Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson; McGraw-Hill; Price: $32.95 (Rs.1,615); 288 pp
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One of the greatest virtues of this book is that it has not been authored by education professors. This may seem an uncharitable way to begin a book review. So rather than lodge a “some-of-my-best-friends-are-education-faculty” defence, let me explain this is really what the theory of disruptive innovation is about.
According to Christensen et al, paradigmatic change is often the consequence of an outsider looking in — someone with the temerity to declare that the emperor is without clothes. In the context of this book, the ‘emperor’ is the US public education system, but it might just as easily be the British, Australian, or Indian education system.
The empire is crumbling, but imperial power continues to be unchallenged because there is a critical mass of satisfied subjects — a sufficient number of individuals who benefit materially from the system. From time to time, the emperor will act upon requests of these loyal subjects to improve the system, and minor tinkering sustains the system — a process the authors refer to as “sustaining innovation”.
Over time, however, without any fundamental change to the imperial system, the number of disgruntled subjects grows as they become increasingly poorly served (or not served at all). This is where the outsider comes in and exerts a disruptive influence, not by challenging the imperial power head-to-head, but by servicing the under-served. At first, the emperor perceives this to be little more than minor skirmishes on the peripheries of the empire. After a while, however, the standing of the impostor may grow to the point where erstwhile loyal subjects defect to the new regime. When this happens, in Christensen’s view, “disruptive innovation” has occurred.
The book is chock full of examples from other vocations and industries illustrating the power of disruptive innovation. Steamships disrupted sailing ships; telephones disrupted the telegraph, mini-computers disrupted mainframes; digital photography disrupted chemically-produced photography, and so on. In the process, seemingly dominant companies lost their markets, and were forced to close or undergo major restructuring. Christensen et al pose the same questions in relation to the education industry. Specifically, how is it that in an era when a vast array of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is at our fingertips (literally and metaphorically!), so many of our schools deliver lessons in a manner that has changed very little in a century or more?
The key message early in the book is that schools are typically mono-dimensional in their approach. Drawing upon Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences, the authors stress the importance of catering to different learning styles, warning that not doing so will inevitably create disaffected learners.
With the judicious employment of ICTs, on the other hand, it is possible to adopt learner-centric pedagogies, with each student given individualised learning paths (ILPs). But according to the authors, larger IT budgets in education don’t guarantee superior learning outcomes. In other words, there is little point in throwing technology at existing systems to make them work harder. Indeed, as the title of the book suggests, if technology is effectively harnessed, it will disrupt class, or at least educators’ traditional concept of a class.
The ramifications of disruptive innovation for teachers are considerable. First, it raises the fundamental question of ‘what is teaching’? Is it still appropriate to use the word ‘teach’ if the person who once stood at the front of the classroom entrusted with the job of information transmission is now a facilitator, who mentors and guides students on how they might best acquire knowledge and skills?
This point is engagingly illustrated in the book through the use of a running fictional narrative that appears at the beginning of each chapter, telling the story of a newly appointed principal of a high school grappling with the challenges of a socially and culturally diverse student population. This dramatisation of ideas discussed in the book is a useful device for getting the authors’ message across, not least because anyone in the public education sector will find the story to be quite authentic. For example, a girl with an interest in learning Arabic (the ‘unserved consumer’) can do so by enrolling for a course offered online, while the star soccer player struggling in his chemistry class (the ‘poorly served consumer’) finally gets to understand a concept when he has the opportunity to draw on his ‘spatial intelligence’ as defined by Gardener.
The authors predict that by 2013, 25 percent of K-12 education in the US will be computer based, and this percentage will rise to 50 percent by 2020. These projections might appear too optimistic but for the Web 2.0 revolution, and the multiplying applications that facilitate learner-centric pedagogies. This phenomenon provides an increasing number of engaging ways to learn that will ultimately render the current ‘industrial model’ of schooling obsolete.
In summary, Disrupting Class is a book highly recommended to teachers, conscientious parents, principals, school boards, and local education authorities. It is an important harbinger of the shape of things to come.
Jeremy Williams