Book Report: “Disrupting Class”

I spent part of a week at the beach reading “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns” by Clayton Christensen. Here’s a summary in three parts.

The great advantage of the one-room schoolhouse that was the dominant educational model of 19th-century America was that every student received what we would now call "individualized instruction."  This was a necessary consequence of teaching a room of students of vastly differing ages and abilities. What followed, however - the standardized, factory-model that became prevalent in the last century - was not only a response to increased urbanization, it was seen as a desirable improvement: factories were proving to be an effective and efficient engine of economic prosperity. Why wouldn't this work for education?

But over the last forty years, two things happened. First, it became clear that having a relatively small percentage of our students educated to their full potential is no longer sufficient. (Until then, it was by design that only the elite received an education beyond high school; for example, we educated engineers who could design and manage factories in which the less educated could be successfully employed.)

The second was a growing recognition - among both educators and later, neuroscientists - that there is no single measure of intelligence; rather, people have (as first described by Howard Gardner) "multiple intelligences", or aptitudes. (The list varies, but it goes roughly like this: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Most people rate highly in only two or three areas.) We also discovered that students learn in different ways, often in alignment with their personal areas of strength. (For example, students who are high in spatial intelligence tend to learn best when they can "visualize" the concept being taught.)

This has interesting implications for math instruction, to give one example. Not only are students who do well in math typically high in "logical-mathematical" intelligence, they tend to be taught – particularly in high school and beyond - by teachers of similar aptitude. Overwhelmingly, those who go on to become math professors come from the same pool of students. In turn, they teach the next generation of math teachers using the same methods – and the cycle continues. As Christensen put it, "members of intellectual cliques are often unaware of the extent to which their shared patterns of thinking exclude those with strengths in other kinds of intelligences."

One of the ironies of No Child Left Behind is that its emphasis on standardization almost guarantees that some children will be left behind. The standardized testing that is at the heart of NCLB favors students with linguistic and mathematical intelligence, at the exclusion of others.

 (The cycle breaks down, notably, when the next generation of math teachers are taught by education professors who understand the importance of different learning styles. That’s why university education and math faculties tend to see this issue differently.)

This presents educators with an big challenge: how do you educate every student if every student can’t be taught the same way? (To do this within our current system is very expensive: on average, a special education student with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) costs about twice as much to educate as a “regular” ed student.) However, it should be noted that some success has been achieved at the elementary level, when several adults are available to assist students at multiple learning stations.

While our students would clearly benefit from a customized, “student-centric” education, how do we get from here (standardization) to there (mass customization)?