How People Teach and Learn

Joe NormanOctober 31, 2025

Exploring the fundamentals of 1:1 teaching and how realtime AI makes it possible to scale personalized learning with the spontaneity and adaptiveness that great teachers bring.

What is a teacher? I don't mean the career, I mean the act of a person “teaching” something to someone else. Sometimes 1:1, but often 1:many.

There is this thing people like to talk about in education, “Bloom's 2 sigma”. It is ostensibly the empirical demonstration of what is simultaneously a truth from common sense and first principles of control theory: 1:1 teaching blows 1:many teaching out of the water in terms of outcomes.

So if learning with a teacher happens best one-on-one and we wish to produce the best teaching, we need to look at the student-teacher system and its information flows.

Here is a minimal picture of such a system. There are 3 agents and 3 main channels: The agents are the student, the teacher, and the common world they are both coupled to. The channels are the conversational channel and the two action/perception channels that connect the two intelligent agents to a responsive world.

Crucially, each of these channels is continuously open and available. And because the intelligent agents integrate multimodal information, semantically rich interactions can flow between action/perception and conversational channels.

The key here is that the information flows need to be assembled spontaneously and adaptively. Teaching in a way that is sensitive to a learner is necessarily spontaneous and to degree always improvised.

It is impossible to predict in any given learning/teaching moment which channels will be optimal to induce the aha in the learner. So I repeat: the three major channels must remain continuously open and available to the student and teacher.

There is obviously a lot more to good teaching than that, but these are the table stakes.

We are building this capability at sageteacher.ai. As far as I know, we are the first to demonstrably do so sans a human teacher. Realtime AI capabilities make this spontaneous engagement between learner and synthetic teacher possible for the first time.

See the tweet below for a short demo playing with Sage Teacher that I recorded this morning as a daily update to my colleagues. Not cherry picked or faked, Sage is teaching.

More to come as we build Sage out. Talk soon.