Disrupting Class, chapter 2

People have been trying to reform the Educational System for over a generation. Christensen cheerfully suggests that these efforts are largely doomed due to the interdependence of the system's parts.

For example, suppose someone developed an innovative way to teach 6th-grade language arts. Even if everyone thought this was a swell idea, what would it take to implement it?  You would need to coordinate the curriculum with what precedes it (fifth grade) and with what follows (seventh grade and beyond) - and note that the fifth grade teachers are probably in different buildings, reporting to different administrators. If the innovation is cross-curricular (such as project-based learning) the curriculum and training for entire departments would have to be modified. Eventually, teaching colleges would have to change their curriculum, and how all this fits in with state and federal mandates and content-area "standards" is almost too complex to imagine.  Did I mention teacher contracts?

By contrast, the "system" of the electric lamp is completely independent. If you want to introduce a new technology (such as the CFL light bulb) your only requirement is that you design something that can be screwed into a lamp socket.  Similarly, you can pretty much do anything you want with the lamp, as long as it interfaces with (plugs in to) a 110V electrical socket. (By the way, "Windows" is another example of an interdependent system; change one line of code and you pretty much have to redesign the entire operating system.)

In order to "change the system", therefore, you need what Christensen calls a "disruptive innovation". He used the transistor to explain the concept.

Within a relatively few years, the transistor replaced vacuum tubes as the dominant technology in the production of radios, TVs, etc. But it would not have succeeded if it had challenged vacuum technology head-on. Transistors were too expensive and insufficiently powerful to be used in the large table-top radios that were then commonplace - but they were perfectly suited for small portable radios, which did not then exist. Even though the sound quality wasn't particularly good, for teenagers looking for a way to listen to the World Series in chemistry class - or to music out of earshot of their parents - this new technology was better than nothing. Having a market in which to develop without “competition”, transistor technology matured, became less expensive and eventually replaced vacuum tubes altogether.

So what’s the disruptive innovation that will transform education?

For 25 years we have been proclaiming the computer to be the Next Big Breakthrough in education, but it hasn’t materialized. In too many classrooms, computers sit in a row, underused, because – literally - nobody knows what to do with them! The reason: too often the computer has been viewed, not as an innovation, but as an ad-on, another way to do what we’re already doing.

(State College has avoided the worst of this by gradually and systematically “rolling out” computer technology, (one grade level at a time at the elementary level). This has allowed the innovators and early-adopters to discover what could be done. As they share with their colleagues what they’ve learned, the adoption of the technology is less intimidating for those who follow.)