"Disrupting Class" Brainstorming

[Fred Bartels]

Clayton Christensen is arguably the world's foremost expert on the impact that disruptive innovation can have on existing organizations. In "Disrupting Class" Christensen (and co-authors Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson) present a compelling case that within 10 years 50% of the courses secondary school students take will be computer delivered, and that by 2024 80% of courses will be taught online. These courses, according to Christensen, will provide customization that takes into account different intelligences and different learning styles. If Christensen's theory is correct -and there is a distinct possibility that it is- then our schools are likely to undergo huge transformative changes over the next 15 years. This is a place to discuss Christensen's theory and begin to think about how independent schools could manage the changes that may very well be heading our way.

[Liz Davis]

Alex - Unfortunately, I have lunch duty from 1:30 - 2:15. I will try to listen in for the first half hour and will definitely catch up with the podcast later. I look forward to it.
-Liz

[Liz Davis]

Is anyone involved with this conversation going to be at the NAIS conference in Chicago in February?
-Liz

[Sarah Hanawald]

Peter Gow is (not to speak for him).

Sarah

[Jamie Britto]

Great idea Liz. I created an event called disrupting nais for folks following this discussion who will be in Chicago. Here's a link if you want to add your name.

http://isenet.ning.com/events/disrupting-nais-in-chicago

and I'll be there

[Peter Gow]

Indeed, Peter Gow is, although on Wednesday in the late afternoon he will be at a meeting of the Independent Curriculum Group schools. I hope I will be free by 6:00 to attend Jamie Britto's event--as long as they're more or less in the same place, I should be fine.

Looking forward to all of this--PG

[Don P.]

Hello all,
I'm pleased to have found this discussion, as I have been involved in disrupting education for the past several years.

For the past several years, I have been VP of Ops & Tech for one of the major online curriculum providers. We have been helping public and private schools throughout the world establish their own Virtual Learning Academies to serve their students.

From that curriculum, we established International Virtual Learning Academy, and received accreditation from the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools, serving students throughout the world. We hire qualified teachers from throughout the world, and tie it together with a fairly sophisticated social network system.

Thirdly, and more pertaining to the discussions about self-developed courses, I have started a new business called oStudium. oStudium is an online repository of online courses developed by individuals and organizations, and offered to independent schools and homeschoolers.

Last year, knowing what we had learned over the past several years about online curriculum and online learning management systems, we developed our own LMS. We received the platform late in 2008, and in early 2009, we will be contracting with curriculum developers to write courses. oStudium will publish and copyright the courses, and pay a royalty to the curriculum writer for every student enrolled.

Not only are we actively disrupting the way education is delivered, we are disrupting the way textbooks are published and sold at high cost.

I would be pleased to be an active participant, innovator, and collaborator in this discussion.

[Sarah Hanawald]

I've been thinking some more about Christensen's claim that existing, successful entities can only "catch" a disruption by creating an autonomous unit that is independent but charged with the mission of seizing the opportunity. During the talk Thursday, I wondered in the chat room about the viability of a "school within a school" and the idea has been with me ever since.

If the market for disruptive innovation is those for whom there is currently no "product" who then is the market for disruptive schooling? There are so many reasons that schools fail to connect with students that trying to build a school for such students would be impossible. Instead, schools looking to develop this model should pick one niche and develop their "spinoff" accordingly.

For example, I've been playing around on the Wiki with what a Disruptive Academy Middle School would look like. It would certainly involve creative uses of technology, but would not be centered around distance learning at all.

My "underserved" market would be kids who just aren't ready for middle school in terms of maturity, organization, social skills, etc but who are aging into middle school anyway. The kids who are destined to lose papers in their lockers amidst the molding lunches their medication causes them to shun. While I'm not necessarily talking about students with serious academic gaps, I'd like to include them too.

Do you think the school within a school model would work in an independent school environment? What would it look like?

[Peter Gow]

The "underserved market" it was serving was not quite the one that I think you envision and that I might understand, but a few years back the Peddie School created a kind of school within a school program, the name of which escapes me now, that aimed at providing students (as I recall, the focus was grade 10) with an intensive and largely experiential program that was quite different--an alternative, really--from the traditional program there. A quick Google just now didn't help me get more details, but as I recall the project required some heavy funding, which a $100M grant from Walter Annenberg offset. I want to say it was the Millennium Project, but I don't think that was it.

Lawrence Academy had an ninth-grade program that in its first years was utterly unlike the school's programs in other areas. It was unit-based, skill-focused, and heavily project-driven (enough hyphens for a Fast Company article there, eh?). I believe it has been scaled down considerably; perhaps like wikis proposed by old men, such programs seem to succeed mostly when founding energy is present and sustained, and the impetus dissipates quickly when that energy goes away and the weight of traditional practice is strong.

A few other schools (South Kent, Appleby, Sedbergh) have had intensive programs-within-programs focused on a particular year or part of a year that occur mostly on campus but whose structure, methods, and overall approach differ enough from the "rest" of the school's programs to almost qualify as schools within schools. Many of us try to do something like this for seniors at the end of their time, but, although many senior project programs may be organized and monitored extremely well, I don't think many are really comprehensively outstanding learning experiences.

This sort of comes back around to the earlier discussion of programs like Maine Coast Semester, Oxbow, Woolman, Rocky Mountain, CityTerm, the Island School, the Mountain School, and other "term-away" operations. For founding school consortia, at least, these schools are almost like schools within schools. All focus intensively on experience and collaboration in the delivery of challenging academics, just the combination that so often works best in bringing your "not quite ready" kids up to speed.

It's outside the scope of what you and I are talking about, but since it sort of fit this model, there was for a while something called the Shackleton Schools in Massachusetts, a totally experiential, action-service-learning-based school founded by some bright and idealistic folks; alas, it folded up a couple of years back.

I believe the SWS model is just what is necessary developmentally for kids at about the ninth-grade age. Build a project-based, very hands-on, very collaborative, very experiential program that focuses on building both academic and soft skills, and use it (as Lawrence did) as the springboard to a challenging, intellectually engaging rest of high school. Let technology infuse these programs in whatever ways it can--as a collaborative environment, a research tool, a tool of communication and presentation, whatever--as such programs would meet the developmental and learning needs of all kinds of minds kids. Wouldn't you want to work in a program like this?

But the trick is sustainability--finding new generations of staff to continue and improve these programs rather than see them subside into same-old, same-old when the founders move on.

Probably too late at night to be posting, so if this makes less sense than I think it does, blame it on the hour and the falling winter-storm barometer--PG

[Bill Ivey]

It's not exactly a school within a school, but Stoneleigh-Burnham's middle school program has something of that flavour. When we started up in 2004, we built our program on the middle school principles of "This We Believe" by NMSA, which are basically the same as the principles in Turning Points 2000 and the not-yet-published at the time (I don't think) Breaking Ranks in the Middle.
I think SBMS is working well for two reasons. One is that we are firmly committed to a progressive middle school model. We have research on our side, and a growing track record of success as SBMS graduates rise through the grades of our upper school. We believe in an integrated program that helps students develop academically, aesthetically, athletically, and socially. We believe in genuinely giving students voice, and taking them out into the community. Humanities 7 is taught on a democratic classroom model (see "A Reason to Teach" by James A. Beane)
Two is that the upper school and middle schools have talked about what skills and/or content knowledge middle school students genuinely need for success in the upper school. They have faith is us that SBMS kids will be quite well prepared for upper school, and trust that we know what we are doing. That kind of mutual dialogue, awareness, and trust are necessary for success.
I would think a school-within-a-school model along the lines of Crossroads/Watershed/Soundings (programs at Radnor Middle School which students may elect on a year-to-year basis) would need to be a fairly good size before that would work. We only have 28 middle school kids, so couldn't realistically have "progressive" and "traditional" tracks through the school.
Oh wait, I need to say SBMS is working well for a third reason - incredible teachers who want to know the kids as individuals and support their growth, and amazing kids who respond beautifully to our program.
I need to get back to filling in financial aid forms for my kid, but if you have any questions, just ask!

[Sean Casey]

That program was called the Prinncipio Program. It has sinced evolved into the Signature Experience Program @ Peddie. If you are looking for more information you should e-mail Pat Clements [e-mail]. Pat founded Principio and is the director of the Signature Experience Program. He is widely regarded as an expert in experiential education.

[Sarah Hanawald]

Wow--I just went by the Peddie website and read about the presentations the students involved in the Signature Experience Program are giving. I'm really impressed!
Sarah

[Fred Bartels]

Living in the Zone of Proximal Development

I like to keep my students in the ZPD.

This semester I'm going to try and keep myself in the ZPD regarding virtual courses. As I teach my spring (oh how nice to write that word) semester Java class I'm going to experiment with creating a virtual online version of the course. My goal is to develop a model of the type of virtual course that might populate a virtual disruptive academy. I hope those of you who are interested in this subject will help evolve the model by providing feedback, suggesting things to try, etc.. I just decided to do this yesterday so I don't have a site yet but I hope to post the link here within a few days.

Fred