tutoring
process.
An experienced
tutor knows very well that depending on a student the same topic might need a
very different presentation and explanation.
There are vast
amount of studies of how people learn which describe a general process of
developing or acquiring new (for a person) knowledge. Those studies often
include the notion of “multiple intelligences”, or “student mind modalities”,
or “learning particularities/styles”, or “individual traits of students”, or
similar, acknowledging the existence of differences in learning processes of
individuals.
However, despite
the fact that we know rather well how people learn – in general, no one
can describe the best teaching strategy which should be employed to teach a
given subject to a given student.
By “a given
student” we mean a student of a certain gender, age, race, social background,
economical stratum, cultural traditions, behavioral traits, psychological and
cognitive modalities, scholarly experience, and, of course, learning stiles.
Clearly, if we use those parameters to classify ALL current students, the
classification will have a large, but finite (!) number of classification
classes (groups, “cells”, elements).
Accepting the
fact of the existence of such classification leads to a natural question: is
teaching approach effectively used to teach a subject to students of a given
class (from the classification described in the previous paragraph) also
effective for teaching the same subject to students from another class?
Based on
everything we know about learning the answer to this question should be: “No”.
The next
question, naturally following the first one, asks: what is the most effective
teaching approach/technique/method/tactic/strategy which should be used to
teach a given subject to students from a given classification class?
The answer to
this question currently does not exist.
Even worse,
currently there is no research group which would be
looking for the answer to this question.
Every developed
science began from a classification: astronomy – from classifying stars
and planets, biology – from classifying species, chemistry – from a
periodic table. In this sense, there is no yet science of education. There are
of course numerous scientific activities – like alchemy had before it
became chemistry. Although study of education yet remains in a pre-science
phase – like alchemy was before it became chemistry.
However,
presently there are no reasons for not developing the classification of types
of learners and for not designing the best teaching strategies corresponded to
each class of that classification. Except one – it would be a highly
financially consuming project involving a large team of experts – a
“Manhattan Project of education”, so to speak.
Such project
would need designing and building from scratch a large school and supportive
facilities, where hundreds of kids would be learning all possible subjects
under the guidance of the best teachers closely collaborating with the best
educational scientists (that’s right! – if there is no yet a science, it
does not mean there are no scientists; they are the people who are building the
new science via various scientific activities).
Seventy-five
years ago only the government could finance such an ambitious project. But
seventy years after the end of the “Manhattan Project” there are now private
citizens who could provide the comparable funding (and creating a “Space X
project of education”, so to speak).
Why neither the
government nor large philanthropists want to invest in creating the science of
education?
I do not know.
Maybe scientists
from different schools of thoughts on learning and teaching cannot find a
common ground on what learning is and how it should be facilitated and guided.
Maybe this field
seems not as “sexy” or commercially viable as space tourism, or a self-driving
car, or a robot that disobeys a human.
The co-creator of
the Breakthrough Prize Yuri Milner, for example, pledged to invest one
hundred million dollars into the search for extraterrestrial life. It did not
occurred to him, though, that many teachers look at students they teach almost
the same way they would look at aliens from “a galaxy far far
away”.
So, if you are
thinking about becoming a STEM teacher - think again. Soon you may be at risk
of being replaced by a robot.
However, if the
current trends in science of education will continue, that risk will not be
significant enough to take it into account.
Is this a good
thing or a bad thing?
No one knows.
The best we can
do these days is to open a discussion.
FYI:
What
should be taught and how - has been known for DECADES. The real question is why despite new laws we have every 10
– 15 years in 10 years we need a new law again to fix what had to be
fixed by the previous law? Possible answers are there:
1. “How is The Third Program of the
USSR Communist Party related to education reform in the USA?” http://www.teachology.xyz/3pc.htm
2. “Why have hundreds of millions of dollars been spent on
developing the common core math standards if content-wise they are not much
different from the ones they replace?” http://teachology.xyz/3r.htm
3. “Education reform needs a new paradigm.” http://www.teachology.xyz/np.htm
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