As a teacher, at whatever level, you are given a syllabus and told to go teach.  You create a scheme of work (what you expect to cover each week) and from that you create a lesson plan.   simple.  This means that everyone know what they are doing and what is expected in each class.   This seems entirely sensible.  If you were to be off, someone else can step in knowing exactly what was taught before and what is planned for now.  This works fine for the school/college/university, but it leaves out the most important part - the reason we are doing this - the students.

No one would think it odd that you picked up how to play the piano faster than me.  People pick up this skill at different rates.  However, I might be better at playing tennis than you.   That is just the way things are.  It is not one of us is less than the other.  It is just that we learn differently.

Yet when it comes to the subjects taught in a classroom, we are all expected to learn the same things at the same speed.  The scheme of work dictates this!  And then we wonder why the less able fall further and further behind and the more able become bored.  The good news is that we can label those who fall behind "in need of help" and those who become bored and disaffected as "trouble makers".  The system imposes these labels on them.

John Carroll wrote an article in 1963¹ which he thought was a "throw away" paper.   In it he suggested that almost anyone could learn almost anything if given enough time.   His estimate was that the least able in a particular subject needed approximately six times as long as the most able to grasp the new concept.  However, that logic can only applied to that concept.  They might pick up other concepts faster.

It gets worse than that though.  If someone misses a key concept then they could misunderstand or not grasp another idea on which that relies.  Jan Meyer² called the missed idea a threshold concept because it hindered later learning.  Students would have difficulty getting over this threshold until the problem was resolved.  The more of these thresholds were acquired, the harder learning becomes.

In mathematics, if an equation is getting longer and longer, then it is probable that you are looking at the problem in the wrong way.  Good equations are short because the encapsulate the relevant parts.  They are elegant.  One of the best known equations, e = mc², is hort and VERY powerful.  You need only look at the number of educational theories on the preceding pages and the number of articles published in academic journals to see the educational equation getting longer and longer.  Maybe we have been looking at the problem in the wrong way?

Educationalist assume we are in control and that we know what is best.  This leaves the clients, the students, out of the loop.  It totally disregards individual differences which in turn causes problems in the classroom.  Rather than have the teachers determine the speed, maybe we should allow each student to go at their own pace?  I can hear the roars of disapproval.  Allow student to dictate the pace?  They will just sit back and play games?  This was the issue with the permissive educational policies of the 1960s and early 1970s.

However, keeping a tight control on how much is being learned would overcome this problem.   Both Fred Keller³ and Benjamin Bloom⁴ suggested the same solution in the same year.  They thought that a syllabus could be broken down into small pieces, the atoms of that subject.  Then each atom could be assessed individually.  The role of the teacher changes from class/content focussed to checking the progress of each individual and helping each student individually where needed.  Each individual works through the set materials at their own speed and is closely monitored for progress.  You are right.  This system is not new.  It was used by Socrates⁵ about 2,400 years ago.

The website LYW seeks to automate the record keeping, allowing the teacher to concentrate on the students.

¹ @article{carroll1963,author={Carroll, John B.},title={A Model of School Learning},journal={Teachers College Record},year={1963},volume={64},pages={723--733}}

² @incollection{meyer2003,author={Meyer, Jan H. F. and Land, Ray},title={Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge},booktitle={Improving Student Learning},year={2003},pages={412--424}}

³ @article{keller1968,author={Keller, Fred S.},title={Good-bye, Teacher...},journal={Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis},year={1968},volume={1},pages={79--89},doi={10.1901/jaba.1968.1-79}}

⁴ @techreport{bloom1968,author={Bloom, Benjamin S.},title={Learning for Mastery},year={1968},institution={Regional Education Laboratory for the Carolinas and Virginia}}

⁵ @book{plato_socratic,author={Plato},title={Euthyphro and Ion},year={c. 399 BCE}}