Advantages/Disadvantages of Different Class Levels

Advantages/Disadvantages of Different Class Levels

A personal experience in education that I value and respect is the time I spent as a volunteer at the Khan Academy Discovery Lab. After meeting Sal Khan and the team the year before (2013) and hearing his incredible story, I went on to reading his book and took up his offer of being a volunteer at his summer camp. What I learned from his book, The One World Schoolhouse, which was implemented at the camp, was the concept of “flipping the classroom.” I believe that classrooms would become far more effective if schools all over the world would move over to this new method of teaching and away from the centuries-old Prussian model.

Salman Khan believes the the classroom should be “flipped,” where the learning is done at home, and the work is done in class. In current school systems there is a one-size-fits-all lecture style. The lecture style will be ineffective, no matter how good the teacher. The ineffectiveness is caused by the different learning rates of the students. Students are taught at the median level of the class. By teaching at the median level the students who learn faster are held back, and the students who are slower learners cannot keep up. And just because someone learns slowly does not mean that they are any less intelligent than the rest, there is only a different learning speed. Also schools don’t compensate for a “bad day.” For instance when a student’s parents divorce, or their grandmother passes away. Obviously the student wont be at 100% that day or for a few days after. But there is no compensation time built into the school. These are some of the reasons why Salman Kahn believes that students should learn at home, because when there is an online lecture, for instance on Khan Academy, the student can pause and repeat the video as many times as he/she would like. When asking there is no need for the student to be afraid or embarrassed any longer. Students can take as much time as they need...