Disrupting Class

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and purveyor of the prevailing theories of disruption, has finally applied these powerful theories to the topic of public education in the US. If any sector of our society is desperately in need of disruption, it is public education and the satellite industries that have emerged over the past 100+ years to support it, particularly the textbook publishing industry.

The theory of disruption states that technologies will be deployed in a sustaining way by incumbents in the industry who have an interest in keeping the primary value proposition, and the underlying economic model, intact. After all, these companies have invested, sometimes enormous amounts of capital, in building their infrastructure for creating, delivering and maintaining their value proposition.

Other enterprises will use technology in a disruptive way. The disruption will be an economic one – the fundamental value proposition will change, and with it the underlying economic model too. The change is often manifest in the creation of consumption among populations who have not been able to consume before. Christensen speaks of jobs that consumers hire products to do. The disruption, then, occurs when a technology is deployed in such a way as to allow consumers to get jobs done that were either too difficult and/or expensive to do before. Interestingly (and a concept often misunderstood by casual readers of Christensen), the disruptive technology is almost never the latest, greatest technology. It is often technology deemed to be insufficient to accomplish the job performed by incumbent products, and so frequently overlooked by the marketplace until the new job it enables emerges. In his early writing, Christensen used the shrinking disk-drive technology as a classic illustration of disruption.

Rather than go into a full review of Disrupting Class, let me invite you to read it for yourself and participate in the active blogs about this important book (see for example techlearning, and Learning Technology). Instead, I’d like to make the following observations specific to the textbook industry that so dominates the category of instructional materials:

The textbook publishing industry: A necessary sub-disruption to the grand disruption
The textbook industry seems almost a comically apt case of an industry badly in need of disruption. At the beginning of the 21st century the industry is still focused almost exclusively on monolithic value propositions, on deployments of technology that require extensive buy-in and training for successful deployment, and on an ever increasing glut of features in the current base value proposition, with adoption packages famous for their “everything plus the kitchen sink” approach. Web pages, DVD-ROMs, wall posters, teacher guides, textbooks, workbooks, consumables, manipulatives.

The industry, despite many loud objections to the contrary, is pursuing a non-innovative, sustaining approach to building value. Pearson’s California Social Studies and their enVisionMath programs are but two examples of programs touted for their innovative design or distribution, but which at the end of the day do not allow any new jobs to be performed.

To the veterans of three decades of instructional technology disappointment, keep the faith
In Disrupting Class Christensen highlights the proper deployment of technology in the classroom as an opportunity to accomplish a job that hasn’t been possible to date – the customization of learning to the styles and needs of each individual student. This has been met by veterans in the instructional technology efforts underway since the late 1970s with a resounding “Yes, we’ve heard this all for over 30 years and nothing seems to change.” I hope these veterans will recognize that the difficult change that has been coming via technology will take more time and more critical mass than has been created to date. So far, technology has not been deployed in such a way as to facilitate the performance of new jobs. Hint: customization will simultaneously empower teachers and automate many of the tasks of evaluating students, selecting content and learning experiences, and monitoring progress.

The missing link: Emergence
One of the fundamental features of properly deployed technology that I believe Christensen and co-authors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson missed in the book is emergence. Highly connected deployments of technology with sufficient data gathering and analyzing capability should be able to deliver to teachers, parents and students in the educational context what Amazon delivers to shoppers and iTunes delivers to music lovers and NetFlix delivers to movie watchers – pattern matching to enhance decision making and influence behaviors. The web as a mechanism for identifying and making useful emergent behaviors cannot be underestimated as a powerful (and perhaps necessary) tool for accomplishing the disruption imagined by the authors. To be fair, they do identify social networks as an important trend, but they fall into the trap of overestimating the willingness of a population to become authors, or the value of existing content placed into the context of a social network (through remixes, usage patterns, etc.).

Underestimating the need to reform educational regulation
The authors also give short shrift to the necessity of overhauling the state-wide adoption process. They equate education with other regulated industries, using the example of Southwest airlines figuring out how to operate in a different manner under a heavily regulated airline industry. However airlines and other historically regulated industries are different from public education in one very critical aspect – public education not only regulates the behavior of various parties, it also controls almost 100% of the funding. In other countries (India and China to select two salient examples) there is a substantial societal expectation that high quality education will only come by parents participating as direct consumers in the marketplace. In other words, there is an established pattern of private money funding a large variety of educational activities within these societies. The result is that it is easier by an order of magnitude to innovate and utilize traditional marketplace mechanisms in these circumstances.

An example of how powerful this can be can be seen in Educomp, the rapidly growing Indian education technology company (and also a Learning.com investor). Starting by providing turn-key instructional technology solutions to private schools in India, the company has rapidly innovated beyond this original offering, taking similar products to public schools, offering tutoring and math help tools online, launching their own brand of brick-and-mortal private school, etc. It is interesting to note that the US is the highly regulated, innovation-suppressing market in education, and places like China are the hotbeds of innovation and entrepreneurship.

More focus on entrepreneurship, please
Finally, just a reiteration of the role of enterprise formation and bringing true innovations to the marketplace in education: Disrupting Class envisions a world in which technology facilitates teachers’ ability to address every student individually. The only way this future will become a reality is if the private sector is able to bring the necessary tools to market and gain sufficient critical mass to be able to continually innovate with these tools. Philanthropy and government projects will not yield game-changing, disruptive products and services necessary for the bigger disruption of the prevailing educational paradigm to occur. In the conclusion to the book the authors do encourage entrepreneurs that “[i]nvesting in technological platforms … will have extraordinary impact. … Funding the development of these platforms and the user networks within with these learning tools can be exchanged will be financially rewarding …” But very little about the book (or Christensen’s body of writing in general) is directed at, or overtly prescriptive of, the specific steps entrepreneurs need to take, or the steps various players (regulators, legislators, customers, etc.) need to take in order to enable a more fertile entrepreneurial environment. More needs to be written and done about this in order for the vision of Christensen, and the generations of believers in the transformative power of instructional technology before him, to be realized.

Bottom line for me: this is a must-read book. They got a lot of the analysis right. They posed questions and challenges that will no doubt flummox those whose interests are aligned with the status quo in education. Much more discussion and action is required in order to address these issues. But throughout the book Christensen et al offer an incredibly optimistic view of how education can (and will) be transformed.

Long live the disruption!

Oregon K-6 Math Adoption 2008

In perhaps a fit of irrationality, or hubris, or creative genius, depending on your perspective and the time of day, Learning.com recently attempted to get a completely online-delivered K-6 math program adopted in the State of Oregon.

(For background information on this adoption, please follow this link. For interesting overviews of state adoptions in general, you can read my previous post "The Future of Instructional Materials", and view the presentation I gave last year at EdNet in Chicago. You can also check out interesting critiques of the adoption process by searching for anything by Diane Ravitch, including the Fordham Institutes "Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoptions" published back in 2005, which includes an introduction by Ravitch. Ravitch has also authored a book on the subject, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn" also available in a Kindle version.)

I'll leave a more profound and philosophical discussion of textbook adoptions to others -- for now, my subject is our particular experience in trying to get our online math curriculum adopted by the State of Oregon.

The state had published its guidelines for this adoption, so the criteria we were going to be judged by were clear. The educational guidelines included 17 criteria, for which we would receive a score from 0-10. The scores on the 17 criteria would be totalled up and if we received an 80% score (i.e. 136 points out of a possible 170) we would be adopted and invited onto the state's "caravan" of adopted mathematics materials from which districts could select their chosen materials.

At this point I'd like to comment, in case you're wondering, that the adoption process is the gateway to $4.3 billion worth of annual business for publishers. The process is difficult, bureaucratic, arcane, and logistically nightmarish. These two factors -- the size and the complexity of the adoption process -- have driven the publishing industry to consolidate to three primary players -- Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton-Mifflin/Harcourt, only one of which is a US-based company (McGraw-Hill). So for a company the size of Learning.com to go after a prize so clearly in the realm of the multi-billion-dollar publishers could be viewed as a little nutty, or very brave indeed.

Back to the story. We spent our time preparing for the review by adding curriculum to our offering (fortunately, our platform allows us to rapidly deploy any kind of modular digital content, so adding content from third party sources is very easy). We licensed some additional content and created a compelling (in our opinion) presentation of a very flexible and complete course of study.

When we got to the review, we were graded down on items like Spanish language support and the availability of manipulatives (two factors we knew we were weak on). We were also graded down on presenting the material with a Lexile score (even though we had worked with the folks at MetaMetrix and they had written us a letter saying they didn't know how to provide a Lexile score for interactive content). So going in we were already down 30 points, leaving us very little margin for error.

The next feedback we got was that the panel felt our program would be too infrastructure intensive and require too much training for teachers to effectively use. This was actually incredibly valuable feedback and has led to a lot of additional ideas within our company. The panel also noted that we didn't really address differentiated learning very effectively, which struck us as an unfortunate oversight on their part. Our platform is built to differentiate all the way down to the individual student, and to address each student through the combination of linear instruction, engaging interactivity, individual and group projects and game play that suits them best. However, we took the feedback as a challenge to more effectively present the value of our solution.

At the end of the day, we missed being adopted by about 8 percentage points, or a total of 14 points. We would have preferred to be adopted, but going through the experience helped us learn a lot:

• We can deliver a curriculum that meets state standards (no one on the panel questioned our coverage of standards)
• We have a lot of work to do to present our solution as the easy-to-use solution that it really is.
  
• We need to reach out to additional third party suppliers for things like manipulatives and multiple language support.

We also learned some not so pleasant things. Despite providing log-in credentials for all members of the review panel -- 14 in all -- only 4 people actually logged on to the Learning.com site and review the material. Also, there was a palpable reticence on the part of the educators on the panel to consider dramatically different forms of delivery for instructional materials, and different instructional methods implied by the delivery mechanism. These things are troubling.

Nothing in this experience has changed my mind that the adoption process represents an overly bureaucratic, unnecessarily rigid barrier to innovation in the core areas of instructional materials. I can't help but believe that education could be dramatically improved if we were to dramatically overhaul the process by which instructional materials are selected and used by schools. And if we found a mechanism for accountability for decisions that are made by state and district review panels.

Until that reform comes, we'll continue to chip away at the process. Next year there are interesting adoptions in Florida and Alabama. We plan to be there.

Back to School Night

I recently went to "back to school" night at my daughter's middle school. She's in seventh grade, the second year of multiple classes with multiple teachers. This middle school seems to take it's work ethic very seriously -- every teacher believes they are preparing their students for success in high school by giving consistent nightly homework. It is literally the case that my daughter spends anywhere from 2-4 hours per night performing homework. Much of this work I would characterize as "logistics" (i.e. collecting, sorting, stapling, figuring out how to get a piece of writing to show up on the worksheet given out by the teacher) or "busywork" (i.e. repeated exercises on worksheets, fill-in the blank questions, etc.).

During this "back to school" night, we parents followed our children's schedules for seven minute meetings with each teacher. One of the teachers that my daughter has told us that while she will post the homework assignment on her web page, she won't post the actually worksheet or reading material, because she wants her students to "learn responsibility."

The further away from that moment I get, the more it drives me crazy. Responsibility? I imagine that this teacher thinks that she is doing the business world a favor by drilling into her students that they must protect and keep track of her precious worksheets. But the fact is, as an employer, I don't really care if my employees can keep track of individual pieces of paper. I care that they can perform the tasks associated with the documents they deal with. And I trust that in this age of digital communications, they will figure out how best to deal with the documents they need.

It is often the case that my employees will ask for a document to be emailed to them, or to be made available on a common storage server on our network. By accommodating my employees in this way I accept that there are better ways to do things than by photocopying one per employee and expecting them to keep track of it.

For a seventh grade teacher to assume that the skill of keeping track of a piece of paper is more important than the work that is associated with that piece of paper is really ridiculous. I hope that it is a reflection of her mistaken understanding of what "responsibility" means in the real world, and not just a cynical mechanism to establish and maintain power over helpless students.

1:1 Redux

2008 has been, by some accounts, the year of the explosion of the education-focused subnotebook (the EdSub).

In April, Intel released the 2nd generation of its Classmate design spec. HP announced it's own design of a EdSub -- the Mini-Note 2133. OLPC had major news of its own -- the ability to have your completely open-sourced laptop configured with the mother of all anti-open-source operating systems, Microsoft Windows. See the announcement here.

The flurry of activity this year still begs the question of usage models. As far as I can tell, there are no generally accepted models of instruction that are designed specifically for a 1:1 student to computer ratio. So even at $200 or $300 per unit, there doesn't seem to be a massive rush to outfit every student with a laptop.

In fact, some educators I've spoken to have indicated a willingness to question whether laptops are the way to go at all. One educator in South Carolina shared their district's intention of achieving 1:1 ratios with thin client computers. They found that the maintenance costs of laptops far overshadowed the value of being able to move the computer around -- that there were plenty of valuable improvements to be had with 1:1 without assuming the cost of allowing mobility.

Outside of the US, large scale deployments of 1:1 initiatives seem to reside primarily in the realm of headline grabbers -- not so much in the realm of effective solutions for improving education. One company I'm familiar with has invested substantially into 1:1 computing in schools in India, only to realize that the Indian education system, with its emphasis on teacher-in-front, fact-regurgitation-based learning, and its relative lack of reliable Internet infrastructure to schools, let alone homes, was not a ripe market for 1:1 laptops necessarily. Lots of instructional methodologies and infrastructural issues need to be addressed before the investment can be expected to pay off.

Interestingly, the US remains the primary market for 1:1 programs to be deployed, and thus the primary location where effective instructional methodologies will be developed and evaluated. I continue to maintain that having an easy-to-use, web-based environment that facilitates managing content, student data, communications, collaboration, will be a critical piece to insure the success of any 1:1 initiative.

Emergent Behavior in K12

Emergence is describe in the Wikipedia article by the same name in the following way: "An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective."

The WNYC science-oriented radio show RadioLab featured a great episode dedicated solely to emergence back in 2005. One of the most memorable images of the show was the description of fireflies in Thailand that somehow glow in synchrony. The image above is a photograph of these amazing fireflies.

Capturing emergent behavior has been one of the key value-added contributions of online services like Amazon, Facebook, Google, eBay and many others.

I'm wondering where the tools for capturing emergent behavior in education are?

The idea would be this: monitor behavioral data, assessment data, and other data (learning styles, preferences etc.) over a sufficient population, and you should begin seeing patterns. Capture the patterns and publish them back to the population, and you can expect the population to leverage the feedback loop to accelerate their way toward more innovative solutions to vexing educational problems than any single expert or publisher could find on their own.

Imagine if Amazon tried to assemble a panel of experts on contemporary fiction to anticipate every type of individual and prescribe for them a recommended next book based on their expertise. Any frequent user of Amazon takes for granted that the service will recommend books based on previous buying behavior. What they likely fail to appreciate fully is the enormous complexity and data cruching required to make even a meaningful minority of those recommendations hit close to home.

Noe imagine if there were sufficient data flowing in real time about the variety of instructional modalities applied to a large population of students, each anonymously characterized by previous assessment data, learning style, age, etc. If the system could track a large variety of content, and teacher/student interactions and behavior, and were designed with a robust data analysis capacity, then emergent trends could be captured and republished for use by the population. Example: a teacher of fifth graders is suddenly confronted for the first time in her career with 5 ELL students who are having a tough time grasping fractions. The emergent trend enging could help that teacher identify instructional practices and content that have proven effective at helping similar students elsewhere and at another time.

Given the proliferation of such data-driven tools in virtually every other aspect of our lives (books, travel, health, online search, finance, etc.) it is surprising to me that the value of capturing emergent behavior in education hasn't been realized to date.

Innovation Chicken or Egg

Much has been written lately about the need for the US public school system to prepare students to be innovative. The recent NECC conference in Atlanta was reported to be about innovation (http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=7232).

You don't have to think very hard about it to see the inherent paradox in that desire.

I'll warn you that this post could be considered political. I really don't mean it to be political as much as I mean it to be as objective an observation as I can make. The fact of the matter is that the US public education system has not established itself as a model of innovation. How can it expect to be the conduit of innovative capabilities for a whole new generation of its graduates?

In the business world, there are few things discussed more than innovation. Here are a few links to illustrate what I mean:

Official Measure of Innovation (BusinessWeek)
This article discusses the need for a way to measure innovation in a business setting. How would we measure innovation in education?

Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain
Clayton Christensen has build an empire on discussing innovation in a variety of business contexts. He has created the language of "disruption" and discussed how to leverage technology to allow customers to do things with your products that they couldn't do before. What does disruption mean in the context of public education? Who is applying Christensen's approaches to public education (besides the education entrepreneurs)?

The Why, What, and How of Management Innovation
Where are the innovations in management structure, job functions, motivation, coordination in our schools?

I know there are a million reasons why this type of innovation isn't happening within the public school system. Work rules, parental pressure to focus on basics/music/PE, political pressure, budget pressure, etc.

Some may argue that charter schools and special focus options (or magnet schools) represent innovation in public education. I'd argue that point. I've got some personal experience with these types of answers to the innovation challenge, and while there seems to be some opportunity there, most of the time these programs seem to become isolated bastions for parents motivated enough to get their kids into something "better" than vanilla public schools. They don't end up generating the kind of repeatable, scalable, sustainable changes throughout the system that true innovation will yield.

Here are some things that I think are required for a culture and environment of innovation to be present:

Rewards. Hate to beat the capitalist dead horse, but until there are clear rewards offered to those who care to innovate, there will be very little true innovation. And there are plenty of types of rewards, not just economic.

Appropriate outcomes criteria. Student outcomes seem to be the appropriate primary criteria to use. Scalability (outcome per unit of labor), cost efficiency (outcome per dollar expended), and sustainability (the success and associated cost of maintaining an innovation determined to be successful by whatever criteria) all seem to be reasonable additional criteria to measure.

Process for creating, capturing, refining, and deploying innovations. These are standard desires of any organization that wants to consider itself innovative.

How does the US public education system stack up even against this limited definition of a culture of innovation? I'll go out on a limb and say "not very well". I invite any and all who think differently to post your examples here.

Until our schools are environments where the employees (teachers and school administrators primarily) are encouraged and rewarded to identify problems, hypothesize solutions, test the solution, evaluate the test against broadly-accepted criteria, and see to it that the final solution is scalable, sustainable and cost effective, and until those employee are then rewarded in meaningful ways (economic and otherwise), then we can't really claim to have a culture of innovation within our schools. And until we do, it seems a fool's errand to think we can impart the necessary knowledge and skills for our students to become truly innovative.

I actually agree that students in the 21st century need to understand what innovation is, and I applaud the effort being put into raising awareness. I just hope that the call for innovation won't end up like the call for technology literacy, where everyone just assumed that if we say it then it automatically has happened, or that kids these days just know this stuff because they are part of the "millennial" or "digital native" generation.

The potential for technology literacy might be ingrained in our current generation of school children just because of the times, but the ability to put that potential to highly creative and highly productive use depends on gaining sufficient discipline in the broad skills and knowledge associated with digital technologies.

(By the way, beware of the anecdotes that people use to reinforce either that "we have it covered" mentality or the "digital natives will take care of their own" mentality. Anecdotes cover up a multitude of sins, and ultimately do not help accomplish what is required.)

By the same token, innovation isn't something we can just say "Let the kids run with it" and assume that we've got it covered. There is a language of innovation and there are tools for innovation. It takes more than an awareness that the world is interconnected and the ability to search Wikipedia. To really get this right will require that we start with a focus on the immense task of turning our public school system into bastions of innovation themselves.

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Can RTI be applied as a model for all instruction?

I've heard from a variety of our school district customers that they are interested in Response to Intervention, or RTI for short. The basic premise of RTI seems to be that a teacher can utilize formative assessment data in such a way as to apply interventions when gaps are identified, monitor the student's response to the intervention (thus the name), and determine what to do next based on additional data. The whole process is designed to provide rapid deployment of interventions and the evaluation of these interventions in a tight timeframe. The purpose of RTI is to catch gaps before they grow into serious learning problems, and to avoid having to channel students through special education programs who may not have diagnosable learning disabilities.

Here are a couple of good resources to learn more about Response to Intervention as an instructional strategy:

• Wikipedia article "Response to Intervention"
• The RTI Action Network
• RTI: A Primer for Parents

At Learning.com, we're trying to utilize technology in such a way that normal teachers can individualize instruction for every student. It seems to me that the RTI framework has a similar goal, albeit ostensibly focused on the needs of students demonstrating gaps in their knowledge and skills.

I wonder if the RTI framework, or a similar mechanism of data-driven decision making, could be applied to a broader population of students. Obviously students with severe learning disabilities need to be addressed in a way most appropriate for their particular situation. But what about students performing roughly at level? Or students designated as TAG students?

For example, if students are performing above benchmark for their age or grade level, perhaps an RTI-like evaluation could adjust the benchmark upward until the student is demonstrating a gap that can be addressed in an RTI-style intervention.

It seems that the primary difficulty in facilitating this type of approach would be a philosophical one: do we want students to continue progressing at their own pace through the above-grade-level standards? This seems like the right kind of problem to have, and is not that different from the conundrum of how to address talented and gifted students that the education system has wrestled with for decades.

Of course, from my perspective, it seems entirely desireable to allow children to go as far as they can, as fast as they can in any direction that seems right for them. Students who could utilize video games to learn math skills, or focused research to master aspects of history, etc. should be encouraged to do so, and the school system should never run out of things to engage that student.

Also, the technology to monitor student performance and behaviors with instructional experiences is here. The correct utilization of technology would facilitate not only the collection of such data, but also the evaluation of responses to a wide variety of interventions throughout a large population of students. With such rich data available, responses to intervention could be more and more accurately predicted, the cost (in labor, money and emotion) could be minimized to keep students on track and moving toward goals that are meaningful to them and to their teachers and parents too.

The technology could be effectively deployed to give teachers the at-a-glance info they need to know where all of their students are at any given moment. This would facilitate the possibility of essentially managing 25-30 kids on individualized learning tracks without going crazy.
If the technology can do it, it will be done eventually. It's just a matter of figuring out who, where and when.