That seems like a big over simplification. Speaking for myself as someone who was very much an above-average student, I often thought I was following along fine in the lectures but then when I would go to solve a homework problem or answer a test question, only then would I realize I skipped over some important parts in my understanding. So even the best intentioned students are likely not in a position to diagnose their own understanding of the material, that's what tests and quizzes and homework are for.

And that's not even to mention, any of the students that know they aren't following along, but don't really care and would rather zone out/sit on their phone the whole lecture than get 1:1 help. Do you really expect most students will seek help for themselves?

Perhaps you could modify your plan and say that students who got lower than a B+ or something on a recent quiz are required to attend the breakout group to get help from the teacher, it's not up to them to self-select. But then you're back to... the status quo, that "breakout group" is just the regular classroom. You have one class for the advanced students to go through material quicker, and another class for everyone else. That's already the way many schools are structured.

I think the problem is that most kids don’t really care about the material—if they are not understanding it, they’ll do something else during the lecture instead of asking for help. Struggling but trying hard is far more indicative of success than easily passing tests without studying, in my opinion.

How do you keep the main teacher from getting out of sync with the students in the breakout sections? If a student needs 10 extra minutes with their group teacher to understand what is being taught how do they get caught back up to what the main teacher is covering? The only way I can see this working is if the main lecture is prerecorded, but at that point you just have a normal class except for where the group teacher has to do extra work to understand how the main teacher is explaining things. This may work better, but I'm not sure if it would be a massive improvement.

Furthermore, unless we suddenly hire a lot more teachers each student's group is going to essentially be their normal class and we are back to the whole class being kept back when someone needs extra help. Again, the only difference seems to be the main lecture is performed by someone besides the students' teacher. This could be better if the new teacher really is "world class", but I doubt it will be an extreme improvement.

As a professor, I don't think exclusive online teaching is long term viable for university students let alone school children.

But a pre-recorded lecture is usually much shorter than a live lecture. The one-way communication of a one hour class can usually be condensed into a 10-20 min video recording. This is by using a script that optimizes the time to communicate the information in the best possible way.

The rest of the time should be spent learning by doing or talking to others.

Sure, let's talk it out together. So I think that #1 may as well be, "pay the best teachers extra to record their lectures and have them for years to come." Universities do this. It's worthwhile. We should probably do that!

But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it.

I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.

This assumes I meant the lecture should be prerecorded, I actually thought more of it being live. It presents other issues as other posters have mentioned, such as catching back up after sidebars, but provides the live feedback that increases engagement,