At Grockit we employ some pretty serious agile development, or extreme programming. Just a few examples include...

1. Our developers code in pairs that rotate almost daily.
2. We write code to pass tests, not tests after writing code.
3. We iterate, iterate, iterate.

I would like to take a moment to discuss the first point. Our developers code in pairs.

Grockit's MMOLG is about students teaching students (yes, it's ok if you're a teacher, you can play too). And recently, I've had some discussions with folks around my comments about the problems in education and the re-design it badly needs.

I realized, in these discussions, that paired coding is what I'm talking about. Because we code in pairs, all our devs get in on the action. This means that every dev is constantly teaching and learning from the other devs. We don't do peer reviews, we don't need to.

Does every dev come to the table with the same skills and skill level? NO.
Does paired coding work despite individual differences? YES. In fact, it works because of it.

People think that students teaching students is impossible because, 'Where do you start?'. It seems to imply that half the students need to already know the material if they are going to teach the other students. Not at all. Let's look at what our devs do.

When the team is faced with a challenge that nobody has the immediate know how to address, someone starts doing some research. This is what happens in real student to student learning. The first thing you need to do if you're going to teach someone is to learn it yourself.

When Russell Ackoff was asked by a group of students to teach them systems, he said 'No, but you can teach me.' Well, teaching Russell Ackoff about systems is a serious challenge. Nevertheless, after many months of studying and working together the team put on a seminar for Ackoff that he described as the best course in systems he's ever seen. In fact, one of the students is now a major planner for Brazil.

In paired coding, or paired learning, the group continually builds on top of its strengths. In this modality of learning it would be impossible for students to graduate illiterate. As it stands, an alarming number of 8th graders can't read and write. We've been trying this education design for about 100 years now and quite frankly the bar has not risen much. I think it's time for a change. I think it's time that students take the responsibility to teach each other.  Can our students handle it?

Well, before the modern industrial revolution, people began having families as early as 13 or 14 years old, and certainly carried far graver responsibilities than children do now. We are sadly mistaken in thinking that young people are not motivated or capable. We take on this view because we place them in an environment that they finding very demotivating and that strips them of their responsibility to contribute. Strangely enough, when it's a matter of their own well being, people can make the personal choice of caring or not. When our responsibilities are to other as well as ourselves, we often care quite a bit more. In fact, some parents might argue that their kids care only about the thoughts and wants of their peers. What a wonderful leverage point to help students teach each other.

The industrialization of education came on 100 years or so ago.

We still haven't recovered. The idea of applying the burgeoning mass manufacturing model of the factory to the school must have seemed like a good idea to the civil planners of the time.

In the early 1900s, the number of schools in the country was cut in half. Any guesses as to why?

This was the mass movement from single room school houses to larger city schools. The idea was that if factories could improve quality and quantity of manufacturing, so could schools.

Instead of teachers being facilitators of a classroom where students taught each other, they became the factory worker, the school the line, and the student the car making its way down the line.

Even here, the analogy almost makes sense. Things start falling apart though. Unlike the sheet metal coming into the factory, each student entering a school is a totally different raw material.

That's not the problem though. The problem is the same that Edward Demming pointed out to the auto industry decades ago. Quality.

Demming argued that equipment must be constantly checked to be within a tolerance. At the end of the line you get Toyota cars that all work to the same exact specifications with almost 100% quality.

The analogy is this. If cars were made like we make students, they would come off the end of the line and some would work and some wouldn't and we wouldn't know where things went wrong. The cars that came off the line non-functional wouldn't be fixed, they would be shuffled off to places where functional cars aren't really needed.

Without metrics measuring the delta of a student's learning before and after said 'learning', we are left with a system that shuffles students down a line and out the door. Some work, some don't. Nobody knows where they went awry.

Much press today around a major Test Prep company's partnership with Aspyr media to develop a SAT game for students preparing for the SAT.

Here is some food for thought.

1. Let's go to our standby, Russell Ackoff. Thoughts?

Ackoff's take on learning from computers is that it's sort of insulting to the student. The idea that you don't deserve to learn from another person and instead should learn from a semi-animate object seems unlikely to be a solution to education's problems. But then again, maybe students have given up on class and are more available to their gaming consoles than their teachers.

2. A large number of the millions that take the SAT can't afford a Nintendo DS. This only serves to further solidify the one consistent correlation in the SAT market. The more money your family makes, the better you do on the SAT.

We'll see how many students buy the game and what they get out of it. My guess is that it has more to do with getting in on the Brain Age money than applying relevant solutions to the massive problems in education and the social inequity existing in the test prep space. But, what would you expect from an educational company?

The similarities between our standing army and our standing teacher population are striking.

- Army is over 500K strong
- Teachers over 1M strong

- Army is underfunded
- Teachers are underfunded

- Army not welcomed by occupied population
- Teachers not welcomed by student population

- Army's soldiers are out numbered
- Teachers are out numbered

Both the Army and Education suffer from the problems of scaling quality. Both have only one solution. Help the population you're managing help themselves.

Soldiers are not the ideal tool for nation building.
Education, in the model of teachers disseminating knowledge and being bottle necks for quality, is not the ideal tool for empowering individual learners to realize their own potential.

This gets to another issue which is that schools are not about "empowering individual learners to realize their own potential". Schools are about grading and getting the population up to the bar of being able to read, write and do some basic arithmetic.

The military is moving towards an Army of One. Maybe we should do the same for our teachers. Maybe we should empower each teacher to be an agile, capable, leader of learners. First, they need the tool and resources.   

Student Grade CalculatorI can prove that education is NOT about learning and is actually about grading. How you ask? First, some background.

Learning, in the psych community, is not so easily defined. One relatively consistent thread, however, throughout the different views on learning, is 'change'.  To 'learn', something must change in your head. Something that wasn't there, is there, or vice versa. Therefore, learning is about the 'delta' or change in a person's knowledge or thought process. So....

1. To claim that your school is about learning, you MUST measure before and after the 'learning experience'. The measurement of the change between the before and after lets you know if any learning went on.

2. No schools do this. They simply assign you a grade after they have done their teaching.

3. Therefore, schools are about grading, not learning.  This applies to public, private and higher education, as well as most other forms of education.

Even the language of the education system betrays it. Your position in the school is a matter of the state of grade you have achieved. Grade One. Grade Two...etc. It's interesting to note, also, that the measurement of the change in the learner is not really a grade of the learner, it's a grade of the school. How did your school do on its last test??

Thanks, Russell Ackoff, for helping me see this.