It looked like a makeshift MASH unit from the outside. But inside it was filled with flat-panel monitors displaying patient vital signs, a real-time video feed, and in the middle of the room, a surgical table. iStan, a life-like, sensor filled mannequin, occupied the middle of the table and waited for a team of medical students to diagnose and treat his condition.
Welcome to the state-of-the-art in medical education.
iStan is used by medical and nursing schools to simulate patient interactions and responses. At the table, a medical school instructor told me how he uses both the sensor information (patient vital signs, drugs given, airflow, gas mix in lungs, etc.) and lab video to have detailed discussions with med student teams after a simulation. They can pinpoint who was doing what at any moment (did you really clear the airway?) and show the consequences through the patient's reactions. It's a powerful teaching tool.
Interestingly, this data-driven reflection is also the state of the art in the US Army. It has "instrumentalized" many of its war games and other performance exercises -- using video and sensors to gather multiple sources of data about what is happening and when. As in the medical school simulations, this extensive data can illustrate multiple interactions among team members in a complex situation, leading to very rich "after action" reflective conversations about what happened, why, and how to improve. In both the military and medical education, technology has enabled instructors to use immense amounts of descriptive data to generate powerful and reflective teaching opportunities.
Can we take these concepts to K-12? Actually, we already have. Go visit your high school's football coach and ask him how he uses practice and game video with his team to break down each component of a play.
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In both the army and football, the teachers and the learners are voluntary participants.
There are no guarantees that that sort of technology will work. But the chances are that they will, and they will inspire creater levels of creativity.
Let's take a leap of faith and redirect efforts from the coercion and primitive accountability of NCLB to trusting in that our energy and imagination can produce technologies and systems appropriate for the 21st century.
Direct NCLB funds away from the blame and shame game of NCLB and into a Marshall Plan for recruiting, training, and retaining teachers and principals, and the market for those types of systems will explode. I don't believe we can have punitive data-driven accountability and unleash the energy that comes from data-driven reflection. I don't believe that young talent will volunteer to be disrespected in the classroom. But I believe our desire to achieve greatness will triumph and talent would flock to systems that use the technology you describe because they want the challenge to be what they can be.
We will really have made breakthoroughs when the students themselves embrace data-driven reflection. Students in classrooms are no different from student atheletes in football; they would love it.
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