Another interesting example of the utility of tight feedback loops, this time as applied to education, is extreme apprenticeship. I’ve been taking one math class built around the XA method, and it has felt considerably more useful and rewarding than ordinary math classes.
Among other things, XA employs bidirectional feedback loops—student-to-teacher and teacher-to-student. Students are given a lot of exercises to do from day one, but the exercises are broken into small chunks so that the students can get a constant sense of making progress, and so that they can clearly articulate the thing that they didn’t understand in case they run into trouble. While students can just do the exercises by themselves if they wish, there are also scheduled exercise sessions during which constant help is available. When the exercises do get done, they are checked by the teaching staff and the students are requested to redo them with corrections in case there are major flaws.
Because the exercises are also returned each week, the teaching staff gets constant feedback on the things that the students are having difficulties with, and the content of the lectures can be modified on the fly. In general, lectures are kept to a minimum, and tend to build on content that the students already learned from the exercises rather than introduce entirely new material.
Another interesting example of the utility of tight feedback loops, this time as applied to education, is extreme apprenticeship. I’ve been taking one math class built around the XA method, and it has felt considerably more useful and rewarding than ordinary math classes.
Among other things, XA employs bidirectional feedback loops—student-to-teacher and teacher-to-student. Students are given a lot of exercises to do from day one, but the exercises are broken into small chunks so that the students can get a constant sense of making progress, and so that they can clearly articulate the thing that they didn’t understand in case they run into trouble. While students can just do the exercises by themselves if they wish, there are also scheduled exercise sessions during which constant help is available. When the exercises do get done, they are checked by the teaching staff and the students are requested to redo them with corrections in case there are major flaws.
Because the exercises are also returned each week, the teaching staff gets constant feedback on the things that the students are having difficulties with, and the content of the lectures can be modified on the fly. In general, lectures are kept to a minimum, and tend to build on content that the students already learned from the exercises rather than introduce entirely new material.
Some reports of the method: 1, 2, more.