Clearly there’s an endless series of lists about what makes a great teacher, with frequent acknowledgement that such make great impacts on students, and stand out for their rarity. Which begs the question of how to make “great teacher/ great learning” experiences commonplace and ubiquitous for students.
If this was a debate it would not be about whether having great teachers in abundance was good or bad. Rather, the question at hand to be researched and the proposition to be debated is what methods of creating great teachers in abundance are possible. Our thought experiment proposes that some form of scalable affordable online learning tool can be developed, that mimics or approximates what great teachers accomplish.
Further our thought experiment proposes that there are current learning innovations that offer, or will within a year or two, solutions to our goal despite a great deal of uncertainty of just exactly how such can come to be. What would it “Look Like”? How would it work? Who can be a part of the development and implementation?
Latent in the potentials of AI APIs and ChatGPTs and the like is a “new sort of knowledge”, and as these tools come to maturity we will have to account for new versions of what students need to acquire through learning and education to thrive and succeed in a transformed economy with new jobs needing new skills.
In 2023 that’s not news exactly, but what is news is that the future has arrived a bit ahead of what we are prepared for, and what were needs out in future years are now needs in current years.
That’s a huge challenge for everyone in learning and education. But let’s start by analyzing what we know that great teachers do…and then perhaps see if we can “ask ChatGPT” to research “great teacher practices” and process all that into a useful actionable summary? Would we need to develop a nichea API to do that? Is that as yet more of a thought experiment than a practical reality?