Book Review: Disrupting Class

Each summer at school, our Head of School assigns summer reading to our Administrative Council team.  This summer he chose Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen.  This book is part allegory, part research, and part commentary.  I can assure you that this book presents a lot of game-changing ideas when it comes to the future of education.  If you are an educator, or someone that cares about education, you should pick this book up today.  It is a pretty quick read and will leave you with a lot to think about.  This book was written towards public schools, but is an axiom for Christian schools, private schools, and charter schools as well.

Due to the subject matter of this book, I thought it only appropriate to read this book on my Kindle and iPad being that they are two of the leaders in disruptive innovation!  Here are the notes I highlighted while reading.

  • Modularity allows for customization, so the solution is to move to a modular architecture in schools
  • Gardner’s eight intelligences with brief definitions and an example of someone who exemplifies each one are: Linguistic: Ability to think in words and to use language to express complex meanings: Walt Whitman. Logical-mathematical: Ability to calculate, quantify, consider propositions and hypotheses and perform complex mathematical operations: Albert Einstein. Spatial: Ability to think in three-dimensional ways; perceive external and internal imagery; re-create, transform, or modify images; navigate oneself and objects through space; and produce or decode graphic information: Frank Lloyd Wright. Bodily-kinesthetic: Ability to manipulate objects and fine-tune physical skills: Michael Jordan. Musical: Ability to distinguish and create pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Interpersonal: Ability to understand and interact effectively with others: Mother Teresa. Intrapersonal: Ability to construct an accurate self-perception and to use this knowledge in planning and directing one’s life: Sigmund Freud. Naturalist: Ability to observe patterns in nature, identify and classify objects, and understand natural and human-made systems: Rachel Carson.6 How does this relate to teaching and learning?
  • Gardner’s research shows that although most people have some capacity in each of the eight intelligences, most people excel in only two or three of them. His research, while implying the need for learning opportunities that line up with individual strengths, also cautions against pigeonholing people and not developing all their intelligences.
  • Why do schools work this way? If we agree that we learn differently and that students need customized pathways and paces to learn, why do schools standardize the way they teach and the way they test?
  • A product’s design is interdependent if the way one component is designed and made depends on the way other components are designed and made—and vice versa. When there is an unpredictable interdependency across an interface between components—that is, we can’t know ahead of time how we must build a certain part until we have built both parts together—then the same organization must develop both of the components if it hopes to develop either component. These architectures are almost always proprietary because each organization will develop its own interdependent design to optimize performance in a different way.
  • When someone changes one piece in a product that has an interdependent architecture, necessity requires complementary changes in other pieces. Customizing a product or service, as a result, becomes complicated and expensive. Many of these interdependencies are not predictable so all pieces must be designed interactively. Customizing a product whose architecture is interdependent requires a complete redesign of the entire product or service every time.
  • The economics of interdependence mandate standardization, and we live with it.
  • Because there are so many points of interdependence within the public school system, there are powerful economic forces in place to standardize both instruction and assessment despite what we know to be true—students learn in different ways. The problem is that customization within interdependent systems is expensive.
  • The question now facing schools is this: Can the system of schooling designed to process groups of students in standardized ways in a monolithic instructional mode be adapted to handle differences in the way individual brains are wired for learning?
  • In summary, the current educational system—the way it trains teachers, the way it groups students, the way the curriculum is designed, and the way the school buildings are laid out—is designed for standardization. If the United States is serious about leaving no child behind, it cannot teach its students with standardized methods. Today’s system was designed at a time when standardization was seen as a virtue. It is an intricately interdependent system.
  • Schools need a new system.
  • The proper use of technology as a platform for learning offers a chance to modularize the system and thereby customize learning. Student-centric learning is the escape hatch from the temporal, lateral, physical, and hierarchical cells of standardization. The hardware exists. The software is emerging. Student-centric learning opens the door for students to learn in ways that match their intelligence types in the places and at the paces they prefer by combining content in customized sequences. As modularity and customization reach a tipping point, there will be another change: As we explain later, teachers can serve as professional learning coaches and content architects to help individual students progress—and they can be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.
  • The disruptive innovation theory explains why organizations struggle with certain kinds of innovation and how organizations can predictably succeed in innovation.
  • A disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough improvement. Instead of sustaining the traditional improvement trajectory in the established plane of competition, it disrupts that trajectory by bringing to the market a product or service that actually is not as good as what companies historically had been selling.
  • Disruption rarely arrives as an abrupt shift in reality.
  • The fact that the sustaining trajectory in the original plane of competition takes a company in a direction that is opposed to the direction of disruption makes life all the more difficult for the incumbent leaders.
  • Society has asked schools to pursue the new metric of improvement from within the existing organization, which was designed to improve along the old performance metric.
  • Can schools move to a student-centric classroom through the adoption of computer-based learning? One reason we might believe it is not possible centers on another common gripe about why schools struggle—their teachers and administrators aren’t sufficiently motivated to improve.
  • Why haven’t computers brought about a transformation in schools the way they have in other areas of life?
  • Classrooms look largely the same as they did before the personal computer revolution, and the teaching and learning processes are similar to what they were in the days before computers.
  • In almost every case, when disruptive innovations emerge, the industry leaders see the disruptive change coming.
  • Schools use computers as a tool and a topic, not as a primary instructional mechanism that helps students learn in ways that are customized to their type of intelligence.
  • “In the end, both supporters and critics of school technology (including researchers) have claimed that powerful software and hardware often get used in limited ways to simply maintain rather than transform prevailing instructional practices.”
  • Success with disruptive innovations always originates at the simplest end of the market, typically competing against nonconsumption.
  • Like all disruptions, student-centric technology will make it affordable, convenient, and simple for many more students to learn in ways that are customized for them.
  • First, computer-based learning will keep improving, as all successful disruptions do. It will become more enjoyable and take full advantage of the online medium by layering in enhanced video, audio, and interactive elements. Currently, according to reports, computer-based learning works best with the more motivated students; over time, it will become more engaging so as to reach different types of learners.
  • A second driver of this transition will be the ability for students, teachers, and parents to select a learning pathway through each body of material that fits each of the types of learners—the transition from computer-based to student-centric technology.
  • The third factor that will likely fuel the substitution is a looming teacher shortage. In the past, shortages have been in specific subjects or school types and mostly attributable to the revolving door of teacher turnover. And while many have forecast mass doom-and-gloom teacher shortages before, this is now more likely to happen. The baby-boomer generation of teachers will start retiring en masse soon, even as the student population, which is the highest it has ever been, will not decline in any proportional way.
  • The fourth factor is that costs will fall significantly as the market scales up. Different industries have characteristic “scale curves” that allow executives to estimate quite accurately the degree of cost reduction per unit produced each time the scale of the market doubles.
  • The result of these four factors—technological improvements that make learning more engaging; research advances that enable the design of student-centric software appropriate to each type of learner; the looming teacher shortage; and inexorable cost pressures—is that 10 years from the publication of this book, computer-based, student-centric learning will account for 50 percent of the “seat miles” in U.S. secondary schools. Given the current trajectory of substitution, about 80 percent of courses taken in 2024 will have been taught online in a student-centric way. Given how long some have been in the trenches of school reform, this will be quite a breathtaking “flip.”
  • Disruptive innovation requires targeting not those courses that the public schools want to teach in-house. They must instead focus on courses that the public schools would be relieved not to have to teach, but do feel the need to offer. If officials target computer-based courses at the core curriculum, however, it will elicit intense opposition by the teachers unions.
  • As the monolithic system of instruction shifts to a classroom powered by student-centric technology, teachers’ roles will gradually shift over time, too. The shift might not be easy, but it will be rewarding. Instead of spending most of their time delivering one-size-fits-all lessons year after year, teachers can spend much more of their time traveling from student to student to help individuals with individual problems. Teachers will act more as learning coaches and tutors to help students find the learning approach that makes the most sense for them. They will mentor and motivate them through the learning with the aid of real-time computer data on how the student is learning. This means, however, that they will need very different skills to add value in this future than the skills with which education schools are equipping them today. Since customization will be a major driver and benefit of this shift to student-centric online technology, increasingly teachers will have to be able to understand differences in students and be able to provide individual assistance that is complementary to the learning model each student is using.
  • This shift from individualized instruction to monolithic content delivery targeting batches of students changed the teacher’s job. We estimate that at least 80 percent of the typical teacher’s time is now spent in monolithic activity—preparing to teach, actually teaching, and testing an entire class. Far less than 20 percent is available to help students individually. A profession whose work primarily was in tutoring students one on one was hijacked into one where some of the teacher’s most important skills became keeping order and commanding attention.
  • Little by little, textbooks will give way to computer-based online courses—increasingly augmented by user-generated student-centric learning tools. The second, or student-centric, stage of this disruption will move to the mainstream when users and teachers start piecing together enough tool modules to create entire courses designed for each type of learner.
  • Two statements attributed to Albert Einstein are relevant to this chapter’s topic. The first is, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we were using when we created them.” The second statement Einstein is said to have made is his definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We have for decades ignored the deteriorating preparation for parenthood that plagues so many families. If we don’t change the level of our thinking to encompass the systemic problems within which our schools are embedded and if we persist in believing that the problems of our schools can be solved by only improving schools, we will never succeed.
  • Eventually, if the formula that led to success stops working and the organization drifts into crisis, then consensus weakens.
  • Culture is all too often used in vague terms, but MIT’s Edgar Schein gave it a concrete definition in his book, Organizational Culture and Leadership. There he wrote that culture is “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”4 In other words, in organizations with strong cultures, people instinctively prioritize similar options, and their common view of how the world works means that little debate is necessary about the best way to achieve those priorities. But this very strength can make such organizations highly resistant to change. The tools of cooperation in the culture quadrant—like ritual, folklore, and democracy—facilitate cooperation only to preserve the status quo; they are not tools to cause change. Managers can also use leadership and management tools here, but only to reinforce the existing culture.
  • Some students are in certain circumstances that beg for something entirely different from what a traditional school can provide.
  • When the task simply is to improve individual components, the organizational structure facilitates these improvements. But when a system needs to be fundamentally reconfigured, an organization’s compartmentalized structure impedes the work it must do. Therefore, innovating managers must ensure that the company’s teams’ structures are tailored to the nature of the task. And to do that, they often need to use the tool of separation.
  • At one level, video games are nettlesome things about which parents love to complain. Video games, however, if used for good ends, can teach our children so-called “twenty-first-century skills” like problem solving, decision making, hypothesizing, and strategizing. They can also be used to teach the underlying principles of mathematics or engage students in reading. And what’s more, if done properly, games are fun, and children love playing them. A whole literature has been created about this “serious games” movement, and more and more video game designers and programmers are doing good work designing games that have educational value and are still fun.
  • Few reforms have addressed the root cause of students’ inability to learn. And most attempts have not been guided by an understanding of the root reasons for why the system functions as it does or how to predictably introduce innovation into it. Without this guidance, we’ve been destined to struggle. This also means, however, that we now have an opportunity for great progress.
  • School reformers have repeatedly tried to bash the system and confront it head-on. A major lesson from our studies of innovation is that disruptive innovation does not take root through a direct attack on the existing system. Instead, it must go around and underneath the system. This is how disruption drives affordability, accessibility, capability, and responsiveness.
  • If we acknowledge that all children learn differently, then the way schooling is currently arranged—in a monolithic batch mode system where all students are taught the same things on the same day in the same way—won’t ever allow us to educate children in customized ways. We need a modular
  • Some of the places with the highest potential to circumvent the system and create a new, modular education system that facilitates customization are the emerging online user networks—the equivalent of the autonomous business unit we describe in Chapter 9. When the decision-making process for what is adopted in schools is centralized, as it currently is, there are so many powerful political and other forces at play that it makes change and customization nearly impossible. But user networks will democratize development and purchase decisions to the end users in the system—students, parents, and teachers. Smart people will do smart things if we just enable them to do so.
  • Finally, to the extent administrators and school leaders want to implement these changes, they have to use the tools of power and separation. Using these tools is easiest in the chartered and private school sectors. This means that school committees and government officials need to view themselves as not being responsible for the specific schools that exist in their jurisdictions; rather they are responsible for educating the children in those areas. Systemic reform requires a systemic view—one that includes all schools. If indeed the charter for educators is to eliminate poverty by leaving no child behind, the homes in which children’s fundamental learning capacities are forged are critical as well.
  • As you face budget crises and difficulty finding teachers, don’t solve these problems by doing less in the existing system. Solve it by facilitating disruption.
  • Continuing to train teachers to perform in a world of monolithic, teacher-led content delivery, where the key skills are in holding students’ attention to subjects that are being taught to the dominant type of learner in each subject, trains teachers for the past. Future teachers will need the skills to work one on one with different types of learners as they study in a student-centric way. The tools that teachers build and distribute in the user networks of the future will play a key role in making learning student-centric. The next generation of teachers needs to learn how to build these tools for different types of learners.
  • Parents should seek for their children at an early age exploration opportunities that they can do with their children at home and that are fun but that would also identify students’ interests and learning styles and allow for the celebration of their uniqueness.

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