What Does Good Education Look Like?

Here’s what I wish my education was like

Education as we see it is ineffective. A lot of us don’t realize it because we haven’t seen better. We have no idea how things can be improved, no concept of what a better education looks like. All we’ve seen are blackberries, and we don’t ask ourselves what an iPhone might look like.

So I stopped and asked myself, what should education look like? I took a moment to break down the things that have made for a good learning experience in my past (in no particular order).

• Community — Am I in a community of learners? Can I learn from and teach my peers? Do they help encourage me?
• Accountability — You should have an idea of the pace you should be moving at, either through a curriculum or goals set yourself. Having someone or something that expects you to complete it helps especially. I sometimes only did my homework because my teacher expected me to, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.
• Accessibility — Can I access relevant and helpful information without digging too much? This is a common problem when trying to self teach anything that changes often, like programming.
• Clarity — Is this the best possible way to present this? The information is explained in a precise and understandable way. Have you ever had someone explain a concept that you’ve struggled with for weeks in a startlingly simple way? Sal Khan has a knack for it. I’ve noticed much of the difficulty in learning isn’t the complexity of the material, it’s the complexity of communicating it.
• Repetition — Research shows that in order for something to stick, you need to be exposed through spaced repetition. That just means concepts need to recur throughout the material.
• Motivation — Why am I learning this? This was especially bad for me in high school, because it felt like we were shoving arbitrary things in our brain and nobody could explain why very well.
• Practice — After having something explained to you, you need to do it on your own and put it into practice. This goes for anything classified as a skill like math, writing, and programming. Just looking at how a problem is solved and feeling like you understand it can often lead to illusions of competence.
• Maneuverability — Ideal material should provide a variety of explanations and examples of the material, but should also allow for those who grasp it quickly to skip forward and practice more advanced material.
• Responsive to feedback — Have you ever read a paragraph in a textbook that was just awful? Imagine if you could rewrite it and submit a pull request, like open source software. The classroom corollary to this is a teacher responding to feedback about what works and what doesn’t for students.
• Familiarity — How is this familiar to what I already know? Highlighting the connection or similarity is incredibly helpful for both grasping a concept and retaining it. Metaphors and analogies are examples of this.
• Relatability — Can I relate to the instructor? The more common ground you have with someone, the easier it is to communicate with them, and the more at ease you are.
• Tight Feedback Loop — I should be able to see what I’m doing right and wrong early and often, and I should have a relatively pain free way of figuring out how to correct it. I should also easily be able to observe my progress in the big picture.
• Context — Is this necessary information? How does this piece fit into the whole, is it in context? Learning information in isolation is never successful, I need to know why this piece exists and how it fits in with the rest of them. Without that knowledge, I can’t integrate and connect it well, and I can’t motivate myself to learn it.
• Generality — We have something useful here, is this the most general way we can say it? I’ve noticed that many aspects of problem solving, mastery, design and learning are domain independent. Asking this question allows you to interconnect the material to everything you know, and makes for the difference between someone good in one subject and someone good at picking things up insanely quickly.
• Scope — Are we covering the whole picture of the concept? What are all the implications of it? Are we covering all the sides of the story? All the potential uses?
• Foundation — In the words of Elon Musk, it’s important to get the trunk and the branches of a subject before you cover the leaves. Otherwise, you just have a leaf in the wind.
• Relationship to the instructor — Does the teacher want me to succeed? Do they have my best interest at heart? Being able to trust your teacher and what they’re teaching you is critical, especially when you’re new and naive in a subject.
• Inspiration — Does the instructor like this material? Inspiration from an enthused teacher can change the course of someones life. Conversely, a lack of enthusiasm sends the message that I shouldn’t care about the material either.
• Safety — Is it okay to fail? Will I be penalized for experimenting? Nailing this can make learning feel like play, which makes it effortless.
• Customization — Are you explaining the material in a way that takes into account what I already know? This can keep you from confusing the student or boring them by being too repetitive. If you’re building a puzzle in someones mind, it’s really helpful if you can discover where the missing pieces are.
• Variable Rigidity — This ones tricky. Some thrive in an extremely structured environment, and others don’t. And some others like freedom but would benefit from more structure than they prefer. In order to be effective, material needs to cater to the entire spectrum.
• Challenging — The material cannot feel too trivial or too hard, or else you risk losing the interest of the person learning or wasting their time. A lot of this is in pacing, but some comes from the complexity of the problems.
• Unbiased — Information shouldn’t be framed to benefit the agenda of a third party. You see this with biased journalism or editorialized history books.

Defining what good learning should look like is the first step towards creating it. If I missed anything, or if you have any thoughts on education or learning, I’d love to hear from you.