Tutoring with adaptive learning apps
Turning the traditional classroom model inside out
In a traditional classroom model, teachers give a lesson (usually in a lecture format) This is followed by questions and worksheets or homework. Students, if fortunate and their class size is not too large, can ask the teacher questions about homework if they get stuck.
Some of the disadvantage to this approach are that students space out during the lesson portion and only learn when they’re doing the worksheets, it’s not differentiated for different learning styles and students often have no felt sense of why they’re learning what they’re learning. It also often results in a massive amount of homework that fills up critical time for play and relaxation.
While certain types of learners (primarily audio and visual) are able to absorb and apply material from a lecture — and certain teachers do a better job of appealing lessons to different types of learners, a huge number simply get lost during this lesson portion and catch up afterwards
At Modulo, we’ve flipped this model. Students start with problems and ask for help from teachers or peers as needed. More often than not, the teachers do not explain how to solve the problems and instead ask questions to help encourage the children to figure it out on their own using the resources available to them. An added benefit is sometimes another child will step in and help. In doing so, the child helping reaches the final level of mastery — student as teacher. The child learning is often much more likely to listen to a peer than the teacher as well.
We find that by starting with the problem, learning is much more efficient. The students completely understand why they are learning the information so they are highly attentive. They are approaching learning with a spirit of inquiry which leads to better attention. They are learning to problem solve. When they are engaged in this way, they are much more likely to retain what they know.
Here’s how this looks:we teach students on zoom in small groups of four. At the beginning of the lesson, they start playing their favorite learning apps. If they need help, they share their screen and ask a question. More often than not, a peer will chime in and help them figure it out. If not the teacher will ask questions, encourage them to watch a video on the app that explains the concept, let them guess and fail as often as it takes, do a Google search together or a YouTube search or sometimes simply gently nudge them , “I think you can figure this out…you know this”…. Followed by a long pause as those beautiful brilliant brain wheels turn.
There are many examples of this type of learning working in life
Kids learning to walk: kids to learn to walk by falling and trying again. They learn to talk by listening and struggling to communicate until their needs are heard and attended to .
Language immersion: People can spend 8 years learning high school and college french and not be able to converse, but live in the country or fall in love with a Frenchman with no prior knowledge and become fluent in months.
Hole-in-the-Wall Project. In the famous Hole-in-the-Wall experiment, Sugata Mitra sought to demonstrate that kids could teach themselves by putting a computer in the wall in an expansive slum in India and started asking kids with no English and no formal education more and more complex questions to solve on their own without help. The children were able to teach themselves concepts ranging from English to DNA replication.
Test-taking strategies. a common trick for acing the critical reading section on the SAT is skipping reading the passage, starting by reading each question and finding the answer in the passage. Reading the passage first is a waste of time because you don’t know what you are looking for.
When selecting apps to use in our small group tutoring sessions, we use the following criteria.
- They have to be vetted for accuracy and secular (many learning apps have errors).
- They must be mastery-based. They build on concepts sequentially instead of in a random order.
- They must be adaptive. Once a child has mastered a concept, they move on to the next. They are given problems in areas that challenge them, not in areas they have already mastered.
- They must be fun and engaging. Within the first two minutes of playing an app, we can identify if a child enjoys it. If they don’t have fun or aren’t motivated, they won’t learn as well.
If you’re interested in using this approach with your child, here are some of our favorite apps to get you started.
Read: The 50 best mastery-based apps for PreK-12th grades
