Wendy Kopp Quotes

But the fact is, no matter how good the teacher, how small the class, how focused on quality education the school may be none of this matters if we ignore the individual needs of our students.

In Idaho, we hope to see educators using Khan Academy to individualize their instruction. Instead of a one-size-fits-all lesson, teachers will be able to focus their attention on specific students who are struggling while the rest of the class engages with material appropriate for them.

A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.

I feel that education needs an overhaul - courses are obsolete and grades are on the way out.

In other words, if a teacher only teaches in one way, then they conclude that the kids who can't learn well that way don't have the ability, when, in fact, it may be that the way the teacher's teaching is not a particularly good match to the way those kids learn.

No two children learn in the same way. While we might agree that every American eight-year-old should be able to read and multiply, beyond those basics, there are few reasons to make every student follow the same path.

Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child.

There will be no more one-size-fits-all. Education will respond to you.

The ideal direction is using something like Khan Academy for every student to work at their own pace, to master concepts before moving on, and then the teacher using Khan Academy as a tool so that you can have a room of 20 or 30 kids all working on different things, but you can still kind of administrate that chaos.

There are amazing teachers, but the system doesn't always allow them to address the individual needs of a child.

The trend of offering individualized education plans, curricula, and lessons is going to help students tremendously. “Teaching to the middle” is one of the saddest concepts I've ever heard about.

I believe in teaching just a few students, as teaching requires a constant alert observation on each individual in order to establish a direct relationship. A good teacher cannot be fixed in a routine, and many are just that. During teaching, each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing and constantly adapting.

Our school systems have to realize that everybody doesn't learn the same way, and no one learns without some emotional support.

I prefer home-schooling because you can work at your own pace and go towards more what you're interested in, whether it be history or geography or math.

I think a lot of teachers feel like they're teaching to a test. Our response is you teach to a student, you really teach to the kid.

I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.

The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.

The future of education is individualized education.

Professors gravitate to the bright, well-prepared students. They are easier to teach, and they appear to profit most from instruction, which may simply mean they are most like the professors. But in the increasing pluralism and decreasing professionalism of colleges and universities in the next decades, the master teacher is likely to be the one who can provide context for many kinds of students.

Students Are Not Widgets. Schools Are Not Factories.

Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.

The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Teachers can use technology-based assessments to inform their instruction. These assessments can quickly produce data and surface patterns that help teachers identify where students are faltering and intervene with targeted coaching immediately, before the student falls too far behind.

I would argue that the charter schools are really good at building programming and curriculum around the issues and the interests of the kids that they serve.