Focus on Education

The Bill Gates annual letter is quite interesting this year. It provides a lot of information on the state of developing countries at this point in time, indicating progress made and work to be done in the future. Overall, it was his comment about the state of the education system that I found most interesting. He notes that a key part of improving the education system is to help teachers get better at “teaching”. This, as he notes, is consistent with current research. However, I think that his ideas that teachers will learn how to improve through “feedback” based learning processes are particularly relevant, as this is another key finding of research in education. Feedback is a key aspect of how we learn; and it is as important that the people who “teach” the teachers use these approaches as it is for teachers to use feedback as part of their approach to teaching students.