Noam Gerstein from bina
Biography of the speaker:
Noam Gerstein graduated in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from Tel Aviv University and completed a Diploma in Entrepreneurship at a Financial College in Herzliya, Israel. She then embarked on her entrepreneurial experience founding Hod Maalata, an event management company in the Food & Beverage industry, and beginning to research primary school education methodologies worldwide. This experience led her to the co-founding bina, an elementary school that offers a comprehensive and customised home schooling experience. Noam is now the CEO of bina.
Question 1: The bina school has recently launched the first cohort for children aged 4–6 — this is so exciting for you all! Can you tell us a bit more about your company?
NG: Bina is a primary school ecosystem that is made to deliver customised learning at scale. If we imagine the fanciest classrooms, with comfortable rags, the best teachers in the world, great interactive whiteboards, half of the kids are still not paying attention. The reason can be attributed to the wonders of education democratisation. When we design educational programmes, we always aim for the centre of the bell curve. It’s true that there are more children that sit around the centre of the bell curve, but they are almost never getting precisely the education they need. They live in a space where they are always over or under challenged, never right on the dot. This is usually the best case scenario — most little humans do not experience the best case scenario. So here’s the question: how do we get to a place where quality education is offered at scale? This is what we’re building at bina: precise, scalable education. Bina’s methodology is pedagogy leveraging tech through a data-driven paradigm. Educational systems’ role in society is to prepare kids to participate in it. Throughout history and geographies, this is done by mirroring the common behaviors of that group, we marry the educational system to our societal experience. At the moment, we are mirroring a society who has ceased to exist. We see teachers who are overworked, underpaid, overstretched and parents who feel they’re missing out on their children’s childhood. This is not ok. How do we educate in a way that tackles those issues while preparing our kids for the future?
ZV: Very interesting thoughts, Noam. I really loved how you broke down the disparities between society and the educational system. Several reports show that even universities aren’t preparing their graduates to the workplace, similarly to how early school education isn’t fit for our current society. Why do you think this is the case?
NG: I think it’s a structural issue. Universities were initially set up for wealthy people to engage in productive and meaningful conversations, to challenge each other and advance knowledge. The target audience was, indeed, very limited. By design, universities were not set up to prepare for the workforce, rather they were used to advance knowledge. Though I don’t claim to be an expert in other fields of education (non-primary) secondary education, this is a path I identify in many areas of a foundational design that fits for a different purpose.
ZV: That would make sense. You mentioned early that the bina methodology is data-driven — it is quite revolutionary for a pre K-6 institution. Can you tell us more about it?
NG: We now offer live, active, collaborative, real-time sessions with teachers and peers in very small classes. We strongly believe that learning is a social activity which needs to be carried with teachers and peers. Secondly, we curate and integrate third party educational content and digital tools on a sleek, intuitive interface made for kids. The sets of data we (and others) gather from the platform are unified to gain the wonders that cross analyses an offer help build our datasets, which are used to deliver tailored learning paths, and immediate educational and socio-emotional feedback. In my experience with the education sector, I have found that, whilst it is a very interesting market to explore, it can be very hard to break into. Sales cycles are painfully long, complex and slow and this is not suitable for innovation. If you want to sell to schools, you have to interact and convince so many stakeholders that perhaps it is not worth the investment. The system is not innately built to be inclusive to educational innovation. The sales cycle is also problematic for the end-user because given the amount of stakeholder approval a company needs to obtain, the student’s perspective often fails to be included, which is obviously not idea for an educational company.
ZV: There’s definitely a distinction between active and passive users. The student (active user) is often not the buyer (passive user), who is likely to show different needs and wants. This is very tricky!
NG: When we craft experiences that are intertwined between active and passive users, our role is to mitigate their needs and wants. Imagine you’re using a language learning app. The buyer, e.g. a parent, will want the app to work. They will want an app that allows their child to upskill in a specific language. The student, however, is the one who actually has to go to the classes so they will want something engaging, stimulating and interesting.
ZV: Going back to bina for a moment, can you tell us more about how a parent/carer can access the services provided by bina?
NG: We’re now building a digital lab school, as a path to build a product made to scale. Families can receive comprehensive bina education, by joining our school. Our students, teachers and parents are our design and business partners, and we share a mutual goal; offering a bina education at no cost to families.
Say you’re an HR manager and would like to diversify your workforce, but more importantly, make your employees stay with you. You can work with us and provide flexible abd excellent schooling while strengthening your community. In our second phase, starting in 2024, we will partner with NGOs, private and ministerial institutions to license our methodology. Think about it as “SaaS- school as a service”. We offer precision education both to students and educators, keep the education both personal and personalised, at scale without raising costs.
ZV: How do you recruit and train your teachers at bina?
NG: This is a hot topic for bina. It is clear that great classroom teachers are not necessarily great digital teachers — it requires a completely different skillset. For example, classroom teachers are used to engaging students with their entire bodies (“oh you are so big! We should listen”). A digital educator can not use their size, given on screen this matters less. Or, instead of hyper focus on oral delivery in a classroom setting, digital teachers have to be able to multitask (and literally bring the elephant into the room). The array of skills is so different that the personas are likely to be different, too. At bina, teachers are also working with fewer pupils. The people we are hiring are interested in building new practices and they are not scared of defying the norm. They are continuously challenging themselves and upskilling. If you want to build a society of lifelong learners, you’d better practice what you preach!
Question 2: We’ve spoken about the bina methodology, how to access your services, and the type of teachers you employ at bina. Where do you see bina in the next five years?
NG: I believe that precision education will get us to a place where we continuously know what students know and are able to do. We can gather not only what they are eager to learn but also how we best support them with quick feedback loops. We do the same for educators, in addition to maximizing their time with students and content development and minimizing their time on, well, everything else. All resources are allocated to what matters most for teaching and learning: the quality of educators and organizing data in a useful way.
In 5 years we will be able to deliver precision education to all areas in the world with 5g connectivity, and significantly improve the quality of education through collaboration within our field. We can also draw accurate conclusions about what works and what does not in early years education through this medium.
If we manage to build a system that reflects the way we currently work, amplifying all touch points throughout the day, we will have made history. I lived nomadically for years and interviewed teachers, parents, children and administrators. When you interview parents, they talk about their endless pain of having to give up their career for their child’s upbringing or missing out on their childhood. This is very detrimental to our society, especially for women. Let’s say you are a parent in Vienna working for a big corporation which partners with bina. In the company there’s a bina hub, meaning that when you go to work, you will drop your daughter off at the bina hub and you can get on with your day while your daughter learns and explores with kids from all over the world, and plays with other kids in the hub. At lunchtime you can then come, have lunch and chat with your daughter and see what she learnt so far. All of this in small classrooms that allow for precise education. You go back up to your office, continue with your work. Still, in a coffee break you share a story or ball game. When everyone is ready, you pick up your daughter from the hub and go home. If there is an issue throughout the day and your daughter needs some support, you are on site and available to support. Overall, this scheduling is adaptive and takes into consideration family’s needs — which is what current society is not doing.
ZV: You depicted a dream for so many parents, I am sure! What will the pupils be learning in a bina?
NG: We cover and exceed the US common core and are guided by International Baccalaureate principles. We weave the standards together in story based learning modules. There is an abundance of excellent content and we never build wheels where they are turning. We strongly believe in collaboration, and are keen on working with and learning from incredible educational work. We don’t “move fast and break things” instead we “delicately stand on the shoulders of giants” and make sure we truthfully build the next layer of work. For example for Year 7 and 8 students, we have a fairy tales module. We looked at the Cinderella narrative and pinpointed all the similarities and differences between these stories across the world. From the similarities we can learn much about the human need for such stories and discuss why that may be the case. When we observe the differences, we go back to their origins to identify cultural and geographical differences. Then we learn how to read and build maps, calculate the diameter of the carriage, multiply the mice, and have the students collaborate on their own Cinderella story. Through that they learn to give and receive feedback, editing, capitalization, punctuation, building a narrative story, and fine tuning — all in one go.
Question 3: There has recently been growing interest into microschool models as an alternative to traditional schools. Microschools tend to show highly mobility, smaller class sizes and alternative learning methods, such as outdoor classes or personalized curricula. What do you think about the rise of this trend?
NG: In Latin, the word “crisis” means turning point. COVID-19 has accelerated the need to innovate and recreate and I think microschools models are one example of that. We have now been asked to re-examine our choices and lifestyle. Parents are now aware that students can learn remotely but they might be sceptical on the quality of the learning provided. We now need to convince people that synchronous, remote learning can be done well and even better than traditional learning. As I mentioned earlier, I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people and I came to the conclusion that we need an Hippocratic oath for education which centres around three main areas: processes, ethics and applications. When the global education system agrees on this, we will have created an effective network of international operators that can connect and disconnect efficiently, while delivering the very best precise educational experience for students.
Key Takeaways
1. Bina is a data-driven, primary school teaching methodology made to deliver precise learning at scale.
2. The current educational system is not fit for our current societies: parents are forced to either miss out on their children’s education or to give up on their careers.
3. Successful global online education will only become reality when the key leaders in the space will agree on an education-focussed Hippocratic Oath, centred around three themes: processes, ethics and applications.
Closing statement
We thank Noam for taking the time to speak with us. If you want to read more about bina, Please visit their website. Since you’re here, why not read our other publication on Early Childhood where we interviewed Sari Hurme-Mehtälä and Jenni Vartiainen from Kide Science?
