REAL-WORLD TEACHING A TRIUMPH OF EFFICIENCY

Saturday, June 8, 2002

The Rocky Mountain News is getting a new computer system, and I have been looking forward eagerly to learning how to use it.

I didn't realize the training week would be an object lesson in educational philosophy.

Why was I eager, given that I know learning a massive new software application is a pain? Because for the five years I've been here, the News has been operating on three separate and largely incompatible computer systems. One goes back to the mid-1970s -- us and the air-traffic controllers! -- and the jerry-built and jury-rigged connections among the systems go back so far that no one really understands how they work or how to fix them when they mysteriously stop working.

Learning a fourth equally incompatible system is a small price to pay for being able to throw the other three out. We get lots of fancy new bells and whistles too.

The training sessions for people who do writing, editing and page design run ,for one week, 9-4, Monday through Friday, and "run," in this case, means at full gallop.

Our trainer, Sara Somerset from Unisys, told us first thing Monday morning, "We have to stay together, but if we do everybody will do fine."

The first task was to learn how to write and edit a simple story -- not the writing part, but the commands to manipulate text and save and retrieve stories. First we went through it one keyboard command at a time.

Sara is a demanding taskmistress. "Look up here, please," she said if any of the eight of us was lollygagging. "Does everyone's screen look like mine?" Her assistant coach, Brian James, watched from the rear of the room and did trouble-shooting on any screen that didn't.

I have to remind you that this is a Windows application, and as such prone to incomprehensible crashes not the result of anything the user did.

After we'd all been through the process together, we got an exercise that asked us to do exactly the same thing separately, but with a keystroke-by-keystroke outline of how to do it.

Then she did the same exercise on her screen (in about one-tenth the time). Then we did it again, but without the outline.

By that afternoon, the multitude of separate steps was already so automatic that the morning's task could be compressed to a single instruction -- write a story, and send it on to your editor.

About that point, it occurred to me: This is direct instruction.

Tell students what they need to do. Tell them how to do it, in very small steps that can be monitored. Check to see that they have done it. Repeat as necessary.

Astonishingly little repeat is necessary.

Direct instruction is anathema in schools of education. The reigning theory says children must discover the right way to understand new material, must construct their own model themselves.

The trouble with that is that it is hopelessly inefficient.

Imagine if we had to sit around in a cozy circle on the rug, practicing small-group cooperative learning, discovering for ourselves how the programmers designed the system.

"Sure, if you've got nine months," Sara said.

But she doesn't have nine months. She has a week. No pious platitudes, "Every journalist can learn." Sure we can; what we're learning isn't harder than what we already know how to do. But the only acceptable outcome is 100 percent proficiency, and classrooms staffed with products of the schools of education rarely come close.

I asked Sara where she got her teacher training.

"I didn't," she said.

Actually, she started as an accountant. In her first major job, with an organization that still kept its ledgers on paper, she introduced basic accounting software, so naturally it fell to her to teach everyone how to use it. She discovered she liked the teaching part better than the accounting part, so now that's what she does. She's been with Unisys three years as of Thursday.

Yes, eight students is a very small class. But that's for the convenience of the students' employer, who has to pay them for their time. It would work just as well with 24 students, it would just take longer (though not three times as long).

"I'm amazed at how efficient this is," said one of my classmates as we came back from lunch one day. Indeed.