Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns 1st Edition
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Selected as one of the "Best Books on Innovation, 2008" by BusinessWeek magazine
Named the "Best Human-Capital Book of 2008" by Strategy + Business magazine
A crash course in the business of learning-from the bestselling author of The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution…
"Provocatively titled, Disrupting Class is just what America's K-12 education system needs--a well thought-through proposal for using technology to better serve students and bring our schools into the 21st Century. Unlike so many education 'reforms,' this is not small-bore stuff. For that reason alone, it's likely to be resisted by defenders of the status quo, even though it's necessary and right for our kids.
We owe it to them to make sure this book isn't merely a terrific read; it must become a blueprint for educational transformation."
--Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education
“A brilliant teacher, Christensen brings clarity to a muddled and chaotic world of education.”
--Jim Collins, bestselling author of Good to Great
According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need “disruptive innovation.”
Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson take one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen's now-famous theories of “disruptive” change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you're a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you'll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.
You'll learn how
- Customized learning will help many more students succeed in school
- Student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology
- Computers must be disruptively deployed to every student
- Disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform
- We can compete in the global classroom-and get ahead in the global market
Filled with fascinating case studies, scientific findings, and unprecedented insights on how innovation must be managed, Disrupting Class will open your eyes to new possibilities, unlock hidden potential, and get you to think differently. Professor Christensen and his coauthors provide a bold new lesson in innovation that will help you make the grade for years to come.
The future is now. Class is in session.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From the Back Cover
WARNING: THIS BOOK WILL CHALLENGE
EVERYTHING YOU EVER LEARNED-ABOUT LEARNING
“After a barrage of business books that purport to 'fix' American education, at last a book that speaks thoughtfully and imaginatively about what genuinely individualized education can be like and how to bring it about.”
-Howard Gardner, author of Five Minds for the Future
“A decade ago, Clayton Christensen wrote a masterpiece, The Innovator's Dilemma, that transformed the way business looks at innovation. Now, he and two collaborators, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, have come up with another, focusing his groundbreaking theories of disruptive innovation on education."
-David Gergen, US Presidential Advisor
“Clayton Christensen's insights just might shake many of us in education out of our complacency and into a long needed disruptive discourse about really fixing our schools. This will be a welcome change after decades in which powerful calls to action have resulted in only marginal improvements for our nation's school children.”
-Vicki Phillips, director of Education, Gates Foundation
“Full of strategies that are both bold and doable, this brilliant and seminal book shows how we can utilize technology to customize learning. I recommend it most enthusiastically.”
-Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester (NY) Teachers Association, and vice president of the American Federation of Teachers
"Finally we have a book from the business community that gets it. Disrupting Class from Clayton Christensen and colleagues points out that motivation is central to learning and that if schools and learning are to be transformed as they must be, motivation must be at the center of the work. They also point out how technology should be used to personalize learning and what the future might look like for schools. A must read for anyone thinking and worrying about where education should be headed."
-Paul Houston, Executive Director, American Association of School Administrators
“Powerful, proven strategies for moving education from stagnation to evolution.”
-Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“Clayton Christensen and colleagues describe how disruptive technologies will personalize and, as a result, revolutionize learning. Every education leader should read this book, set aside their next staff meeting to discuss it, and figure out how they can be part of the improvement wave to come.”
-Tom Vander Ark, President, X PRIZE Foundation
“In Disrupting Class, Christensen, Horn and Johnson argue that the next round of innovation in school reform will involve learning software. While schools have resisted integrating technology for instruction, today's students are embracing technology in their everyday lives. This book offers promise to education reformers.”
-Kathleen McCartney, Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“The genius of Disrupting Class is the spotlight the book throws on how we can tap children’s early enthusiasm for school by letting them learn in best-choice, individualized ways, the teacher’s role transformed from ‘sage on stage’ to ‘guide on the side.’”
--Seattle Times & Post-Intelligencer
About the Author
Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is co-founder of Innosight, a management consultancy, Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm, and Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank. Christenen is the author or coauthor of five books including the New York Times bestsellers The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. He serves as a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Michael B. Hornis a cofounder and Executive Director of Innosight Institute. He holds an AB from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.
Curtis W. Johnson is a writer and consultant who has served as a college president, head of a public policy research organization, and chief of staff to governor Arne Carlson of Minnesota. Johnson and his colleagues were among the early proponents of what has become the chartered school movement.
Product details
- Publisher : McGraw-Hill; 1st edition (May 14, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0071592067
- ISBN-13 : 978-0071592062
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 0.86 x 9.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,113,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #596 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #1,375 in Education Reform & Policy
- #2,279 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
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About the authors

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Michael Horn speaks and writes about the future of education and works with a portfolio of education organizations to create a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their potential. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Choosing College and Goodnight Box, a children’s story.
Michael is a senior strategist at Guild Education, which partners with leading employers and organizations to help offer education and upskilling opportunities to America’s workforce. He is also the co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a non-profit think tank.
Michael is the author and coauthor of multiple books, white papers, and articles on education, including the award-winning book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns and the Amazon-bestseller Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. He serves on the board and advisory boards of a range of education organizations, including the Clayton Christensen Institute, the Robin Hood Learning+Tech Fund, and the LearnLaunch Institute. He also serves as an executive editor at Education Next and is a venture partner at NextGen Venture Partners.
Michael was selected as a 2014 Eisenhower Fellow to study innovation in education in Vietnam and Korea, and Tech&Learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education. Michael holds a BA in history from Yale University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
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However, solutions that focus on the needs of the teachers, the unions, the principals, the parents, etc., have not worked. And, with the proper guidance, students should know what they need to be successful in their school work and ulitmately their lives.
Clayton using his usually strong analytical approach evaluates the educational challenges both inductively and deductively to get to the root cause of the problem. And, in my words, the problem is this: each student learns differently, and the centralized, bureaucratic approaches that have been used to force fit a regimented approach dictated from Washington down to local school boards haven't and won't solve this problem. What we need is a more student centric approach that uses flexible tools developed through information technology to meet the needs of individual students.
This is a very innovative approach to solving this problem, and in my opinion, Clayton is the most innovative thinker out there today. After all, as he quotes Einstein (and I used some liberty to paraphrase), you can't solve the problem by using the solutions that caused it.
Then, Clayton lays out how the change is happening (in some instances) and can happen (in others where it is not) based upon innovation concepts like disruptive innovation and heavyweight teams.
I highly recommend this book for any individual interested in innovation and/or education.
Clayton has written another excellent book to build upon his disruptive innovation philosophy. Thank you, Clayton, for your continued excellent work!
Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business School who developed a theory of disruptive change to explain what happens in business when new technology disrupts a stable market (e.g., the personal computer and its impact on mid-size and mainframe computers). I was skeptical that a business school professor would get anything right about education. In fact he gets a lot right: education does need a paradigm shift to accommodate diminishing numbers of teachers and diminishing resource, and to accommodate the long discussed little addressed differences among learners and how to accommodate it in classes of 20 or more using lecture as the principal teaching method. The notion that courses delivered over the internet could be built to accommodate individual differences in learning style, and could free teachers from administrative tasks to allow them to tutor one on one, is intriguing. Christensen does NOT do the heavy lifting of building such courses, he only motivates those who are considering that heavy lifting. But he does provide the rationale for being willing to do the heavy lifting to build excellent courses delivered on the internet, and to invest the billions needed to give each student access to a computer in multiple classrooms.
Along with writer and consultant Curtis Johnson and Executive Director of The Innosight Institute Michael Horn, Christensen and his co-authors demonstrate the sheer beauty of applying the current scholarship we understand about innovation in other domains (business et al) - to a domain that precariously occupies that space in American society that can accurately be characterized as a "gap filled with tension - holding on to what is known and accepted." The latter domain would be the field of U.S. public education. Why? Why is this cross-disciplinary approach so important? Molecular Biologist Kary Mullis nails it when she writes: "Important inventions almost always cross the lines of disciplines. Moving between fields is the way to be creative."(2)
What motivates these authors? In the first half-dozen pages you acquire the distinct impression that these fellows care deeply about improving the U.S. public education system....they've studied it...exhaustively - all the excuses, criticisms, rationalizations, performance data and the like.
After the introductory chapter, the authors use vignettes to set the context for the discussion contained in each respective chapter. The first chapter struggles with the issue of why we are teaching in a standardized approach when we are all "differently-abled" - we learn differently. Chapter two introduces the concept of disruptive innovation, which the authors define as follows: `The disruptive innovation theory explains why organizations struggle with certain kinds of innovation and how organizations can predictably succeed in innovation." (p.45). "Disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough improvement. { Instead of sustaining the traditional improvement trajectory in the established plane of competition, it disrupts that trajectory by bringing to the market a product or service that actually is. Not as good as what companies historically had been selling."(p.47). There's much more to the scholarship that supports the authors thesis regarding disruptive innovation. The charts are also very helpful in conceptualizing the points they are making.
Why haven't we seen disruptive innovation in the U.S. public education system? Listen to these authors: "People did not create new disruptive business models in public education, however. Why not? Almost all disruptions take root among non consumers. In education, there was little opportunity to do that. Public education is set up as a public utility, and state laws mandate attendance for virtually everyone. There was no large, untapped pool of non consumers that new school models could target." p.60. Note that one of the central points the authors make is that the targeting on non-consumers is the arena where disruptive innovation takes place, in other domains. (The way Apple targeted listeners of music with the iPod versus the recording industry creating a similar sort of innovation).
The authors go to great lengths to explain why technology has not transformed how we do what we do in public education (and the results derived therefrom) in the following: "In the language of disruption, here is what this means: Unless top managers actively manage this process, their organization will shape every disruptive innovation into a sustaining innovation -one that fits the processes, values, and economic model of the existing business - because organizations cannot naturally disrupt themselves. This is a core reason why incumbent firms are at a disadvantage relative to entrant companies when disruptive innovations emerge. And it explains why computers haven't changed schools." P.75.
The authors move on to detail how to disruptively deploy computers in the classroom and embrace a vastly more student-centric approach to teaching, learning and assessment. They characterize this as an "opportunity" when they state: "Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Nobel Laureate in literature once observed, " At every crossway on the road that leads to the future each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past." `Educators, like the rest of us, tend to resist major change. But this shift in the learning platform, if managed correctly - which means disruptively is not a threat. It is an opportunity. Students will be able to work in the way that comes naturally for them. Teachers can be learning leaders with time to pay attention to each student. And school organizations can navigate the impending financial maelstrom without abdicating their mission." P.112.
Chapters five and six delve into the recommendations of these scholars regarding how disruptive innovation evolves within a highly regulated system akin to public education, using examples from the private sector. They address the importance of the knowledge being derived out of the field of neuroscience as it relates to the importance of language dancing during the very early, formative years of infancy. They also advocate for user-generated content, platforms that empower non-technical folks to create powerful learning tools - sharing the same in our connected world. Their treatment of the public education system as a value-chain commercial system is fascinating - a system whose production and distribution of learning materials can and must change, along with disruptive innovations in the current marketing and distribution model.
Chapter 7 legitimately and methodically lampoons the "quality" of social research produced in and around public education - a fact that remains an incredible handicap to the system, teachers, administrators, students, community and country. Chapter 8 is a clarion call for a "common language" in addressing the challenges inherent within the current system. What do the authors mean by "common language?" Consider this excerpt for clarity: "providing a common language is a "mechanism of movement," in that, when done well, it can shift a group's location in the matrix to the point that other tools of cooperation can be effective. With a common language and a common framing of the problem, tools like strategic planning, measurement systems, and salesmanship can be effective. An important reason why we have gone to such lengths to identify the root causes of the problems plaguing public schools is our hope that this book might serve this role for our readers. While we may not have gotten all of our diagnoses and solutions correct, we hope that the understanding we have summarized here might - create a common language and a common way to frame these problems so that there is broader agreement on what is needed and how to achieve it." (pp. 192-193). If that's the impact of this book, we should all be deeply grateful.
Chapter 9 addresses suggestions for structuring schools so they are encouraged to innovate. In the conclusion to this work, the authors, once again, emphasize that their recommendations must not be viewed as threats, but as distinct opportunities to be explored.
This review is not intended to be a substitute for reading and discussing this work. On the contrary - It is my hope that it encourages many to do just that.
It is an incredible body of knowledge that contains the engineering know-how (from both a theoretical and practical standpoint) to Span the Current Chasm in U.S. Public Education.
Devour it. Discuss it with friends and colleagues. Then do something disruptively innovative with that discussion. As the authors use of a quote from Einstein clearly illustrates: "The significant problems we have cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we were using when we created them."(p.156).
NOTES:
(1) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Creativity - Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Harper Perrenial, HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, New York Copyright © 1996 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, p.103.
(2) Barron, Frank Montuori, Alfonso & Barron, Anthea Creators on Creating - Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind, Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York, NY Copyright © 1997 by Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori and Anthea Barron - quote by Kary Mullis - p.70 & 73. Chapter entitled The Screwdriver.
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