Self-Taught: Moving from a Seat-Time Model to a Mastery-Learning Model

(Hardback)

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Description

The American educational structure is a feudal system designed around an inefficient seat time model. This structure sets students against each other in competition, creates zip-code inequalities, and empowers an expensive and often damaging bureaucratic class of administrators. Due to shortages of teachers and staff, and to needless problems with curricula and testing, this system is about to fall. Historically, when feudal systems collapse, they create opportunities for new structures to emerge. Technology has made it possible to develop a new educational model that connects students to their community and reduces pressure on students and teachers. This new model makes it possible to deliver high quality education for all students, regardless of zip code, while turning students into active learners. Self Taught: Moving from a Seat Time Model to a Mastery Learning Model explains how this process can begin by asking just one question: what would you do if you needed to learn something

Reviews

Public education is like the weather: everyone complains about it but no one ever does anything about it. The old seat-time model of shuffling students through regimented classrooms designed like military outfits of rows and columns must give way to the mastery learning model in which students learn to master a subject before moving on. But how With 3.6 million teachers in over 14,000 school districts the momentum built up over the past century is seemingly insurmountable. But educational reformer and teacher Chris Edwards outlines how we can make the changes necessary to prepare students for the rest of the century in this important book that should be read by everyone who cares about education, which should be all of us. -- Michael Shermer, Publisher Skeptic magazine, Presidential Fellow Chapman University

Author Bio

Chris Edwards, EdD teachers AP World History and an English course on critical thinking at a public school in the Midwest. He is the author of numerous books, a frequent contributor to Skeptic magazine, and was the principal investigator and director for a summer STEM teacher developmental program.