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When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed schools to make a sudden transition to online learning, many saw the computer-based classroom as a necessary evil. But is the online classroom destined to be a sub-par alternative to in-person schools, or can it be its own uniquely great option when the teachers are well-trained in the art of online education?
Today, we’ll be discussing the rise and continuation of online education with Harvard professor Irvin L. Scott, Ed.D.
Curious how an online education could benefit your family? Tap here to book a free call with one of our Family Consultants to discover how a live online classical education can uphold both your family’s lifestyle and educational goals!
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Doctor Irvin Scott. Welcome, Doctor Scott.
Irvin L. Scott:
Thank you.
Marlin Detweiler:
He is a senior lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education. And he runs that program. And we're so glad to have you, on with us. This is pretty exciting to me. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself personally? Your family, your education, and how your career has led to this point?
Irvin L. Scott:
Wonderful. Marlin, thank you so much for having me. You know, I grew up for those of your listeners who were familiar with the Pennsylvania area, South Central in particular. I grew up in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, went to Millersville University, taught at McCaskey High School, which is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I was a principal at McCaskey High.
Marlin Detweiler:
So for those that don't know, that's the city school. And that can provide some tough situations, as I know.
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah, tough and, wonderful. It's that combination that you shape as an educator. But I did most of my professional work there before going on to Harvard Graduate School of Education because I wanted to be a large urban school district superintendent. And I got into a program called the Urban Superintendents Program and did my doctorate there and eventually became an assistant superintendent of schools in Boston and eventually to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where I was for five years.
And then I landed at Harvard, basically to teach education leaders who were aspiring to do many of the jobs that I and others have done.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's that's great. So you live, in central Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, where I'm from, and you commute to Harvard as needed. But I also understand you're doing some teaching online now as well with Harvard.
Irvin L. Scott:
That's exactly right. That teaching online came as a result of COVID and everyone had to go online. Well, when we went online I was at Harvard for about four years at the time.
And all of that teaching was in-person, but then Harvard and every other university, K-12 school went online and simultaneously in a personal area, my parents, who continue to live in Chambersburg. My father is a pastor and preacher there. I grew up in the church. They needed more assistance, so I moved to Massachusetts. Continued to teach online, but stayed at Harvard so I could be closer to them. So that's where we are now. Lititz, Pennsylvania. But then when everyone came back, I continued to stay here in Pennsylvania. And so I do some commuting and we continue to do some online, degree programs. So yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Well, as I did my research to prepare for this conversation, I saw a number of things listed as areas of expertise for you. And the first one I want to ask you about is education reform. Tell me what you mean by that and why that's important. As I said to you prior to turning on the recording, I get a little tired of all this reform, this reform that as politicians speak about it, it seems like everybody's always seeming to say something needs to be reformed. And that's my platform. I want to do that. There is some sense to which it feels like we ought to be able to settle some of these things.
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah, well, the one thing I'll say is that terminology education reform is probably used less these days in 2020, 2010 than it was used when I was doing work, for example, at McCaskey High School. There was a lot of talk about education reform. And then with the Gates Foundation, a lot of talk about education reform.
But you're right in some ways, people have steered away from the word because it takes on sort of a negative connotation now for the very reason that you thought.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay.
Irvin L. Scott:
And people think that people are like, well, what do we need to reform? Haven't we been talking about that for 20 or 30 years? What's going to change? But I will tell you while the word goes away, that there's an interesting point that the word tries to capture, and that is that there continues to be a persistent number of children and communities whose education systems aren't right and are struggling, and the kids are struggling.
Irvin L. Scott:
They're not reading on grade level. They're not doing as well as other kids. And while some people might say, well a lot of that is society and it's poverty, all of that is true. But what is also true is education systems have to be involved in order to support those.
Marlin Detweiler:
So that I can understand.
Irvin L. Scott:
So that's what the word is trying to get.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Another area of expertise listed that I captured here in my notes is the idea of families and community, as you think, in terms of that being an area of expertise, what is it you mean by that? As you can imagine, in the homeschool world and the classical Christian school world in which we deal, there is a tremendously high value for family, the nuclear family and the extension of that then into the community, their church and their neighbors and that sort of thing. But what is it that you're seeking to address the marketplace with as an expertise?
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah, I think one of the realizations that I personally have, come to over my 30 plus years of education, is that you can't be you can't have deep and long lasting, successful outcomes for children without engaging with their parents, without engaging with those who surround those children outside of school hours. And so I think that's the essence of what it means.
Like, yes, I have, as an English teacher, had the students for a certain amount of time, during the 6 or 7-hour school day. But for the rest of those 18 or 14 hours, they're at home, they're in the church, they're in their businesses, they're at the grandparents. And so trying to figure out how to bridge that gap.
And we're talking about the traditional public school trying to figure out how to bridge that gap between the family and community is absolutely essential, for all the lessons that we try to teach children on a day-to-day basis during the time they're in school.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it is easily seen as counterproductive if a student in K through 12 is given a message in school that conflicts with messages that they get elsewhere without somebody or some means of providing oversight and interaction to help bridge those conflicting messages.
Irvin L. Scott:
That's that's very true. Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
As you would expect. And I think you probably would agree with this, that, parents would be in our world, enjoying primacy in all of those kinds of things.
Schools, we, in fact, in our language, we use the Latin phrase “in loco parentis”, that the school operates on behalf of the parents as its delegate, as long as the parent wants to delegate it.
Irvin L. Scott:
That's very true. And we use the same language. I do appreciate that. Oh, yeah. I use “in loco parentis” as a way of saying to educators, it might be a little twist. And that is, you should remember that you are in place in some ways of their parents. And so you should cherish the child as much as a parent would cherish it. That's the way I usually think.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. Very good. Two other areas that I put together because I thought, it made sense to is, areas of expertise, K-12 school leadership in K-12 system leadership. What, as you think, in terms of, helping others from your areas of knowing and learning, what do you mean by those? How do those get applied in your teaching?
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah. So school leadership is exactly what it sounds like. I mean, I do a lot of training of aspiring principals, individuals who want to lead elementary schools, high schools or middle schools who come to Harvard Graduate School of Education to receive training on that. Certification to the extent possible. We were a certification body, but have sort of gotten away from that a little bit.
We're trying to move back into that area. In other words, people who want to get certified to be principals. We did that for many, many years and, I mean, it's a job. I was talking to someone I think we wanted to ask who was struck by the fact that there was training for principals and superintendents, and I wondered, what did the person think, how do you think you got those jobs?
Perhaps there was a time where the person who was teaching the longest ended up running the school, or the person who ran schools along just ended up as the superintendent. And I could see how that would happen, but that's not an education system that you want to be a part of.
It's a practice that you can get good at or really, really bad at but need to be trained to do. So that's leading the school. And the same with same case is with leading systems. And the only thing complication there are that complexity there is. Now when you're leading a system, a school system, now you got to be in charge of many schools. You got to be in charge of the HR department. You got to be in charge of the financial department. That's the systemic.
Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. So it's maybe a step above in terms of org chart. example. Yeah.
Irvin L. Scott:
It is.
Marlin Detweiler:
I'm struck with a question. I have an opinion about this. And I don't want to surprise you with my opinion. So I'll give it first because I know you'll cross me or differ. Differ with me or confirm what you think, without being influenced by what I say. One of the observations that I've made in my career in education, which now it goes, it's basically, let me think, there's 32 years of involvement in having started a school and then a business that caters to schools and home schools.
So 32 years is a long time, but it's not my full career. Prior to that, I did some other things, but I've observed something and that is the best teachers don't necessarily make the best administrators. And just because somebody is a good administrator doesn't mean they're a good teacher. It is not a given, that the natural evolution of a career educator is to go from something, maybe before being a teacher to being a teacher to being an administrator, whether that's, a dean or a principal or a superintendent.
And so we've had to say it's a different set of gifts. It's a different set of and in our world, it might even be a different calling. What what's your experience dealing with, a broader sample, in terms of educational systems than what I do?
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah, I think in many ways you touch on something that we think a lot about, talk a lot about, and I would answer it in three ways real quick. One is by saying, I'll use the term core work. The core work of any education institution, any school or whether it's online, doesn't matter whether it's higher ed, what, K-12 elementary doesn't matter, to be a seminary. But the core work of that institution is to ensure that individual learning.
And that usually happens through great teaching. Right? So people learn, that's forward. And how do you do that? Core work through a great teacher. Right. So though that's an important thing to keep in mind when you're talking about education institutions. Now, it would be ideal for anyone who's leading that core work. Many people doing that core work to have done it really well and to know it really well.
Right. So an ideal world, a person who is a great teacher would then be in a position to lead the core work and ensure that it's happening in many different places. That's ideal, but that your point is well taken doesn't necessarily mean just because you were really good that you know how to lead others. And I think one key distinction, in doing this is the difference between teaching kids and leading adults is dramatic. And just because you were able to teach kids and they were really great at learning that does not mean you can lead adults to do the same. The core work changes now it's not teaching kids, it's leading adults.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, we occasionally probably in the 32 years I've been involved in education, I estimate that I've interviewed more than a thousand teacher candidates.
And one of the things that I occasionally observe is someone who interviews poorly with the adults in the room, like me interviewing, but they don't get turned away for that because we can see in them that they're more comfortable in a classroom with people that are not their peers or even in my case, many times older than that, most times.
And so, we see they're good with kids, even though they may not be good with adults. The interview, sometimes allows us to parse that in a way that causes us to say, we're going to hire them anyway.
Irvin L. Scott:
Oh, that's good.
Marlin Detweiler:
And it's kind of fun to see. And that goes to giftedness and, in terms of what really matters for the teacher in the classroom.
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah, that's very true. Yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, the other another area and this is the last one that we're going to delve into this one a little bit more. And the other area that is listed as an expertise for you is online education. Tell us, you know, everybody's been involved in some form of online education if they've been involved in education for the last several years because of Covid.
But in our world, we have been offering live online classes, for we're about to start our 20th year of doing it. I guess that means we're kind of a grandfather in the space. Because it was, you know, and then what we still saw with some criticism, especially from people that I would consider to be people that I like to hear from peers, people that I believe most of the time were criticisms of how bad online education was in the Covid time and how much we need to get out of that.
It was kind of a critical conversation of others. And my thought there was, you know. If somebody was teaching in a school on Friday and was told Friday afternoon that on Monday they needed to stay home and teach their same class on a computer, I can understand why that experience might not have been very good, because I know what we put into training teachers to teach online.
And so I thought that on some levels from people that I otherwise like to hear from, their lack of understanding caused them to be critical in ways that weren't justified. Clearly, if you think of online education as an expertise, you think of it as a good thing. Tell me about your experience and what you would consider to be the pluses and minuses, that you observe and make people aware of.
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah. I think one of the things I just want to build on is your point regarding, that scenario where if a person went home and the next day, the next, after the weekend, they had to go online. That, in essence, is what happened to the way and that's what happened to education systems. I mean, when I was at Harvard in 2019 March 2019, and it literally was we went on spring break and the Dean was like, no one comes back.
We can't we can't come back. Harvard shut down. We're going online. And the chaos that ensued to ensure that learning didn't stop was palpable. It was it was it was not ideal. I mean, we didn't have what you and your organization had in terms of years of practice.
And, failing and coming back and learning and struggling and, yeah. So that's the way online happened for most of the world and most of the education system. And that was not ideal. And I think to say otherwise, at least from an education standpoint and K-12 would not be truthful. It did not happen in that field.
However, when it happened, we began to learn some things that, we found out if we could figure out how to build one, they could be ideal, for example, that you for people who, may not want. Now, speaking in terms of Harvard, people who could not access a Harvard education because they couldn't come to Massachusetts, it's too expensive, they have family, and so fourth.
They could access it online. And they would pay for it. They would, because it was a powerful experience of teaching and learning and what I wanted to add research to earlier. And so, I think what happened for us at Harvard also happened in K-12 in that they, it wasn't ideal, but we learned a ton and we tried to take some of the benefits and expand some of those benefits.
I don't know if K12 does that enough, at least in our public system. School districts will use online if there's a snow day. I think teachers, I'm married to a teacher who relies and does a beautiful job of relying heavily on online materials and tools, those things sort of came to life and people began to use more tools, math space and other things as a result of working online.
So there are benefits that happen. But then the last thing I'll say is there were a lot of kids who really needed the connectedness, the physical connectedness of teachers, of other peers, of that community. And when they were isolated, even though they were still connected to virtual teaching, they missed that relational connectedness. And that that hurt a lot of kids. Yeah. And they're still coming back from it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. One of the variables that I think determines whether or not it can work well or does is actually parental.
Because the parent in our world, the parent plays a more significant role in the education of their children in a direct way as opposed to a delegated way, which might result in a little bit more of an indirect way. But they play a little bit more of a necessary role to making that student be effective in learning online.
Marlin Detweiler:
And in the broader scope of things, not everyone has that opportunity. Not everyone has the family that will provide that support. That makes a lot of sense.
Irvin L. Scott:
That makes and it makes a huge difference even online. I mean, that's actually one of the things that I think was another good to see parents were able to sit in, whether it was explicitly or they’re in the living room, the kids in a dining room and they heard things that were going on. They both heard what their kids were like in a school setting, but in some cases, they heard what educators were like, and I think that actually was a good thing, for parents to see and have those experiences. But you made another good point. And that is not all parents, even during Covid, could be there. Many of them had to continue to do work and jobs that were not virtual. So yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
But with regard to online education kind of exploding that a little bit into a couple categories, there are two terms that tend to be used for types of online education. The terms that are maybe more of the professional speak are asynchronous and synchronous but defined for a broader understanding, asynchronous means, that it doesn't happen live in person– live on the screen interacting with others. It happens, in a way that is not live.
It might be that a teacher provides assignments and reading things. You turn in things to them, they grade them, and you have interactions like that, maybe with occasional live interactions. But it's generally understood to be working with a teacher but not in a live interaction.
Synchronous, of course, is the opposite of that. That is just like in a classroom. It's live. It just happens to be through a technology, typically a computer or something like that, that people are appearing together or conversing together, interacting together, that sort of thing. How would you compare those two means of education, maybe in terms of effectiveness, and other things that are important to compare?
Irvin L. Scott:
Yeah. Well, I'd say first of all, your description of both of them is spot on. I would say so much of in terms of comparison, so much of it is what is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish within that student? And specifically I teach, I co-lead an online education leadership program at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Harvard has only two online education degree programs or two online degree programs, and are only two. One is the Public Health School of Public Health, Chan School of Public Health, and the others are graduates, all other degrees from Harvard. You have to be here in person. So they're very particular about starting with my experience. It's and so, one of their goals is to ensure that students get a masters degree at the school have as close to what you would have if you were going to Harvard in person on the ground.
And so since that is one of the goals, synchronous is very important. It is very important that I'm on a computer with my 50, 60 students all across the world for 2 or 3 hours at specific times where I can ask the questions, I can test a case study, analysis I can put into breakout groups and have deeper conversations. I can meet with them because that's what would happen at Harvard. The content doesn't change, right? But one of the reasons why you pay, let's just face it, to go to a place is to work with someone, to be taught by someone who used to sit across the table from Bill Melinda Gates to talk about education and to make investments in education across the education ecosystem.
So that experience has to remain the same, although they're doing it from all over the world, and that requires deep synchronous experience. And so in our online masters program, our students are like this throughout two years of the experience. Now, they do do things asynchronously. They obviously they do assignments, they do papers, they get reading and all of that. But you don't have too many lessons that they would go to on their own and just engage with. They're engaging with earth and sky realities. But we have a different goal.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, and I understand I would make a broad generalization that says that for the most part and the the devil's in the details, but for the most part, synchronous education is better than asynchronous education because of the things that you talked about. At Veritas we actually don't even use the term asynchronous. We have some things called self-paced classes, but they don't operate in the traditional asynchronous way I've described them to you and others are, kind of a little bit like a computer game meets a computer program.
Irvin L. Scott:
Okay, yeah.
Marlin Detweiler:
Very interactive. It's video-driven. It's that sort of thing. It is asynchronous in the sense that it is not done live, but it doesn't really fit that model. And the model of asynchronous education has its place in certain circumstances, but not when you're really trying to get students engaged in live interactions with you and others.
In ways that, happen because they happen in real time, allow for the extemporaneous and spontaneous elements of education that are a significant part in my thinking of how we know students learning.
Irvin L. Scott:
Absolutely. I am a firm believer in education, period. I love teaching. You might be able to tell from the way I animate in a certain period of time that I really love that part that I'm teaching. And so I'm perhaps a bit skeptical around whether you could get that same sort of experience, online that you would have live.
And it's not the same, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say I am struck by how much you can still, get to your point. The extemporaneous engagement, the emotional connection. I've seen people laugh online. I see people crying online, I see people get nervous. You can tell when they're nervous because you called on them cold-called, and they're nervous, but they're in Singapore and they're nervous because you've asked them to answer a question. All that humanity does come through the technology. It's really amazing.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, well we're out of time. But I want to thank you so much for joining us, Doctor Scott, it's been a real pleasure to get to know you a little better and to visit about your life and education and really the focus of online education, which is very important, to many families. Thank you.
Irvin L. Scott:
Thank you so much, Marlin, I appreciate it.
Marlin Detweiler:
You bet. Folks, thanks for joining us for another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We look forward to seeing you next time.
