Dear Everyone in Education,

I’m boldly going to just ask for your help.

I know I’m not the only one who thinks we will always need human teachers in K12 learning. Yet some AI experts think that in the future the digitized subject and interactive questioning expertise of master teachers will replace millions of teaching jobs.

Meanwhile there is ongoing cascading failure and attrition away from traditional schooling. Schools can’t find enough teachers anyway and running 24-28% short.

I’m just the type of irritating intellectual to look beyond local reasons to mass-scale trends and data to show where things really are going and what’s actually wrong that cries out for fixing. In recent years, my conclusion is that schooling structure is out of sync with this century’s other industries and a variety of trends. “Going to school” is so ingrained that we almost don’t think about learning in any other way. Not all people want all learning online either. They are basically resisting the formality and impersonal nature of schooling structure, but what does that mean?

Have you ever had the horrid thought that maybe the manufacturing-line pattern of whole-group education is a huge problem in this century of everything super-personalized on-demand and online? Maybe you wondered at the same time how that could ever be different. Many learners need human teachers and live classes and wouldn’t do well in purely online independent learning with little to no human teaching or social groupings.

I’ve kept having these questions and finding overwhelming evidence of the basic failure of schooling structure, which has haunted me since before the pandemic. During the pandemic it went parabolic.

I found a problem is that the logistics of managing one-to-one teaching and small cohorts are not built into models or systems – except nominally as manual methods to personalize learning inside the existing whole group patterns. This quadruples the teacher burden if not more.

Ultimately, trying to personalize learning in the middle of structures that were built for whole groups keeping together by age against curriculum pacing is like trying to manage air traffic control with no radar to land thirty jets all mere seconds behind one another on one landing strip--just eyeballing it.

Learning personalization could be done, but given humanity’s wide disparity in competencies, not at scale. Time and space use from the last century were designed to normalize both learning and behavior by age in whole groups, not personalize for students sitting there in your class who are several grade bands behind or ahead in the subject or barely speak English. We in the sector tend to not own up to the fact that while we would like equity for all, we deliver in a system designed to be inequitable. Teachers triage. They have to because every human is different than every other one and they have to keep the pace of learning of all within small parameters in time for the group, not the one. Some do personalize learning infinitely better than others.

The fact is the growing friction of outside learning consumer expectations of personalization and flexibility is bringing the whole-group model down. “Mass” anything is so over, and “small batch” has taking center stage in other industries. Still, people largely don’t see structure as the root of everything. They blame other things for lower achievement, attrition to alternative schools and homeschools, and continue to think the teacher should take on inhuman amounts of work.

What’s the alternative though? How could schools possibly alter the structure of time and space use that would align with expectations?

Glad You Asked

For several years I have been tinkering with a revolutionary remodel of the old patterns and building a new ecosystem centered on Autocohorting AI Calendaring. A majestic number of algorithms are set to transform learning to individually pace-based learning for every student without sacrificing live teaching. It’s “uberization” of the teaching moment, saving teachers up to 50% of their time. The whole of the schooling paradigm would change.

Teachers would become valued for their humanity and expertise. Any learning system, courseware, app and discrete document would remain useful alongside the new spatial-temporal AI, which is intellectual-speak for space-and-time. The teaching methods would not need to change, only the active live verbal instruction moments would be separated from the individual study moments. That’s normal in lesson development. Uberization would separate where the two parts are done and who oversees them so the teacher may roam and do more personalization. In this way the transformation can move schooling into the 21st century.

Helping

Educators & Schools

The help needed is from educators and schools stepping up to solve their intractable problems by exploring a transformation with a consulting contract. That’s how I am funding the continued work of both the beta Knowstory.com site and the mobile apps for Google and Apple stores. I will trade the cost of a term of use of the AI equivalent to the transformation consulting. Teachers may always use free versions or low-cost One Teacher School groups just for their own classes or gig teaching without having their school involved.

Edtech Companies and Investors

Companies and investors can also help because the future of traditional schooling is most definitely something else than it has been. The promise in the new schooling vision centered on an auto-cohorting AI calendaring ecosystem is immense. It is perhaps the first idea of how to structure the way human teachers, learners, and content come together that is aligned with the real human condition of individual learning readiness, individual interests, and individual motivations.

Anyone

Free Knowstory.com accounts will give you a bookings link to share out. An Essentials Account is only $2.50 a month to be able to integrate outside calendars, make “Holds” of labeled open time on any selection of days of the week with a start and end, create meetings that only need to request an amount of time which the AI will then set for you and your invitee, and other features such as creating social and extra-curricular credentials/badges called Knowcred. Vetted teachers and schools can create validated grades, marks, degrees and diplomas.

My journey to solve a root problem in education needs you. I cannot be the only one who sees that something different in the structure, not just new themes, more teacher burdens, more method training, more effort at recruitment of teachers and learners will win the day.

I know I’m not the only one who thinks we will always need human teachers.

Reach me at my main gig, LearningCounsel.com or in the Knowstory.com site where my brainchild of auto-cohorting AI calendaring lives.

Best,

LeiLani Cauthen

CEO & Publisher, Learning Counsel News Media

Founder, Knowstory