The Scientific Teacher

Khan Academy has stirred up a lot of debate among educators about the value of video lectures. On one hand the proponents tout the fact that students can watch them on their own time, at their own pace, and review again if needed. Some educators (like these guys) have even been employing video long before Khan’s rapid rise to notoriety, using video lectures to “flip the classroom” so valuable school time isn’t wasted on something students could just watch at home. The critics of Khan call foul because of the questionable value of lecture itself. A lecture on YouTube is still a lecture, a one-size-fits-all, listen-and-receive-my-knowledge affair. If lecture shouldn’t play a large role in the classroom, what is there to be “flipped” in the first place?

I agree with the critics that KA isn’t anything new under the sun. The media spotlight it enjoys is more about our country’s need to find a new direction in education than any new brilliance of KA. In fact beyond the videos, the “gameafication” of learning that has been created by KA team for teaching math through incentivized drills has much more in common with old-red-school-house pedagogy (Frank lays this out well here).

But despite all the flaws in KA-style teaching, lectures are still an occasionally useful tool in a teacher’s arsenal, and a video lecture probably even more so. So let’s not flush video lectures down the toilet in our disgust at the media’s KA lovefest, instead let’s figure out what this tool is good for. Without further ado, here are my 4 S’s for the best use of video lectures:

• Short: This should go without saying. Any form of direct instruction needs to stay within the confines of its audience’s attention span. For my elementary students this seems like 2 to 3 minutes.
• Shallow: If well done, students will remember the content of a video lecture, but only on a shallow, memorized level. Without first-hand experience and mental engagement to let them process the idea in their own mind, there’s not much opportunity for any deep understanding to be created. So keep expectations for learning shallow.
• Sticky: I mean this in the Malcolm Gladwell sense, not like the gum on your shoe. For the (admittedly shallow) learning to take root, the video lecture must have some memorable appeal that sticks with you: humor, intrigue, a storyline, whatever. I usually opt for humor, maybe because I secretly wish I was Bill Nye.
• Spot-on: How many times have you teachers out there put on a video for review and realized midway through that it’s not quite what you had hoped? (I know I have!) Maybe the vocabulary doesn’t match what you’ve been using in class, maybe the approach is too complicated or too simple, but it just isn’t fitting for your students’ needs- and you end up with more confusion than when you started “reviewing”. A good video lecture needs to be crafted for a very specific audience and purpose- most generic videos won’t cut it.