> In tutorial instruction, students study materials beforehand and come ready to debate, critique, and defend ideas in "class."
This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach. You're right that this is not directly "teacher led" in a material sense, but only inasmuch as the equivalent effort happens outside the classroom. The "debate, critique, and defend" approach shares both the "immediately applicable practice" and the "quick feedback" features of DI - there's clearly "a ton of overlap" between studying a lesson on one's own and later debating, critiquing or practically applying the same content in class. Just because it might not be literal "blabbing back" doesn't mean that much of the same underlying dynamics is not involved.
> This seems to be what's often called the "flipped classroom" approach.
A flipped classroom falls short of tutorial instruction. Often, it's just recorded lessons presented outside school time to leave more time for using the classroom in other ways.
Homework in conventional primary classrooms is not helpful and may be harmful, and as best as I can tell, this includes flipped lessons and textbook readings. We've got a pretty big mountain of data accumulating on this topic.
I'm trying to flip some topics in AP Microeconomics and it's really hard to do in an effective way.
Actually: I find in AP Micro I am doing things much closer to how you describe, because I'm micro-optimizing for (students doing well on the AP Micro exam) instead of (producing students that I feel understand economics in a generally useful way).
> "quick feedback" features of DI
I think pretty much everyone agrees quick feedback and measurement is valuable. Having one clean expected answer that the class says together is one way to get this, and I guess it's perhaps the one that requires the lowest instructor skill and thus is most repeatable.
But I would say, for example, that Khan Academy does it much better-- pacing things to each student, providing individualized feedback, supporting spacing effects through mastery challenges, and allowing questions whose responses would not be said the same by all students. It's trickier, though: you need to stand in the back of class to tamp down on device misuse. And in the end students do work in exchange for recognition from their instructor in a well-functioning classroom, which is hard to get if they're spending most of their time trying to please a computer.
Somewhat offtopic, but I'm surprised that "device misuse" is that big of an issue. I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device. Aside from that, I do in fact agree wrt. on the potential of Khan Academy and similar systems - they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
> I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device.
In our case, schools purchase and bring their own devices past elementary school. But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
> they seem to have the potential get closest to the "Bloom's two sigma" result of fully individualized instruction.
They don't, though. In my experience, there's 3 reasons why a student will devote effort to improvement in a classroom. In order of their efficacy and difficulty to instill:
1. Pressure from grades/the gradebook. In my experience, this is only weakly effective. Even in my environment where families are really achievement focused. There is too much of a delay; even if things are updated in Khan or the gradebook nigh-immediately, the measure doesn't become consequential for a long time.
2. Social pressures in the classroom: desire to not look foolish; relationship with an adviser; desire to please the teacher; effects of appropriate praise; desire to do fun things that other students are doing.
3. True interest and independent engagement in the subject.
You could alternatively view this also as a scale of how quick and effective feedback is. By #3, the student starts to measure themselves.
Khan or DI will have a hard time taking a student to #3. Khan's a super-strong, super immediate version of #1; DI is a very weak version of #2 (but possibly the easiest to implement).
> But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
Indeed there are! I was in high school around 20 years ago, and our computers were “locked down”. You couldn’t install anything (or really run any unapproved binary), access to system tools was disabled, and every time a computer rebooted, it would wipe a clean image to the HD so no changes would be saved to disk.
My friend and I figured out how to bypass the lockdown before boot, and made a floppy that did so. Removing evidence of tampering was as simple as shutting down the PC. From there, we added a menu to the bootloader, put it on a CD, wrote a simple Visual Basic app launcher on the CD, and included Quake 2/3, GTA, Worms, and a handful of other games that could all install or run from the launcher, and then sold the CDs for idk $10 a pop?
We also learned that every computer in our district (that we had access to test on) used the same admin password for all the remote VNC access, which was fun. And the same password (different from the VNC password at least?) for all of the networked printers in the district - on football game day, we printed hundreds of our school’s logo on a rival school’s printers, with the logo being just barely off-white.
There's definitely technical/fancy tomfoolery. But I'm also just surprised in very low-tech ways.
I once had someone draw a very elaborate stick figure fight in CAD for an entire 74 minute period instead of the high priority project his teammates were waiting on.
It's tricky for me in the engineering project classes, because I'll often be very deeply involved with one group teaching a new task or skill. 90% of the time the other groups will make good progress, but the other 10% yields interesting surprises. I definitely am more careful to show up unexpectedly more and to carefully look at screens, not just to shrug when they look OK-ish from 15' away.