Blogging Disrupting Class #13: Chapter 9 -- Giving Schools Structure to Innovate

The previous post summarizes how Chapter 8 discusses strategies for forging a consensus for change. Chapter 9 discusses how to give schools the right structure to innovate.

This chapter's opening vignette is intended to illustrate how schools fail to accommodate students with different needs, so some students go astray when they might have done better in a differently structured learning environment (pp.197-199). Generically, Disrupting Class has identified and articluated an important problem, in keeping with the need for customizing the learning experience for students. As usual, the devil is in the details. For example, I found myself distracted by the vignette's depiction of one's student's doodling in class as a sign that he needed "a school with more unconventional programming -- more art, more creative kinds of writing, more music" (p.198). Or "a chartered school like KIPP" which teaches students how to pay attention (p.199, 197)?

Um, I've got a better idea -- how 'bout providing more opportunities for art, creative writing, and music in the current school? And instead of labeling doodling not as a sign that a student is off track or not paying attention, recognize that it could mean many things, for example a self-managing strategy for bright students to stay relatively focused and pay attention (as my own son's 6th grade teacher did)? Or perhaps we could come up with some even better ideas for how to help students who have been routinely saturated by information- and visually-rich and user-controlled environments of new media, cope with the relatively information-poor environment with low user control which is the traditional classroom lecture?

Back to the narrative. In the next section of Disrupting Class, an extended anecdote about Data General was able to design a new minicomputer to beat the existing competition (DEC) illustrates the need for existing organizations to "use the tool of separation" to make fundamental changes (pp.199-201). The next section describes four types of problems which innovators confront and the types of teams required to deal with them: functional, lightweight, heavyweight, and autonomous (pp. 201-207). Next, Disrupting Class applies this model to public education. In their view, public schools are built mostly around functional (e.g., discipline-specific; grade-specific) or lightweight (e.g., department heads; cross-curricular teams such as those employed by Writing Across the Curriculum projects) teams (pp.207-208). These types of teams enable schools to perform certain types of tasks, but they are ill-suited for major redesign because such teams are prone to "endless debates, begrudging compromise, and little change" (p.210).

Enter the heavyweight teams -- although these "can take several forms," Christensen et al. spend the bulk of their time on touting chartered schools (pp.210-216), which offer several distinct advantages: they provide "the tool of separation," allowing innovative educators to bypass existing district and departmental structures and enroll faculty with the flexibility to create "new architectures for learning" (p.210). One guiding assumption is that students have different life circumstances, so they need different school architectures (p.211). This point echoes one from the vignette which bothered me: the notion that schools (or school architectures) can somehow be maximized at the school level. This notion seems to require assuming that students can be categorized into discrete groups, and a school (ideally a chartered school?) can be created to satisfy the needs of each group. This assumption is stated more clearly later on as follows: if a student comes from a certain background and set of life circumstances, that student should attend a school designed to work with that particular configuration (p.211).*

According to Christensen et al., this need kicks in after elementary school; the geographical categorization scheme currently in use makes reasonable sense at the elementary school level to the extent that this enables schools to do their jobs of fostering democracy "by assimiliating people into their communities and allowing people from all sorts of backgrounds to mix" (p.211). Setting aside the obvious limitations of segregated communities for a moment (as the authors note in Note #4, p.220), the big question is whether or not this makes sense at any level. My first reaction is that it doesn't. What are the appropriate background and life circumstances which define the appropriate categories, the sine qua non to "get the categorization scheme right" (p.212)?
Their supporting example re KIPP illustrates the difficulties involved. Critics point out (and Christensen et al. agree) that KIPP's SLANT methodology is inappropriate for many students; their point is that it is appropriate for some, and that KIPP should be considered only one category of school (p.213). But here's the question: why does this have to be at the school level? What evidence is there that there are students who need this approach throughout their entire schooling? What if this KIPP methodology is something that some students need for awhile, but then need to move on after they master it? Do they move on to another school? Again, why does this approach have to be institutionalized at the school level, rather than further modularized within each school?

The next example highlights additional difficulties: the Met School in Providence, RI has a project-based curriculum built around real-world internships and self-chosen projects (p.214). I agree that this school is probably not for every child, but the statement "it would be wrong to think that project-based learning is best for all students" is misguided. Why frame the choice as a school which is entirely project-based, vs. a multitude of schools where project-based learning is part of the mix? In this sense, current reality is in many respects already far ahead of Disrupting Class's model.**

So this argument is a bit muddled for me. Amidst the muddle, however, there are couple of nuggets worth pulling out and shining up. The first is that some chartered schools such as the High Tech High in San Diego (p.215) seem to be good examples of how chartered schools can allow substantive change to occur -- although again, the need for innovations to be organized at the school level rather than within the school is not clear.

The other nugget is indirectly noted: that High Tech High (and many other chartered schools) are able to "assemble a team of teachers interested in stimulating kids to assume responsibility for their own learning" (p.215). At one level, I believe the technical term for this is "cherry-picking" -- as no doubt many chartered schools are able to do with students as well. But this is the same thing that private schools routinely do. At another level, in an ideal world, would we not pay this much attention to all our students? Perhaps by providing more avenues to create new "architectures", chartered schools will help draw attention to the fact that they are ultimately a niche solution, and that the larger solution requires far more sweeping cultural changes -- for instance, developing a culture in which everyone really does value education (and justifiably so) and is willing to do what it takes to support that.

The last part of this chapter talks about how to spread and codify new architectures. This includes a statement which further clarifies the authors' key assumption that how students learn best is a problem fixable by matching the student with the school architecture (p.217). Again, there is some truth to this -- witness how parents select private schools for their children based on some specific criteria which have some degree of merit. In fact, that's a very revealing analogy, particularly because such parents (in my experience) make such selections on many other criteria besides how their children learn best -- gender, athletics, reputation, facilities, class size, for instance -- much the way that college selections are made. Which reminds us that education is for most people a lot more than figuring out "how students learn best" -- however that is defined.

The final two paragraphs are rather unsatisfying: they argue for gaining acceptance of chartered schools by targeting them toward students who have not succeeded elsewhere. In other words, don't bother with trying to introduce project-based learning, student-generated content, and other innovative strategies to the mainstream because they will resist such changes the way they resisted progressive learning (p.218-219)? Sounds a bit cynical and defeatist to me.

*The other big assumption here, which has run throughout the book but is worth repeating here, is that the schools are in such a state that disruptive change is necessary. Sustaining or incremental change won't do.

**As a side note, in this context I wish I knew more about how the School of the Future in West Phila. worked. I saw a presentation about this school in June, but I don't know how that school fits into Christensen et al.'s model.

Chapter 8
Chapter 7 (Part 2)
Chapter 7 (Part 1)
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4 (Part 3)
Chapter 4 (Part 2)
Chapter 4 (Part 1)
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
Introduction