Sal Khan mentioned an interesting point in a recent talk with Peter D about how the industrial revolution type of education is economically incentivized. There wasn't a good solution to this problem unless schools wanted to increase their income statement with more teachers who could offer near 1:1 engagement with students, and even then the quality of the teacher would need to be very high for students to succeed.
Khan Academy and GPT-4s partnership almost eliminates this problem. It gives students a tutor in the form of GPT-4 that's always accessible and getting close to human knowledge (as Khan describes it - I think there are many more steps for GPT-4 to go until it's ready to take on this role but I think education is the best use case) and an expert teacher (Sal Khan and other contributing creators). The economics of education have thankfully reduced in input cost as a result of technology. The implication is personalized learning for everyone with both tutors and instruction where teachers are now facilitators of projects and in-class activities instead.
The most important skills for a teacher become:
a) building relationships with their students and how to build a global network of people for their students. For example, if they learn that Katherine enjoys building small-scale nuclear reactors in her house, she can send a message to the team at CFS and get them to speak with her and Katherine and figure out a way to involve Katherine early on in her education. There are no good resources for teachers to learn how to build a network or to help them figure out what to do after the initial connection. Questions like how do I help my students find an internship? Conduct a fireside chat for my students so they can learn about the careers of the future? Run a lunch and learn event so my students can demo the projects they're building in class? Even, how do I build high standards in the classroom so when I reach out to people they're impressed and excited to speak to my students instead of saying no or completing it so they feel like they've given back to the community.
b) learning about how to use technology effectively (and what technologies exist) so when students come to them with a software or hardware problem they know the steps to solve it. It's not important to have the domain expertise in programming but knowing the resources, fundamental data structures, ways to think about code might help an interested student get started.
c) learning how to coach students in the areas they're curious about. For example, if a student's interested in learning how to write or how to sing, what's the process for a student to get to their end goal? How do they set an end goal? How to they have check-ins and what's the ideal timeline to observe progress for a student based on their initial expertise and desired expertise.
I think The Knowledge Society has done many of things things well. I wonder if they'll end up running global sessions for teachers to learn what happens between directors-students inside the TKS program. They're often ahead of the future. People are in awe at how early they were in designing the future of education. I anticipate they'll be early in the area of training teachers too, if they want to explore that path.
