Blogging Disrupting Class #14: Conclusion

The previous post summarizes how Chapter 9 discusses how to give schools the right structure to innovate. The concluding chapter of Disrupting Class reviews the book's five major messages and advice to its target audiences.

This chapter's opening vignette is a nice scenario of some of the things many people would like to see in schools (pp.223-224) -- a "kinder place" where students can make choices about what they study and are "allowed to stretch themselves"; where learning tools allow more variation in learning approaches, among other features. Notably absent in this brief vignette is any evidence of teacher involvement with students -- no lecturing, but no guidance either, merely observing. Perhaps guidance is implied in the scenario, although Disrupting Class has a lot to say about how learning tools will change education, and not much about the teacher's role in this new world.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book's five major messages with a bit of an odd lead-in: an exhortation not to give up, that "now is exactly the wrong time to quit" (p.225) -- who proposed quitting on education reform, I wonder? Who is the intended audience for this remark? Don't know. Anyway, a summary of the book's five major messages (pp.225-226) with commentary:

1) Most previous reforms didn't address the root cause of students' inability to learn (customizing vs. standardizing, I presume), and they weren't guided by an understanding of "why the system functions as it does or how to predictably introduce innovation into it." But as a result, "we now have an opportunity for great progress." Reformers do seem to have a lack for ignoring systemic functions when it comes to education; Christensen et al. do a great service in moving us farther along in this direction, although there are additional systemic functions which they've not accounted for (e.g., custodial, socialization) in their focus on improving learning.

2) Disruptive innovation happens by going around and underneath the existing system, not by direct confrontation. This is another of the book's great insights and contributions, as far as it goes.

3) We need to educate children by customizing education via a modular system rather than by standardizing it. Agreed as far as it goes -- but the book has not done a very good job of dealing with the need for customized results, focusing instead on customized inputs.

4) Emerging online user networks are among the best places to create this new system.
Perhaps -- but what will drive users to do this? Also see comments below.

5) School administrators and leaders will need to "use the tools of power and separation" -- specifically, via chartered and private schools. I suppose that's one solution -- but the case has not been made that this is a comprehensive solution.

This leads to their specific advice for different stakeholders (p.226-230), all of which naturally stem from recommendations in earlier chapters:

- School leaders (administrators, elected officials) should have one person, and eventually one organization, "whose sole job is to implement online courses" -- someone with broad autonomy who reports directly to the principal or superintendent. If this creates a sort of 'school within a school', no problem, so long as you're not having online programs compete with existing programs. These are good recommendations in their own right, independent of the author's wholistic solution.

- Philanthropies and foundations: fund this disruption, specifically "research that helps us learn how different people learn" and how students can "best educate themselves and each other" because learning needs to be driven by intrinsic motivation since prosperity is diminishing extrinsic motivation. Sounds reasonable at first glance, but this last comment adds an almost sinister tone to it. The authors are right about the dynamic to some extent, but this formulation greatly oversimplifies things -- extrinsic motivation has hardly disappeared, for example. Does this recommendation mean "fund research that will help us figure out how to get students to buy into the program", say of standardized outcomes? Ultimately, such research would quickly discover that the issue is not how students learn, but that there is a larger cultural context which needs to be addressed.

- teacher training colleges: stop teaching teachers to do monolithic, teacher-led content delivery; start learning how to teach in a student-centric way and learn how to build tools for the next generation of learners. The recommendation is rational and sound and something I would support. On some level, however, I think this recommendation simply disses teacher training colleges. By nature, they have to be reactive institutions, or if they are proactive, why should they get on board with this proposed solution as opposed to the dozens of others floating about? It's hard to see this recommendation going anywhere without much additional context.

- Grad schools of education: get beyond descriptive research that seeks average tendencies; study anomalies and outliers to gain richer insights. Sounds good to me; sounds like a great direction for action research. So why did the earlier chapter link this to experimentally designed research with randomized controlled trials and the like?

- Teachers, parents, and students: demand that your local schools offer online versions of unavailable courses. Seek user networks and tools to help your students learn troublesome concepts. When possible, build them yourself. Parents, also see opportunities that identify students' interests and learning styles. This advice is off on many levels. Exhorting students and parents to demand online courses sounds like a pretty weak strategy for encouraging nonconsumers to participate. (Fortunately, I suspect that there are plenty of practitioners out there who have developed or discovered more effective ways of encouraging the growth of online courses.) The next two recommendations are going nowhere with most parents (except the home schoolers): which parents have time to find or build these things? That's what the education system is for (I'm guessing most of them would say). Identify student interests and learning styles when they're young? I tried that to an extent with some limited success. But even as a career educator who has some concept of what learning styles are, I could not tell you what my son's learning style is. (another hint: it changed frequently over the years). How are parents going to be able to do this without massive cooperation from the educational system?
Oh, and teachers, help out with this please.

The final concluding paragraph is unconvincing and (I suspect) a bit offputting to much of its target audience (especially the aforementioned teachers). The authors' recommendations will lead to opportunities "that make teaching professionally rewarding" (as if it is currently bereft of rewards?) and will "transform our schools from being economic and politcal liabilities to sources of solutions and strength"? This last comment is discordant and far harsher than the earlier chapters where the accomplishments of schools as "sources of solutions and strength" were acknowledged. Perhaps the authors were in too much of a hurry to finish the book to make the more subtle argument that schools have accomplished great things to date, but changes are needed to accommodate the changes in demands being made on them. Instead, this last comment must feel like a bit of a slap in the face to many educators who will read it.

The next post will be a summary commentary on the entire book. It may turn out to be a review, or a pre-review commentary -- we'll see how it goes...

Chapter 9
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