Reimagining the Way Teachers Teach and Students Learn

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2013 HOW WE LEARN: RE-IMAGINING THE WAY TEACHERS TEACH AND STUDENTS LEARN Koch Building, Lauder Room 1000 N, Third Street Aspen, Colorado Sunday, June 30, 2013 LIST OF PARTICIPANTS WALTER ISAACSON President and CEO, the Aspen Institute JOEL KLEIN CEO, Amplify * * * * *

RE-IMAGINING THE WAY TEACHERS TEACH AND STUDENTS LEARN MR. ISAACSON: Welcome everybody. I think one of the big surprises that I have at Aspen Ideas Festival is that you either put Joel Klein on a panel or say the words "educational technology" and the biggest room in Koch isn't big enough. And all three or four of the panels today on ed tech have been overflowed. I vaguely apologize, but I also am somewhat proud that so many people care so much about this topic. Joel Klein has been one of my heroes since about 70 years ago we met at Lushot Rouge (phonetic) or whatever the name of that joint was, and you were at the Justice Department explaining Microsoft antitrust to me by drawing it on a table cloth which is now framed in the Smithsonian. But since then Joel has done many great things, not only working at the Justice Department, but obviously being the chancellor of the school system of the city of New York, transforming it and really pushing ed reform, teacher quality, opening up new ways of doing charter schools and then went on, and this is what I really appreciate, people can go from the public sector to the private sector and the public sector, private sector, going to the private sector which is where I think educational technology really will, the experiments, the -- will be brought to scale. Amplify is owned by News Corp and is a digital curriculum company. It's not just like Sal Khan doing videos. It's not just like a MOOC where you go online and do things. It's where teachers, kids have tablets; the teachers know what the kids are doing. It's a beautifully designed thing. And so we're going to start with just a two-minute vide explaining Amplify, and I'll turn it over to Joel to then talk about what it is and then we'll talk about other things. MR. KLEIN: All right. MR. ISAACSON: I'm having a little double duty here. MR. ISAACSON: Double duty?

MR. KLEIN: The problem with educations technology is always the technology part that's -(Laughter) (Video being played) MR. ISAACSON: Thank you, Alex. MR. KLEIN: But if you think about what we're designing and why Walter's involvement is so important, so you know one of the things that I've always thought is to get great, rich, immersive, robust content in the hands of kids and teachers. This is something that really works together with the teaching force. And Walter and a team of curriculum experts are now developing these lessons that are really powerful about the Declaration of Independence and something that he knows a tremendous amount about, and we'll have, I think, enormous impact in our classroom supporting teachers to be able to teach the things they want. But let me take a step back and say a few words about Amplify and then talk about what I think the field is about. We've decided that there were three core things that we need to develop to be able to change the way K to 12 teaching and learning occurs. And in this regard, I think the opportunities are enormous. And there are a lot of people, people I see in this room who are doing their thing and I'm really as excited about it as anything. It's not going to be one group or one company or anything like that, but that lots of people bringing their ideas to a field. And when you think about this, in every other sector of our economy, we have gone through a technological revolution. Not in education. And there is a reason that is and that is an enormous resistance to change in the organization. So the three things that we're doing is first of all we're trying to bring data and analytics assessments and the way kids learn is differentiated. Howard Gardner has talked a tremendous amount about this. What we think we can do is customize and individualize the learning

experience, but you need sophisticated data, analytics and assessments to do that. And we have a company that we call Amplify Insight that's the backbone of everything we do. So that when kids are moving ahead, some kids have mastered fractions, other kids have not. Some kids need more work on addition, subtraction. These are things you can customize through this tablet with total transparency to the teachers. You can group them; you can put them together, but you've got to have sophisticated data and information to be able to drive that. MR. ISAACSON: But wait, before you go -- explain, because I'm not sure if I understand, this isn't like a MOOC. You're giving tablets, right, to every kid? The tablet is connected, and then the teacher has a teacher tablet so they can look over the shoulder. MR. KLEIN: Right, that's the second piece, which is the tablet piece. And you saw this. That was from Fulton County, Georgia, where we're doing now a pilot that we just finished. We did -- piloted this with 2,500 students and teachers throughout the various school districts in the United States to get their input. And what you're doing there is each kid has got a tablet in front of him or her and the teacher has got a tablet that makes all of the kids transparent. So she can do things. Some of those tools she was talking about in there. For example, you can do a quick spot check and say to the kids, are you getting this. And if they're not, you know which ones are going to need remediation. You know, maybe I have to slow it down if enough aren't getting it. You can then drive information to them in groups. So if this group of four people feels like you're moving too slowly, you can drive lessons that you put the night before and learning objects toward them. And then if another group needs remediation, you drive it toward them. If you need to bring them all back together, you can. One click of this tablet, and it's eyes on teacher. You can shutdown every app, close it down, and teacher has total control. So you know a lot of parents don't want their kids on Facebook during -- after school much less during school. We have all of that learning device controls built into the system and the teacher becomes

the orchestrator of all of this. And we're about to now do this for some 15,000 middle school kids in Gilford County which is in Greensboro, North Carolina. And so starting in the fall, there will be an opportunity the whole middle school is now going to be on these tablets learning. The teachers we've been training for the last two, three weeks full time. And they are excited because we don't just come in and give a kid a device, that one teacher said it best, she said if this is tech for tech sake, it won't work. People have asked me why it hasn't worked in the schools before, because if all you do is give people a whole bunch of devices or gadgets or gizmos, it will not work. And so what we're doing is coming in with lots of support, professional development, teacher training, and the teachers are excited. And let me be clear. If the teachers aren't excited about this, it won't work. The kids are excited. I assume that because they have grown up in a tabletized world. But my favorite video, which I didn't get to play today is of a 35-year-old teacher who had never used the device before and now sees its learning potential and has become the biggest supporter or what we're trying to do. So that piece is called Amplify Access. And what we're trying to do then is open up the learning opportunities, individualize it in the classroom, bring lots of content. On that tablet right there, you got Sal Khan's videos. You all know Khan's videos on -- kid's can take them home now. They don't have to have an internet access in order to do this. They can click on them. There's a group called CK-12 that's done a whole bunch of text books that are online for free. We've now embedded them inside the tablet, and they are interactive now. They are not just a reading experience and so on. Every kid gets one of those tablets, gets an Encyclopedia Britannica and a dictionary, and that opens up all sorts of worlds for kids. You know, a lot of my kids in New York City never had an Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Now, it just comes as an add-on into the process. So that's the access piece. The third piece is the piece Walter is talking about and I also

think has enormous, enormous opportunity, and that is we're developing curriculum in K to 12 space for math, science and English language/arts. And we're developing games. We just announced 30 of them last week to come in behind the curriculum and support it. But you know what we learned from kids? Don't assign a game. If you assign a game, they are not going to do it. (Laughter) MR. KLEIN: It's going to -- you know, because we had teachers try to assign and the kid -- but if you don't assign it, and one of the things we do, we study, because we have the tablet, we study carefully how many hours a day kids use these games. And the games reinforce the learning. So we have a whole unit on metabolism, and then we have a game that basically enables a kid to accelerate metabolism, build energy, et cetera. And these games, they are not designed by us. They are designed by the leading gamifiers. But the core, the heart of it is the kind of thing we have people like Walter and others who are really expert in curriculum that are developing experience and asking -- we studied hard and asked what are the really tough questions about the Declaration of Independence, why is it important, for example, to think about why we change? Do we hold these truths to be sacred? Do we hold these truths to be self-evident? Now, somebody said to me walking in here today, he said, you know, everybody talks about education and its value in the marketplace. How about citizenship? Well, you know what's happened in our schools is the learning about the formative documents and the historical events that make us the people we are, those things have been diminished significantly. Now, think about this. Every kid who wants, every school that wants can have Walter Isaacson -(Laughter) MR. ISAACSON: Well, it's actually been fun doing those. By the way will somebody get a bottle of water for us please, thanks, for Joel?

MR. KLEIN: And it's two panels in a row -MR. ISAACSON: Two panels in a row, he can use a bottle of water. Thanks. But you also allow the tablets to be connected. You have a deal with AT&T? So every kid has equal access now, is that right? MR. KLEIN: Any school that buys the tablet with the AT&T data minutes in there takes them home. So this is a great equity opportunity as well. And it also extends the day, extends the year. A number of people have talked about this today. You can now have -- we've got processes like this where you can bring in tutors and other kids to come in and help kids when they were at home who need additional time on task, teacher can do this from her home. I mean, I've seen teachers literally grading homework and giving real time feedback in the evening to the kids. So the opportunities are enormous here. And again, I want to emphasize we are in the earliest of innings of things you can do. Same thing with this curriculum. People will be able to now take the curriculum, make it adaptive. Meaning if you want to accelerate the kid, you accelerate them. Teachers will be able to supplement it in ways that they want to design it. But they will also know from people like Walter and other experts what are the really tough questions you want to ask about the Constitution, what's really important to understand about Fraser Douglas, which I've seen kids studying in New York schools and not really get the power and the importance of his autobiography. And then the games. You put a kid literally inside a cell getting attacked by viruses that he has to ward off. We have a game what we call Lexica, which is not just a game, but multiple games integrated. And basically it's a library under siege, and in order to advance and progress, you've got to be able to read a lot more. And the more you read, the more you're able to triumph. So we've got wars there between King Arthur and Tom Sawyer, and it just brings these kids right into -(Laughter)

MR. ISAACSON: It's a wonderful one. An Edgar Allan -- I'm going to rant for a moment so you can open your water -- an Edgar Allan Poe game where you have to figure out, with the different clues, who did it. But involves reading, it involves knowing that Mark Twain characters, everything else. I mean, I found it so much fun. I was learning all about both the English language/arts but also how you do a gamification of something like that. MR. KLEIN: Well, no, watching you, Walter, sitting there with the curriculum people doing the really heaving lifting, but I walked past the conference room the other day when he was over there on Sixth Avenue and he's like a kid in a candy store. He's so excited about. Well, you begin to think once you develop this, you're going to make it available ubiquitously. I mean, this is not something you have to limit to the United States or something. In some countries where they -- these kids have lots of devices, but they don't have really good teaching, you could build whole systems like this and give kids an opportunity to learn at a level they never learned before, and once you have it on a tab like this, you can constantly get smarter. I can tell immediately which games the kids like. If they don't like his lesson, which is unimaginable, but if they don't like his lesson, you're going to have to do something to change his lesson because you'll know how much time they are spending on it. In the pilots we did, we found one thing that made us so excited. The amount of time the kid was reading increased and the amount of time she was writing increased. And if you want to know about outcomes and accountability, if I can double the time that a kid reads and the double the time that she writes, we will change the world right there. Our kids are not reading, they are not writing. And so you begin to see how you develop a system that applies all the learning from the various aspects of the tech world that's going to get echoed in the consumer channel as well as in the enterprise channel and you begin to see how you can actually transform this. And at least from where I'm sitting, I think our teachers and our kids are going to

be the leaders in this transformation. MR. ISAACSON: Why is this better than the massive open online courses known as MOOCs? MR. KLEIN: So, look, I think MOOCs have enormous potential. I just did a high school MOOC in computer science that we're rolling out. But I do think for many kids if you just give him an online course without the interactivity, without the teacher, you're just missing a huge part of the piece. So I'm much more into a model that we call blended learning. Rather than just put the kid in front of a device, I still think if you can have the teacher be the conductor of the orchestra, you're going to get much better results. There are times when I want to machine down in class and stop and say, look, let's take your eyes off this, put your eyes up here and let's talk about what we just learned, what we -MR. ISAACSON: How did this digital curriculum then encourage discussion collaboration and sort of cooperative creativity? MR. KLEIN: In multiple levels. You saw this kid. I met this kid down in Fulton County. His name is Kosher (phonetic) and you saw him up there and he said, well, now, you know they are in groups and they are working together. So the teachers now got four or five groups of six kids each and they are working on whatever it's in this class, it was Spanish class or whatever. And what the kid says is now they're making -they are talking to each other like during a social network but they are talking about the learning material. And he said now you can publish your ideas. It gives you fame. The amazing thing we've seen, and I'll give you three examples of things I would have never predicted, are all working like magic. One, lots of kids with special needs who won't participate in a classroom are participating on this device, and this teacher talked about how it opened up some kids in an amazing way. Second of all, if a kid is at home, he can dial in now into the classroom and participate in the classroom. So all those kids who want to stay home to avoid school, too

bad for them because now they can sit and dial -(Laughter) MR. KLEIN: And the most magical one was I had a teacher in Florida, a teacher in Florida who was sick, and rather than let the substitute teacher teach a class, the teacher taught the class from home on the tablet. Think of -- in New York City the average teacher was gone somewhere around 8 to 8-1/2 days a year out of a 180 teaching days. Think about if you could recover almost all of those days so you didn't have the farce of substitute teachers who come in there and don't know the class, don't know the curriculum and don't know what they're doing. So these are all opportunities that I think we're just beginning to develop. MR. ISAACSON: When we're doing the -- I'm doing English language/arts for eighth grade just as a consultant. And we were doing it for the Declaration of Independence, but we have a game where different groups of people can sort of wikify the Declaration; see if you can make it better, see why Jefferson's original draft differed from the one that Franklin and Adams edited, and then what edits would you do, what are the bill of particulars against a king. And one of the astonishing things is that you don't know what kids don't know some times. And one of the things your team learned was, or we learned was, most kids in eighth grade when they are doing that don't realize that England and America was the same country, and they don't quite understand why there was a revolution. They think we were two separate countries. And so it's little things like that that pop up in their use of the device that you can then incorporate into the curriculum. MR. KLEIN: And one way you can find that again, which is this came up through real world learning. One way we figured this out is by the things the kids were writing, it was clear that they didn't know that there were once a single country. And so we then send a note to teachers saying one of the things that would help explain this to kids is explain how they were once one and now two countries. And it is literally in the course of the curriculum, just a little pop up window that shows up for the teachers so that she knows to put emphasis on a point. Same thing you

can take that process over and over again to see the things that the kids aren't understanding so the teacher remedy those things in real time and immediately. MR. ISAACSON: How does this replace text books, does it? MR. KLEIN: Yes. (Laughter) MR. ISAACSON: And how quickly? MR. KLEIN: I don't know how many -- I got in trouble long when I was chancellor when I said five years from 2010 I don't think New York would every buy another text book again. I mean, I've got -on the tablet, I've got the CK-12 text books. There will be other text books. But they are much more animated and dynamic. Why should anybody have to be carrying around these text books. So I think one of the things that you're going to see pretty quickly is a movement away from traditional text books to digital textbooks, but also a movement beyond digital text books to digital curriculum, which I think is a leap frog move in this play. MR. ISAACSON: Explain the difference. MR. KLEIN: Digital -- so we've had this model, which is basically the teacher and the text book. That's been the fundamental. Teacher teaches everything, and then you do your homework. You work with your textbook or assignment sheets or something like that. I think we need to think about an integrated process in which the textbook becomes part of the day-to-day learning experience. And if you need to do quests or a homework or assignments and stuff like that, you can do that. But these two parallel structures never seem to me to make entirely a good sense. And indeed I always thought there was very little synchronization between what was going on in a classroom and what was going on in a text book. This was you can sync the whole thing into one use or experience with the things that the kids do

at home. I mean with Sal Khan -- help teachers is to flip the classroom and he's doing a lot of work on this. There's a lot of stuff the kid can do at home in watching a video, for example, and learning the basic skills, you can get that kid -- bless you, Brian. (Laughter) MR. KLEIN: Give that kid -- oh, because I keep thinking he's doing a great digital curriculum. I keep thinking. You know, I was looking over here. You sat right in the middle, so I couldn't miss you, but I was thinking about the great stuff you were doing in science. But if you think about this kind of thing where the kid can do a lot of the basic work, you give that child an assessment and the teacher now knows 70 percent that a kid has got the basic story down of what's happening in Fraser Douglas or it's understood from Walter what's going on in the Declaration, then she can key the classroom discussion to a much more robust, much more dynamic. She can get the kids working on these quests to figure out about Edgar Allan Poe. So there's a lot of work being done. My only caution is too many people who were thinking of themselves are visionaries think they know how it's going to all end up. And I'll be the first to tell you I don't know how it's all going to end up, but I think the power here is to unlock something that's now locked down. Even if you take a MOOC, I've met with them incredible professors. I mean, a story that really struck me was the biggest best class I ever walked into was I once saw Stephen Jay Gould do a lecture. And there was over a thousand people in that room, so there was no one-onone and he didn't know I was there and didn't get to call on me and never answered my questions. But still I learned more in that hour than I learned in virtually any classroom I'd ever been in. And when I took this job at a news corporation, a friend of mine who is the president of a major university called me and said, I don't know what the hell you're doing there, but I met with my advisory counsel yesterday and I asked 20 kids would you rather take Michael Sandel's

jurisprudence course online or the one we have live here at the college. Twenty out of 20 said they would rather take Sandel online. Now, that's a powerful thing. Now, what Walter said before matters to me. I don't think you can just MOOC up the K to 12 space. But not everybody who teaches jurisprudence teaches it in the way that Sandel does. And so the ability to a MOOC, to make Michael Sandel available to every kid in every corner and every adult who wants to take it, as good as my physics courses were at Columbia College, none of them was good as watching Richard Feynman at Caltech. And I had great professors. None of them were as good as watching Richard Feynman -MR. ISAACSON: Actually you cold called on Brian Greene who is now teaching physics at Columbia University and author of the Elegant Universe. What are you doing, Brian in terms of digital learning. SPEAKER: Can we pass this question to Brian? MR. ISAACSON: Sorry, this is like a -MR. KLEIN: I didn't mean to put you on a spot, Brian. MR. ISAACSON: It's like a classroom. I'm going to cold call on Eli too in a minute. (Laughter) MR. GREENE: Nothing much actually. (Laughter) MR. GREENE: No, well, I think it's basically what Joel was saying. I think there is a version of the MOOC, which can also be highly interactive. So I know there's a session coming up about MOOCs, which is a fantastic disruptive approach to education. But for the most part, the vast majority of the offerings are in my view trying to replicate the live classroom in a screen.

Whereas you've got this fantastic new technology, which means presumably there's a way of leveraging it so that the material that you're communicating is done in a way that aligns with the technology and allows the kinds of interactive engagement that Joel is referring to with the Amplify System. So it's somewhere in between the two, a MOOC and Amplify is the goal, the parts that we're taking. MR. ISAACSON: And when I look at what Amplify is doing, I'm actually surprised at how little of it is replicating the lecture. MR. KLEIN: No, I think that's right although I do think there are pieces. That's what I say about the flip classroom. So there are pieces watching Sal do something is a way for some kids who you can get them to listen. But you can't just lecture at a kid 40 minutes a day in a public school in New York City. It won't work. And what Brian and others are saying is really important. We can make this with lecturing, but with interactive, immersive, dynamic engagement as well. And that's what the technology allows in a way that the classroom never would've allowed for. MR. ISAACSON: How important is the core curricula to allow you to build curricula around the country? MR. KLEIN: Well, it helps in that if you have 45 states measured against the same centers and the same assessments, you can write it once and for all. But even without that, most of the states are going to converge on what I think the principles are. And those people at the last panel even was -MR. ISAACSON: Eric Cantor even -MR. KLEIN: Eric, he was saying that he thought that those standards were quite demanding, quite rigorous. And so you'll see convergence. But it's important in order not to have to write, and this is always a textbook problem. You have to write your textbooks for different states in different ways and get textbook clearance. We got to get beyond that.

All our kids ought to learn about the Declaration and the Constitution and we got to stop pretending that education is somehow simply a local function that can be done differently in different states. Our kids in Virginia are going to have to compete in kids all over the world, not just kids in North Carolina. MR. ISAACSON: One of the things I noticed when I was working for you on this thing is that by knowing exactly what the eighth grade English language arts core requires of a kid such as use of original material, be able to dissect it, be able to analyze it, be able to show what the arguments are, these are creative things that are in the core. It's not just please learn the date of the Declaration of Independence. And it allowed us to say, okay, how do we accomplish that in one semester. MR. KLEIN: Yeah, and that's exactly what you've been -- well, I mean, I watched you workshop those things where you're sitting there saying, look, let's focus on this, let's move. You can't -- but what you can do is create a scope and sequence that works I think for kids and gets both the knowledge and the skills. But people have to understand if all you do is memorize dates, you're wasting your time. But if you don't know what the Declaration is about, when it happened, how it relates to the Constitutions, why we went to Articles of Confederation, then you're not an educated person. And you're not going to find the answer to that when you're 39 years old on Wikipedia. I mean, we have got to get our kids learning the interrelationship between knowledge and the application of thinking to knowledge to create the requisite skills that they are going to need. Twenty-First Century is going to be much more demanding on our kids than was the 20th Century. MR. ISAACSON: How do you respond to people who say we're teaching too much of the test, we're over-assessing? MR. KLEIN: It depends what you're testing. If you're testing garbage, you're teaching too much to it. But if you're testing history, you want to know that the kid knows history. I know I've never gotten this argument. We shouldn't -- a class is not just the test and test is not the

measure of everything. Howard Gardner and others have written brilliantly on it. However, when a kid doesn't know math and she can't divide and she can't multiple and she can't do algebra, at some point you've got to know that because she's not going to succeed. And we have got to have systems that give us the feedback that enable us to hold ourselves accountable. And as imperfect as testing may be, we got to make it better, not simply chunk the answer -MR. ISAACSON: And to tie the teacher performance to the test of the student? MR. KLEIN: It's a measure of accountability. MR. ISAACSON: I'm going to cold call on a few people and then open it up. I want to cold call on Eli Broad who has done more for educational reform in this country than most of us and just, you know, some of your thoughts about how this can transform education and maybe Howard and then if you have questions, let's -MR. BROAD: Thank you. You know, the coming of blended learning is well overdue. If you think about the American classroom, it hasn't changed in over a 150 years. The biggest change has been instead of a black board, we know have a white board with marker pens. That's the biggest change. (Laughter) MR. BROAD: And if you think about how did we get there, we have a system that started in Prussia, you line up kids, 30 kids or so in a class, teacher teaches to the middle. The ones below the middle don't get it. The ones above that get bored. So it's time for a change. To think that the kids today have the same type of textbooks that their grandparents had 50 or 100 years ago doesn't make sense. So blended learning is the answer. It's a way to really have individualized learning. It's a way for teachers to manage their students a lot better, administrators to find out what's going on. And it's a big game changer. So we look forward to

great progress. MR. ISAACSON: And Joel, you wanted to call on I think Jesse -MR. KLEIN: Jesse. I wanted to say a little about -MR. ISAACSON: Jesse Woolley-Wilson. Explain who she is. MR. KLEIN: DreamBox. Well, she's the CEO of DreamBox. She can explain who she is. (Laughter) MS. WOOLLEY-WILSON: Hi all. I'm intrigued with the dialogue around preparing kids for a world and for jobs and for industries that frankly don't yet exist potentially. And part of that is to try to teach them to learn how to learn so that they can continue to remake their skills and their capabilities. And I think one of the most promising things about the technologies of DreamBox and other players is that not is it getting a sense of what kids are getting right and what they are getting wrong, but why, how are they thinking and what they are doing that they should be doing differently. And so now we live in an age where there are these new technologies. Everybody has gone on Amazon or Netflix and has been introduced to something that they didn't know about because these are technologies to get to know us as we use it. Well, not we can bring that to learning. And as we bring that to learning, we can personalize learning supremely in ways that make learning very efficient so that a kid is neither bored nor frustrated, and we're not going to develop kids that can just survive the 21st Century, but that can drive it. So this is the dawning of a new age in learning and there's a lot of reason to be optimistic. MR. ISAACSON: I think DreamBox is also on display in our Paepcke lab there. So everybody should do some hands-on. And the last

cold call and then I'll open it up, Howard Gardner teaches education and other things many -- and creativity at the Harvard School of Education. And how are you seeing this Howard -- here comes the mic -because Howard is also one of those people worried about creativity. MR. GARDNER: Thanks. I guess this goes as lukewarm calling since I had a little warning. (Laughter) MR. GARDNER: Let me tell you what I was thinking about as you were talking and this is really a question for both of you and it reflects the fact that you're both in education, but you're both involved with the media. And I didn't know that Brian Greene was in the room. But one of the most dispiriting things in recent history is to recognize that large numbers of Americans have no sense of what it's like to think scientifically. And if you look at things like understanding or having some belief in evolution, understanding not only the fact of climate change, but something about the human contributions, the trends in the United States are actually in the wrong direction. Fewer people understand these things than did 10 years ago. Moreover if you look at the rest of the world, these are not issues there. I mean, you don't have significant antievolution, climate change is a hoax or it's all caused by moon beings or whatever as Senator Rubio (phonetic) said, so -And I think part of the problem is that there's just huge amount of garbage on the media, some of it -- I know you guys are in the media, and people don't have the -- they don't have the power to discriminate. And even Walter knows that Oprah Winfrey got an honorary degree this year at Harvard and she put pseudo scientists on who come up with explanations about autism, which had no sense. So I mean you guys are as important as anybody in our country for addressing this issue and I'd love to know, you know, your thoughts about it. MR. KLEIN: Go ahead, Walter. You get paid the big bucks. (Laughter)

MR. ISAACSON: You know, I think that the internet MOOCs everything else, opens up a whole new world of scientific literacy and we just have to encourage it more. I mean, I sometimes flinch when people say I'm scared of science. I look at Brian who is not only one of the great theoretical physicists of our age, but also somebody who can explain it. And I think that we shouldn't -- you know, if somebody came into this room and said, oh, I don't like reading, I don't like Shakespeare, I don't like art, we'd think they were a Philistine. But if they said, oh, I don't understand physics, you'd sort of maybe give him a pass. I don't think we should give people a pass if they treat science as something that they shouldn't understand. MR. KLEIN: So I take it a little in this way. I think what you're saying what passes for entertainment and it's relationship to education is a very important question and it's not one I think that's going to be resolved on this panel. I mean, what happens is where the market drives people to pay for the kind of news and entertainment that they want to buy. I think you can do that differently in education. The reason I'm optimistic about what we're doing in education is I think we can create standards that matter. We can have people assess what we're doing against those standards. There will be uniform outcomes. So to me you can actually take, and I heard you say this earlier this morning, you can take the benefits of what the technological revolution brings and mix it with standards that somehow manage to escape us in the news and entertainment business in America. So that's why I'm an optimist. To answer your larger question, I wish I had a better answer than that. MR. ISAACSON: Oh, yes, right here. First hand that got up. Right behind you is a mic. And it's a small enough room. If I call on you, you don't need to wait for the mic. MS. LEVINE: Hi, my name is Madeline Levine (phonetic). I just have one question and that's I think probably everybody in this room was affected in some very profound way by relationship with the teacher.

Could you please comment a little bit on the pros and cons of this in terms of the teacher's relationship to the pupil? MR. KLEIN: So I think it depends how it's done. But I do think you're right, that people are affected by their relationship with the teacher. Everything that we're doing still makes the teacher the maestro over the classroom. And I think that if anything I think this whole debate we've had about "the sage on a stage versus a guide on the side" is not about the human interactions, but about the importance of the teacher really being central to the educational experience. Now, I think the people who are moving in a post-secondary world toward MOOCs and online learning, I think they've got a different set of challenges there and how they're going to develop their own blended models. I've had a lot of universities talk to us about how do you develop a blended model. But I do think they have a big, big challenge which is a lot of kids are going to want to take these online courses. When you see what happened at Georgia Tech where one of the great computer science programs is now going to give a kid an online master's with a degree for somewhere around $6,700, that's going to change the game. And the next panel that Anant and Andrew Ng and those people are going to do on this is a good place to get into it. But at least in K to 12 and certainly in countries like ours, you're going to have to build the systems around the core function of teaching. I like to see it as a force multiplied for teachers who I think right now we say go do everything. Then we put a fire hose to their mouth and hope they get can get a sip of water. And if we don't give them the tools, the supports, the contents, the kind of thing I think that this thing does, then I think they are going to -not going to succeed at the levels we need them to succeed. MR. ISAACSON: But let me flip the question real quick, what you just say all of us were affected by a teacher, and I assume you mean a good teacher. I know a lot of kids in New Orleans, especially before the storm, who were affected by teachers because they were really horrible

teachers, and year after year they good passed. How did this type of curricula help protect against the bad teachers? MR. KLEIN: It mitigates because there's a lot of things that you can build in. I mean, a kid is not going just going to see this teacher, Mr. Jones. She is also going to see Walter and she's going to people who are doing exercises and things and questions that are going to be asked and feedback from the computer that -- or from the tablet. So this is in one sense will help -- I always like to say for those teachers who aren't doing their job well, this will strengthen them. For those who were great, this can only make them better. MR. ISAACSON: In the back and then in the front and then in the back. MR. CANOSA-CARR: Hi, my name is Bobby Carr. I'm the principal of Westchester High School in Los Angeles. We're one of the schools in LAUSD that's going to be providing a tablet and a digital curriculum to every student on our campus starting at this coming school year. From my perspective, one of the things that I'm really worried about is every recent major education initiative that has failed seems to have failed due to poor teacher training. I'm wondering through your work, what have you learned about professional development and how could we apply to make sure that our teachers are adequately prepared to really deliver the potential of this technology. MR. KLEIN: I think this is such an important question and I think there are levels of the answer. The one that we do is we bring in people who work with the teachers and the people who are going to train the teachers and spend time so they understand the functionality. We're not rolling out. We're rolling out our tablets which would be about 15,000, I think I mentioned, in Greensboro, North Carolina. But right now, before the kids get there, before anything, we're spending time with the teachers. And if we need to make adjustments in the tablet, we're even prepared to modify the software in order to help them get what they need. But they've got to buy into it.

I mean, when I was in New York City, I went into so many schools and they had computers in their basement. I mean, it was ridiculous. So that's the first thing. The second thing and a much harder challenge for you is -- goes to the question of how your professionally develop a workforce that doesn't really understand the content. But if they can understand this -- but they still need to know to ask the tougher questions about the Declaration or about algebra. MR. ISAACSON: Why don't you just speak up because I know you have a loud voice and because we only have one mic here and we're going to the -MR. COBBER: My name is Marty Cobber (phonetic) and I've done some work in a small town in Iowa around educational reform. I'm very intrigued with the change or shift that you're talking about to group learning. What are best practices you found in terms of the interaction in small groups in a learning environment? MR. KLEIN: So two things. One Eli Broad said before was again you think about this, but we don't think about this. But if you give a teacher 30 kids in a heterogeneously grouped people, they could span two to two-and-a-half years worth of difference. So one kid could be at least a couple of years ahead of another kid. And the teacher is trying to figure out how she -- so she tries to teach to the middle and see if a peripheral vision is good enough to balance those kids who are struggling and those kids who are bored. By grouping them, and the way you group them is through simple exercising, assessing, seeing -- you can then drive the learning experience for some kids at an accelerated space, some kids at a slower pace. Sal Khan has got a book, which -- we're going to take a long time before we get there, but it's an idea we need to think about is why do we measure the school year by basically one year for each kid. Some kids can move through this process a lot more quickly. That will happen. It won't happen quickly but that will happen over time. And one way to do that is through understanding how you group kids.

The other thing that grouping them does is they end up working with each other, learning from each other in a much more robust way. When it's one kid in a classroom and raising her hand and stuff like that, very different when we've got them. So these quests we have on Edgar Allan Poe where they try to figure out who killed Edgar Allan Poe, you find them like detectives working collectively putting the clues together and they find what that kid said in the classroom, that they're sort of part of the learning. It's not just a passive receptacle learning experience, but that they are engaged in it. MR. ISAACSON: Yes. SPEAKER: How does this technology apply or would it to afterschool education, which at least in the city of New York makes up for a great deal of what isn't being taught in school, also the city of New York where one in five adult is functionally illiterate? But how does this apply, or do you see this in a way taking over for after-school as well? MR. KLEIN: It -- look, it's the same thing. I'm a practical person. So if they are after school programs, this is the kind of thing that can working the after-school program and the after-school program can adapt it. We've already had many of them talk to us about that. However, some of my kids in when I was in New York did not have an after-school program, so I'm hoping that this will become part of their afterschool program so that when they and their classmates can get together and work in a group, chat or do one of these quests that they find very exciting or develop chat rooms around games that we have where the kid is literally inside the cell fighting off the virus. So I think that the adaptation will depend on the circumstance, but there's no reason any good afterschool program couldn't adapt something like this. MR. OBERNDORF: I'm Bill Oberndorf (phonetic). Joel, you noted in the beginning of your comments the enormous resistance to change historically (inaudible) how do we accelerate the process of adoption of this new wonderful technology? MR. KLEIN: The principal in the back who I have never met, he hit on the question. If you just say to people here is a tablet, go make it

happen, it won't happen. They don't have to make it happen; they don't want to make it happen. If you partner with them and show them how we can make them more effective with the things they want, that it won't undermine them, it won't marginalize them, it would make them more empowered and more effective, then it will work, that takes the application of human talent to the problem. It's not about gadgets and gizmos. Anything we're doing -- I never talk about give a kid a tablet. I always say create a learning platform for the classroom because if that's not happening, Bill, it won't happen. And I think too many people make the mistake of thinking things from the consumer market, like a simple tablet, you throw it in a classroom it will change. We've done that game and we've never prevailed. We have got to -- if our teachers don't think this is a powerful learning tool, it won't succeed. MR. ISAACSON: I think, yeah, way in the back there. SPEAKER: So if you think of this, I think of this in terms of especially an edge in technology in terms of what it does to help you -- to help people like me. I run a kids' school in New Jersey manage the school system, right? So in addition to content delivery for kids, and if you think about big data and how it's transforming industry, it's all about education right across the country? Now we're in a point where we don't just annual test scores if we could get data on a daily basis through systems like Amplify and others. Can you talk a little bit about how you see this impacting the management of systems as we -- you know, as it grows and becomes more potent for us? MR. KLEIN: So if people -- you know, Ryan Hill (phonetic) is one of the great education warriors in America. If you see what he did in New York with the KIPP schools. It's really something to admire. So Ryan, people like you are probably better at answering this question than I am. But let me say a couple of things. First of all, in terms of management, you know, giving teachers

lots of data in ways that they don't help them is just again flooding the zone rather than empowering the teacher. And so one of the things we and others, you will be doing is breaking out this information in very usable ways. So when the question before came about how do you break them into groups, this all becomes such an easy thing to do through a mechanism like this. Second of all, you can easily with one click go back and check. You don't have to go open a book and look what did I write about Ryan Hill last week. You know, you've got it all literally a click or two clicks or three clicks away from you. Third thing you can do is the kind of classroom management things that we think. I mean, the first thing you know in a class -- in a seventh grade you got to take attendance. So it often takes you a few minutes. Here you just say to the kids open up the tablets, you've taken attendance. You know who is there, who is not there, what they are doing, you know who has dialed in from home. So there are lots of efficiency and management things that are happening. But the most important of them which are so going to have to figure out is how do we take all of this big data. After all, our teacher is not IBM. She has not put a team of 100 people there to try to analyze the big data to figure out we got to do more of this and fewer of these things. So how do we take big data, break it down in bite sized chunks that enables teachers to find it useful to their mission rather than just conceptually interested. MR. ISAACSON: You know, Ryan, he said that you would be the best to answer it. What would you need as you run the KIPP schools in New Jersey for a system like this to do for you this that we may not have thought of. MR. HILL: If it's anything that makes it quicker, makes it so that we can adjust more quickly to (off mic) so a place where there is underperformance, and also to find areas of outsized positive performance to replicate within our school, right? And so if we're waiting at the executive director level at the central office for data to come in at the end

of the year, that's way too slow to really effectively manage a teacher, right? But if you have daily or weekly or even monthly data -MR. ISAACSON: Well, couldn't you just have real time data, you know, instantly every day with sporadic -- yeah. SPEAKER: I've watched Ryan for several years and I think it's the word "real time" is really critical here. (Inaudible) all the time learners keep on talking (inaudible) every day and use all the feedback devices really quickly -MR. ISAACSON: And every -- I mean, Safeway store gets real time data. MR. KLEIN: That's what you want. I used to say to my wife who is sitting over here. I mean, on Friday night our phone rings every time at 2:00 in the morning because we know exactly how many people went to which movies that night. And Sony makes all sorts of decisions. (Laughter) MR. ISAACSON: She works for Sony, yes. MR. KLEIN: Sony makes all sorts of decisions. You know, I've told this to Margaret Spellings, who used it in all her speeches. Sony makes all sorts of decisions about what they are going to invest in, what advertising. They wouldn't wait for the end of the quarter or the end of the month to figure out how many people went to see the movie last night. But the other thing, I mean, I think you also want data that shows you, for example, in one of your KIPP schools, if you're a principal, that the fourth grade class is nowhere and you better do something very rapidly about that class and not wait until even a mid-year exam to figure out. So there are lots of things like that that I think people like you will be able to teach out of it. MR. ISAACSON: Yes, way back there. Yeah, yeah, sure.

SPEAKER: What kind of teacher interaction and certainly the student interaction is there within the classroom with this program? MR. KLEIN: So again, it's just -- what I've seen and observed is a teacher teaching the whole class except when she clicks (inaudible) teachers. So she's actually -- they were all using this, they are talking, but they are using, they are doing exercises. And to go to real time data, one of the things you find is if you do a little quick poll, you ask a kid three basic questions, you can tell whether the kids are getting it or not. And if you see two-thirds of the class are not getting it, you better roll it back. MR. ISAACSON: And you instantly see which two-thirds are missing. MR. KLEIN: Which two-thirds got it. MR. ISAACSON: And it shows on the teacher tablet. The people who don't get seats and have to stay out in the doorway get preference. Shout. SPEAKER: My question has to do with as a teacher (inaudible), there's a bunch of data that shows that kids learn better after exercise, and I am curious how this -- because the title is Effective Learning, how exercise fits into the technology piece in classes. MR. ISAACSON: Yeah, by the way, Wendy Paulson (phonetic) just asked that too which is, is there a way to make sure people are up and about more? MR. KLEIN: Well, you can make sure they are up and about, but I mean one of the things we need to do is restore physical education as part of the classroom day. I mean, you know -(Applause) MR. KLEIN: But whether it's a textbook or a tablet, if you're sitting on your -- in your chair all day, that takes a real hit on kids.

MR. ISAACSON: Over here. I'm sorry, well, I'll get over here to -- lots of questions. SPEAKER: Joel, the presentation was fantastic and you focused a lot on math and science and you talked about Sal Khan who focuses on math and science. DreamBox is focused on math. Are there areas -- I mean, it seems that are a lot of -- hybrid learning now that's focused on math. But there are areas with humanities that Walter is helping with that are sort of ripe for change and ripe for -MR. KLEIN: So two points. Thank you for that one. Number one, if America has got a crisis, our greatest crisis is in English language/ arts. Over the last 30-40 years we've actually in the lower grades in particular made progress in math and science, not remotely enough, but we have been flat from 1970 to 2010, 2012 actually, on English language arts for 17-year-olds. So this is an area that -- and it's much harder actually than what Sal Khan in math because math is an in-school experience. English language/arts requires from the first day your family is talking to you, you're developing vocabulary, with all your experiences. But we are putting the big bet on curriculum. Gideon (phonetic) asked the question because he's got a great app on sort of reading levels for kids and how the teacher can customize and accelerate. So he's doing something that's again similar to one of the things people like Ryan and everybody are trying to figure out is how do you take a class of 30 and make sure each kid is moving at the right level for her rather than being stuck in a class where somebody is trying to find a sweet spot in the middle. And if you haven't seen his app, it's really very cool. MR. ISAACSON: You know, it -- we're beyond time and the next panel is right there which is at Greenwald, which is the massive online courses. Let's all keep the discussion going and thank you all for being here. (Applause)

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