March KLS Shallot: The Future of Teaching at KLS
By Ali S.
March 25, 2022
Disclaimer: This article is satire. The opinions expressed in this article may not represent the opinions or views of the author.
The motto of the Khan Lab School, “Everyone’s a Teacher, Everyone’s a Student,” rings loudly in the hearts of all of its members. Salman Khan’s original vision for his “One World Schoolhouse” described a school in which “No one is just a student; everyone is a teacher as well, worthy of the respect that goes with that.” At the Khan Lab School, this is seemingly a reality. Students have designed and taught full-fledged courses throughout the past three years. Additionally, numerous students have joined the Teacher Assistance program, which helps teachers focus on instructing the class while they complete tasks around the classroom. In a school with a staggeringly high teacher turnover rate, these valiant students have stepped up. Administration controversy at KLS is only getting worse, meaning the community may see more teachers leaving very soon. And in their place will sit more students, armed with their will to keep the school running. The students of the Khan Lab School have shown that they are more than capable of assuming the responsibility of educating the world’s future leaders, and as such, hiring new teachers is both pointless and expensive. Instead, the Khan Lab School should fully embrace the model of students as teachers, rebuilding the architecture of the school to not only support it, but require it.
The New System
It must be clarified that a student doesn’t simply start teaching a class the minute they join the school. Of course, there must be some sort of vetting process to condition our new teachers and train them in the art of classroom instruction. The process begins at the start of a student’s Junior year, in which they will start a Teacher Assistance program to a class of their choosing. The current teacher of a given class, who is likely a KLS Senior, will act as a mentor to the students in their TA program. As the senior student teaches the class, the junior students help them out by taking care of things such as grading work, helping organize classes, and working one-on-one with students. Come winter term, junior students will start to receive training from their mentors on organizing lectures and leading classes themselves. Students will practice by taking over lectures every few class periods under supervision, practicing until they hone their abilities perfectly. Once Spring term comes around, students will be allowed to fully take over the class, completing the transition from student to teacher. Their mentor, while still being active in assistance with advice, will get to enjoy a nice final term of their year full of relaxation and senioritis. Once the year finishes, Juniors become Seniors and the now-Alumns bid their farewells and leave to live the rest of their lives. The new Seniors will spend the summer designing their own curriculum for the class they will teach throughout the next year. The next school year arrives, and the Seniors begin teaching their classes as the new Juniors TA them. And thus, the circle begins again.
The Benefits
This system is fully autonomous, and does not require much supervision. It's much more difficult for a student to leave in their Senior year than a teacher to leave anytime, thereby solving the teacher-turnover crisis. This would also allow administration to cut down on hired teachers significantly, and as a result have much more money from the wages that no longer need to be paid. Tuition could be severely discounted and still produce greater profit margins, as well as perhaps having the extra money to fund much needed school improvements (they still haven’t fixed the second basketball hoop). If there are any moral questions regarding firing our current teachers, it must be noted that if we’ve learned anything from the past few years, they’d probably have left of their own volition anyway.
As the years go by, each senior student is able to pass their wisdom to the next generation of teachers. This process creates a form of “generational wisdom,” in which each student’s collective experiences make their way into their mentoring, in addition to what they were taught by their mentor. In short, when one student teaches another student, that student will teach it to another, who will teach it to another, which will go on for the rest of the history of the school.
Students are naturally able to relate with other students in a social setting; This would only aid their teaching experience. The Khan Lab School attempts to break the professional barrier between students and teachers through creating a more casual environment through practices such as the first name basis. However, while this is certainly effective, a student to student relationship will always be inherently better. A student-teacher has more experience from being a student in the modern age, and they’ll likely be much more understanding of their own students. Additionally, they know exactly what they’d like in an instructor, and would be able to better implement it in their own classrooms.
Teaching full fledged classes and curriculum designing also looks really good on college applications. Students in the system build character, responsibility, and are conditioned to become better at public speaking and teaching - or so it could say in a college essay. It doesn’t take much more effort than actually taking a class, and it would produce an even, arguably less, amount of “homework.” If there is a scenario in which lots of extra work is involved for the teachers, that’s what the TAs are for. TAs help take extra work off of the plates of the teachers filling out college applications, greatly reducing the amount of burden placed on the teachers themselves.
The Khan Lab School already sets a revolutionary example of the future of American schooling through its mastery system. With inclusion of the student-teacher model, the school will be able to continue to do so while not being plagued with issues of teachers leaving. It can be provisioned that this model will become an integral part of the mastery system.
