An Ecology of Talent
One-on-one tutoring is not the highest form of pedagogy
Thank you for being here. As always, these essays are free and publicly available without a paywall. If you can, please consider supporting my writing by becoming a patron via a paid subscription.
“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius…Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in a gene.” - Brian Eno
As the class trickled in for the 7 pm start time, coming either directly from work or after a quick bite for dinner, I walked into the room, grabbed a few magnets, and stuck my work up on the magnetic whiteboards that covered the walls of the room. It was the first thing we did every week: the crit. At this point, I was three years into my PhD and had spent many years in classrooms both in the seats and at the front of the room. Nevertheless, this was a space quite unlike any other I had experienced. It showed me the power of learning in community.
After some small talk, we began. "So, tell us what we're looking at." Our instructor, a seasoned graphic designer who had worked at Disney Imagineering for decades, was our guide for the semester. We would stop at each student's work, hear from them about what they were trying to do, and then offer our own reflections on the work. It was obvious who the expert was, but the goal was never to exert his expertise in an authoritative sense. Instead, he leveraged his expertise to cede control and agency to others in the room, to invite them to voice their own perspectives, and to guide them in their own journeys toward developing their craft.
I learned a lot in that class. For one, it changed how I look at typefaces. More generally, it demonstrated a particular model of teaching and learning that all educators should borrow from: plan, try, fail, critique, revise; all in community with others.
The power of learning in relationship with others is the lesson that stands above the rest. We often think that teaching is a one-to-one relationship: between a student and the text, teacher, or peer. Of course, it is all of these things, and yet, the true magic happens in the synergy between them. This is the magic of scenius and that is what we should be striving to cultivate in our classrooms.
For the rest of this piece, I want to share how the lessons I learned from that Intro to Graphic Design class at Art Center can shape our vision for teaching and learning in the age of AI.
The Absent-Minded Professor is a reader-supported guide to human flourishing in a technology-saturated world. The best way to support my work is by becoming a paid subscriber and sharing it with others.
Aim for scenius, not genius
Much of the recent conversation around AI and education is misguided because it is focused on the creation of individual genius. Education is not about creating individuals who demonstrate genius, but about training curious collaborators who cultivate scenius. AI can play a role, but we need to be mindful of how our use of AI is enhancing or detracting from the formation of learning communities.
Scenius, a term coined by musician and producer Brian Eno, is his attempt to describe a realization he had about innovation and great art. He shared a bit about the process that led him to the term in a 2009 interview.
I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution.
As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.
What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.
Scenius requires community and collaboration. Scenius cannot be created by any one individual. Despite making a good story, the greatest sources of creativity and imagination have never been from a lone genius. We know this. There are many examples: Silicon Valley, Ancient Athens, the Clapham Sect, Bell Labs, the MIT Media Lab, or the Florence Renaissance; the heights of human creativity are always a product of community.
If we know the power of scenius, we should design our educational experiences to cultivate it. If you listen to the chatter around educational technology using generative AI, it seems that universally accessible one-on-one tutoring is the holy grail. Individual tutoring might create genius, but it cannot foster scenius. Here are a few ideas I'm pondering as I think about double clicking on scenius in my own teaching:
Give students a voice
Strengthen the network effects
Build in public
1. Give students a voice
One of the most valuable things that the instructor of my graphic design class did was elevate the voices of the students in the room. Of course, the value of the feedback we had was of various quality and often not as insightful or helpful as the commentary we would receive from the instructor. But, when the instructor is giving all of the feedback, we deprive students of the ability to engage with the material in a new way: not as a student, but as an observer.
If we don't allow students to give feedback to others, we're leaving opportunities on the table for them to hone their own craft. One of the big parts of becoming an expert in any discipline is developing good taste. You've got to develop the ability to see a piece of work and articulate its strengths and weaknesses in concrete ways.
There are many different ways to give students in your class a voice. You can provide ways for them to interact in the delivery of the course content by developing a lesson plan that leaves space in the margin to follow particular threads of inquiry. You can also provide opportunities for them to share comments or questions with you, either in the good old-fashioned way with a raised hand or with an anonymous polling tool, an online survey, or a minute paper at the end of class.
One way I try to give my students a voice is by leaving a few lecture slots at the end of the semester open to talk about topics that they choose. This is a nice way to allow them to speak into the content of the course and indicate their desire to explore a particular area. This also highlights that there are so many valuable areas for discussion in a course that there is no way we could comprehensively cover them all. What we choose to include or exclude is often at our discretion as instructors, so why don't we share some of that agency with our students, even if we offer them a menu of options?
2. Strengthen the network effects
A while back I heard someone comment about how the richness of relationships in a community grows nonlinearly with the number of members in it. The fundamental scaling law at work is quadratic, with the number of unique relationships scaling with the square of the number of members.
For example, a family of two members has only one unique connection. Add another member and the number of unique relationships increases to three. Add more and you jump to 6, 10, 15, 21...by the time you get to a group of eight people you have 28 unique possible connections. Even in a relatively small class of 20 students, there are a total of 190 possible connections.
Unfortunately, we leave most of this collaborative capital on the table. Most of our assignments tend to be individual in nature. Even when we do create opportunities for collaboration, we often let students coalesce into cliques, failing to help them break out of their existing network to develop relationships with others in the class.
I want to continue to build networked activities into my lectures this fall. Here's the thing: it's hard to do this well. If you're anything like me, the first several times you try something like this will go "meh". Likely not a total disaster, but it's unlikely that you'll immediately feel that it's hitting on all cylinders.
But I'm convinced that it's worth failing a few times to get these types of activities right rather than play it safe and let things continue on as they always have in the classroom. A few things I've learned from my experiments that might help you:
Consider the importance of space. If you have any control over the physical layout of the chairs and desks in your classroom, consider moving them around to mix up students.
On the theme of mixing up students...one trick I like to use is a deck of cards, either playing cards or a custom deck made from different colors of construction paper. Shuffle the cards, give them out to students, and ask them to form groups based on their color. There are lots of combinations here: all different colors, pairs of colors, all the same color, etc. This has been a really successful way for me to manually stir the pot in mixing up students which overcomes the awkwardness of asking them to form new groups.
3. Build in public
One of the formative aspects of my graphic design class was that we all showed our work in front of the whole class—including the process work that was part of getting to the final product. This is a norm in the arts that those of us in the STEM fields should embrace as well. It does a few things:
It helps everyone see the lineage of a particular product. You can see some of the ideas that were explored but ultimately didn't make it into the final product. It helps you to see the train of thought and better understand the artist’s intention.
It helps you to understand that polish begins with roughness. The first draft is called a rough draft for a reason. We should embrace the roughness as a feature and not a bug. Polish is not the point.
It gives you confidence to embrace failure. When you have to put yourself out there, you get comfortable having folks see your work as it truly is: filled with errors, mistakes, and errors for improvement. But at the same time, you see that the work of your colleagues is also imperfect in many ways and contains many areas for improvement. When we build in secret, it only hides this truth. By building in public, we encourage honesty and integrity, and break down the performative barriers we erect to curate the image we present.
This fall I want to help my students build in public in a few ways.
I'm going to encourage my students to share their code and reports publicly on the web by default. So much of the work that we do in our classes is created for an artificially limited audience. We write an essay, but share it only with our instructor. We make a presentation but share it only with our class. This is a huge missed opportunity. Encouraging students to write for a broader audience can help them build career capital to demonstrate their expertise. If there is anything I've learned in the last few years of writing here each week, it's that building in public is massively undervalued.
I also want to give students more opportunities to review and reflect on each other's work. One of the best ways to learn is by seeing the work of others. Out of concerns about academic integrity we often design collaboration policies to severely limit this sort of sharing. While we certainly need to be mindful of the temptation of shortcutting learning processes, by and large, we are way too restrictive about collaboration. This fall I'm planning to have my students do peer feedback for each other's work by providing formative feedback at the early stages of the design process after they have all made a significant effort at tackling the problem on their own.
Relationship is rich
These commitments highlight the power of the relational richness in a learning community. This realization seems to be glaringly missing in our current conversations around feedback and tutoring. We've almost taken for granted that a one-to-one tutoring model is the unquestionably highest form of education. It's not.
Individual, one-on-one tutoring is certainly valuable. But I think that our obsessive focus on making this a reality is a fundamental misunderstanding about what learning is, what it's for, and how formation happens.
What I learned in that graphic design class was the value of a learning community. Sure, I could have taken individual lessons. I certainly would have gotten more expert feedback and likely honed some skills faster. But what I would have lost out on was the relational context of sharing my work with a broad audience with different perspectives and views.
This loss is not just a linear loss. When you put all those people in a room at the same time, you get synergy. You get the "yes, and" comments of a classmate adding on to one of their peer’s observations. You get the interplay of commentary between the teacher and other classmates as they push back on each other's interpretations. It's something you cannot replicate in a one-on-one relationship.
Education is for cultivating sceniuses. Sceniuses, as compared to geniuses, embrace the power of collaboration and community. It's about forming the type of people who are curious and relational. Yes, skill is surely a part of the equation. The creative products of a scenius don't happen without skilled members. But the secret sauce is the network.
What is our vision of education?
Over the past few weeks, there is one scene I cannot get out of my head. It's the video of Sal Khan sitting next to his son as they demo the new GPT-4o model and make the case, if implicitly, that this is a future of education that we should desire. The video rings hollow to me. I don’t think it’s an accurate picture of the way these tools will be used in the future, nor does it demonstrate the ability to get students to do the kinds of problem solving and thinking that are ultimately at the root of fields like mathematics.
Khan's presence beside his son is unnecessary. The message in the medium of an AI tutor is that education is about individual achievement. What it misses is the value of the relational web. The vision for AI tutors idolizes the model of the lone genius, trained alone with a mechanized tutor. It’s about building talent in isolation, not about building expertise deeply rooted in community.
I don't doubt Sal Khan's motives. By and large, I think his heart is in the right place and his desire to democratize education is well-intentioned. His work as promoted through Khan Academy has certainly helped to create many excellent educational resources.
But…I have my concerns about the implications of this most recent push for personalized education using AI chatbots. AI tutors as a supplement to a learning community is one thing. AI tutors as a replacement for a learning community is quite another.
As educators, our movement should be toward building what Brian Eno calls an ecology of talent. It’s not without its challenges. Community is messy. It is uncomfortable. It demands things of us. It challenges our preconceived notions. But the value of a learning community cannot be underestimated. What I experienced in my night class at Art Center is a taste of what I want for all students: a web of personal relationships that is fundamentally richer than even the best one-on-one relationship.
Let's build scenius.
Reading Recommendations
If you read one thing this week, it should be this piece from
in the New Yorker from last November: “Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?” It is a beautiful reflection and exploration of how LLMs are fundamentally different than humans through the lens of a mother and her toddler. (h/t to for the pointer).
The Book Nook
Last week I finished listening to The Spirit of Our Politics by
. In a year that has already been filled with plenty of political tension and a coming few months that are sure to hold more, I found this book to be a helpful and hopeful guidebook.The book is deeply motivated by one of Michael’s heroes, Dallas Willard, a longtime professor of philosophy at USC who also wrote on Christian spiritual formation. The second chapter of the book, which describes the disappearance of moral knowledge in our culture and a path to rediscover it, was one of the most thought-provoking for me. The question of whether objective moral knowledge exists and if we can access it is a critical one for our current moment.
While this book is targeted toward Christian readers, it is worth a read regardless of your religious or philosophical background. Even if you don’t find yourself agreeing with him, Wear’s book is a thoughtful call toward a better version of our politics in pursuit of healing, kindness, and hope. We are certainly in need of all three.
If you want to learn a bit more about the book, check out the post below where Michael shares why he wrote the book and how he hopes it will shape readers.
The Professor Is In
This week I stumbled across a summary of the events hosted by MIT’s Teaching and Learning Lab over this past academic year. While the recordings of the talks are sadly limited to the MIT campus community, it was great to see detailed blog posts on each speaker. Here are a list of the talks in case you are interested in checking them out:
Finding the Why: Integrating Purpose in STEM — Dr. Amanda Diekman
Speaking Up in STEM: Self-advocacy and Classroom Experiences of Undergraduates with Disabilities — Dr. Julie Stanton
Balancing High Expectations and Flexibility to Support Student Mental Health —Dr.
Climate Across the Curriculum: An Octopus’s Journey — Dr. Sandra Goldmark
Beyond Content: Teaching for Civic Participation and Engagement — Dr. Bryan Dewsbury
In addition to nice summaries of the talks, each summary calls out specific takeaways for effective teaching which is very helpful.
Leisure Line
Lots of bugs this week. We found a seven-spot ladybug in our grapes from Costco (!), a desert stink beetle on our hike at Eaton Canyon, a Giant leopard moth caterpillar on our hike to Millard Falls, and a Megalographa biloba moth in the backyard.
Still Life
Tried a new chocolate chip recipe (gift link) from NYT Cooking on Sunday night. Hard to beat the classic Tollhouse recipe, but these were about on par with a slightly crispier texture. My one complaint was that I didn’t get anywhere close to the 4 dozen cookies that the recipe predicted.
Using a randomizer mechanism is such a great idea! For me, that takes the pressure off, and makes it more about the connection itself than the (probably imagined) judgment. Delighted to see more of your thinking on learning in community, and how the communal aspect of learning influences the experience.
Nicely put, Josh, as always. You have written before about the way that grading works against the work of recognizing "the relational richness" of classroom learning. In my experience, most of the "grammar of schooling" to use David Tyack and Larry Cuban's phrase, works against creating a genuine community of inquiry and learning in a class.
Just this week, a student published an editorial in my campus newspaper arguing against structured, active in-class learning. Some of the critique was about the execution of the idea in the writer's experience, but behind the critique as the common refrain that students are more comfortable with individualized structures of evaluation and participation, which is of course, mostly what they have experienced in 6-12 grade classrooms.
As you well know, the challenge of realizing this wonderful vision start with our own students.