ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ

In November 2015 a young man called Carl Chan visited the Centre for Innovation in Education (CIE) at Tallinn University. Coming all the way from the United States of America, he and his friends were touring Europe and visiting different countries to learn about their education systems. Maarja from CIE interviewed Carl about his travels and learned about his self-guided and self-designed Master's degree.

M: You visited CIE in November 2015 as part of your trip to Estonia and you have a very fascinating background! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Also, would you mind telling us more about what brought you here?

C: I studied statistics as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the United States. When I was in college, I had a very formative experience serving as a mentor to young students at a nearby elementary school where many of the students were from low-income families. The disparity between what these students' opportunities were, and what mine had been pushed me to think more deeply about issues around inequality and education. I eventually decided I wanted to start my career in the field of US K-12 education after I graduated.

When I finished my studies in college, I worked at an education software startup in San Francisco, and later received a Fellowship from to work in Chicago. In Chicago, I worked with large public school districts as well as nonprofits that provided social services to the homeless and impoverished.

When my Fellowship ended, I had planned on attending graduate school in artificial intelligence. It was a field that I was interested in, and had gotten a scholarship to study at a great graduate school. But I ultimately realized that becoming an expert in artificial intelligence wasn't aligned with my core interests, values and personal identity. After realizing this, I called the graduate school I was supposed to attend, and let them know that I wouldn't be attending.

As a result, when my Fellowship in Chicago finished, I decided that if I wasn't going to get another degree in artificial intelligence, I might as well create my own "degree" for the topics I wanted to study.

That led me to form something called the "Self-Guided Masters in Education."

With the help of some friends who were similarly interested in learning about education, I came up with a list of books I wanted to read, topics I wanted to learn about and ideas I wanted to explore around the field of educating children. I began to study them.

As part of this self-guided degree, I traveled to visit Finland, Estonia, Germany and the UK, where I was able to visit schools and learn about the unique attributes of the education system in each of these countries.

It was through this journey that I visited the CIE and learned about the work done here.

M: It is truly a fascinating program! May I ask how you are financing all this? And why did you choose to do it on your own? Why not just enroll at a university?

C: Due to working for a few years before embarking on this self-guided journey, I have a small cache of savings that I'm living off of while I'm pursuing this path. In addition, I wrote a that sells well enough to generate a bit of income each month.

Choosing to pursue my own educational path rather than enrolling in a university is a more complicated topic.

I think there are some obvious benefits to doing a self-guided program: I can tailor my learnings to my own interests, I have a flexible lifestyle, which allows me to juggle the many projects that are part of this Self-Guided Masters in Education.

However, in my view, there are two strong arguments in favor of enrolling at a traditional university instead of doing what I'm doing:

The credential: It's not a secret that one of the most valuable parts of getting any sort of higher-education is the branding or credentials that you receive. Being able to tell other people that you have a Masters in a field from a prestigious and selective institution is a shortcut to quickly establishing that you have some authority in the field, and a baseline level of commitment and interest.

The network: Another valuable asset that people who enroll in a traditional university is that you can get access to a strong alumni network. Who you know is oftentimes just as important as what you know, and I certainly believe that a traditional school may be better if you're looking to build a network in the field quickly.

However, the question you ask is: are both of these worth the price tag? Are there other ways I can get both of the above advantages without going through a formal institution?

Personally, I believe that I can establish a network through my passion and commitment to the field. I believe that if I am honest, sincere and enthusiastic about my work, others will respond positively to me.

And while it's true that I won't receive a degree or credential when I complete my own program, I also believe my personal story and journey may be a stronger indication of my ability and passion than a piece of paper that indicates where I graduated from.

M: How did you design the program curriculum? Are there any principles you follow? A structure? Did you do any research before you put it together or was it more about following a gut feeling so to speak?

C: Since this was a personal project, my friends and I designed our curriculum alongside what we wanted to learn.

We started with questions we were interested in and let those guide our specific research into education. We initially tried saying, "I'm just going to try to get an overview of education," but this was difficult because there's just so much material within what's typically labeled as "education," and it's hard to prioritize what to learn and appreciate why something's important to learn without a specific question or goal in mind.

However, broadly speaking we had three goals in outlining the Masters that we used to guide our curriculum:

Inform ourselves on current and historical education issues in the United States and in the world: from the 1830s common schools movement, to the Women's Rights Movement influencing more women becoming teachers, to the modern-day emphasis on accountability and choice, different issues and movements have spread through the field of education. We wanted this Self-Guided Masters in Education to educate ourselves on both the historical lineage of today's issues around education reform, as well as the nuances of modern education reform issues.
Inform students on the practical aspects of working in the field of education: what steps do you need to take to become a teacher? What about a principal, or superintendent? What steps do you need to take in order to start a public, private or charter school? What other opportunities are there to working in education?
Present evidence and research on what works: with so much funding, manpower and interest in the field of education research, we wanted to learn what have people managed to discover that "works" when it comes to teaching students? What about when it comes to funding schools? Training teachers? How reliable are these findings?

It was this last goal that prompted us to visit international education systems, including Estonia and Finland, to better understand what other countries have tried and succeeded in. One quick note though: the things we're learning have a strong United States focus. That's because all of my friends and I who are involved in this Self-Guided Masters in Education grew up and live in the United States, we've focused our learnings on to how what we can learn can benefit the American education system.

M: What are some of the materials you have used for your study program (you mentioned documentaries etc)? Is there anything in particular that has made an impact on you?

C: This Self-Guided Masters in Education combined a series of different resources, including books, documentaries, visits (such as those to Estonian and Finnish schools) and speaking on-the-ground classroom experience through volunteering inside of a school.

Here are some of the materials we've used thus far.

Partial list of books we've read or are reading:

International Education Systems:
Finnish Lessons 2.0 by Pasi Sahlberg
The Smartest Kids In the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley
Philosophy and purpose of education:
Why School by Will Richardson
The End of Education by Neil Postman
History of US Education
Class Warfare by Steven Brill
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch
Education, Free & Compulsory by Murray N. Rothbard
The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein
Modern US School Reform
The Prize by Dale Russakoff
Work Hard, Be Nice by Jay Mathews
Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom by Esther Wojcicki
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough

Visions of the future of education:
The Education Apocalypse by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Education Nation by Milton Chen
Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner
Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education by Ken Robinson
The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined by Sal Khan

Documentaries:

The Finland Phenomenon
Race to Nowhere
Most Likely To Succeed
School: The Story of American Public Education by PBS

In terms of things that have made a particular impact on us, one large impactful finding was the realization that a big bottleneck to social progress is having more "effective" people working on socially impactful opportunities which motivate them.

This came up over and over again -- in Silicon Valley, where recruiting talented people is often called the most important and most difficult thing you can do and where companies are fighting over talent; in academic research, where there seem to be so many promising ideas but not enough people to execute them and test them out; and in non-profit world, where organizations like GiveWell have identified good non-profit ideas and have even called for people to step forth and implement them, but without success yet.

Addressing this bottleneck has been motivating our research in education.

M: What have you learned from your visits to different countries? What have you learned more specifically from your visit to Estonia?

C: While in Estonia, I had the opportunity to visit the Center for Innovation in Education at Tallinn University, where I met up with Director Pille Slabina. We had a wonderful conversation, and followed up on that experience by visiting the International School of Estonia.

Through these two experiences in Estonia, I gleaned the following insights:

Peer and self-assessments can replace traditional teacher assessments - At the International School of Estonia, I learned from a 17-year veteran teacher that her students were assessed primarily through self- and peer-assessments, rather than through traditional tests that have permeated the United States' education reform culture.

The importance of sliding desks - I visited a classroom the Center for Innovation in Education in which all the desks in the classroom were on wheels. As a result, students in the class could slide around and arrange themselves in any formation they'd like. Since our physical environment affects our experiences, this design element made me think about how much such a simple decision could cascade into affecting the culture of creativity and spontaneity within a classroom.

Who you hire sets the early values of a school - I was told by the same 17-year veteran teacher that I mentioned in my first point how the early teaching and administrative hires at a newly founded school will set the values and culture of the school. I've heard this advice given in the Silicon Valley to startup founders and CEOs, but to hear it in a completely different context reinforced its truth and importance.

M: Would you mind telling me about the big "project" you are doing as part of your self-designed course? What is your dream?

C: My friends and I are now working on a few large projects.We're applying for a grant to start a school in the United States through a competition called the XQ SuperSchool Compeititon. It will fund five teams with $10 million each to prototype a high school in the United States with innovative design, mission and philosophy. We're also drafting up all of our learnings and writing a "masters" thesis of sorts, where we'll outline what we've learned and share it publicly.

Through conducting this Self-Guided Masters in Education, our dreams is to inspire students to become independently curious, autodidacts and motivated to tackle important global issues. The world could always use more effective, good-intentioned people, and education is a fantastic system to help give students the opportunity to contribute to the world.