File: Tuttle032709BkDisruptingClass

Clayton M Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W Johnson. Disrupting Class How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns.    For teachers, administrators, Boards of Education, Schools of Education, technology Directors    $21.75   Amazon.com

Harry Grover Tuttle

Christensen, Horn, and Johnson's book uses a business lens to analyze education and suggest drastic disruptive ways for improvement.  The authors start with the premise that students learn in various learning styles (Gardner's' Multiple Intelligences) and schools have failed to address this root cause for students' inability to learn. For example,  schools teach each subject area  in its own specific intelligence such as Math in mathematical intelligence  and those students who do not favor this intelligence do poorly in the subject.  Because schools have done  a superior task of keeping up with the constantly changing goals imposed on them such as having a math and science focus, the writers feel that schools need a disruption to change from  a monolithic (one size fits all) to a student-centric  teaching-learning approach (students learn standards and do well on high-stake tests through customized learning  based on learning styles). These disruptions will not take place within the school system but outside the system.

Disruptive innovation is not a change or improvement but a drastically  different way of doing things, For  example, Apple introduced its IIe computer not to compete with DEC's minicomputer market but as a toy for a different audience. The  present technology use  in school is not disruptive; it is crammed inside the already existing ways of learning.  Disruptive school technologies will be student-centric technologies. The authors  highlight two disruptive areas: online learning  and tutorials.  Online learning transformed instruction when there was no alternative. They state they by 2018 50 % of students will learn online. These disruptive technologies offer fixed learning goals but variable learning time and style of learning. Likewise, teachers will change from teaching (preparing, teaching and testing) to tutoring.

Disruption has two stages: the product is more affordable, simpler to use, and fills a void and then the second stage requires building and upgrading the product.  The authors argue  there is a void in that, at present, textbooks are produced by intellectual cliques who work in the dominant intelligence of the subject.  These researches  feel that very soon teachers and students will have computer-based learning products to design student centric programs and then education will flip. The disruption toward student-centric learning will allow promote the creation of user-generated content. Students will build products that help them teach other students; virtual tutors will tailor the way the students learn a subject.  Students, parents and friends will create collaborative learning libraries. These learning modules will be combined into complete custom-configured courses. These learning disruptions will occur  outside of school.  In a similar vein, public schools should study charter schools (an innovation but not a disruptive one)  to find the best curricular architecture for different categories of students. Similarly, schools-within-schools may form heavyweight teams from all disciplines to figure out how to help individual students using an “If...then..” approach. Schools need to codify what works best for various categories of students.

The authors chide the present status of educational research. Present day studies are descriptive based on the average student.  However, these studies do not have predictability such as under what conditions students can learn the subject area using their learning style to be successful; for example,   if a student is strong in visual intelligence, then the student can do ... to be successful in science.   Furthermore, the researchers do not investigate the anomalies that could cause them to reconsider their categorization of the data and explore more in-depth explanations of learning. In addition, they criticize schools for not having a common language to frame problems and think of solutions.

They conclude by urging that schools to  have a full time online course person who helps to improve the learning in this alternative way of learning. They urge funding that helps schools learn how different people learn, how to identify those differences, and how different students can best educate themselves.

This book opens educators' eyes to how to the disruptions that are necessary for all students to succeed and the power of technology to help this process.

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