Disrupting Class - Reflection on how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns

Chapter 1: Why Schools Struggle to Teach Differently when each Student Learns Differently

1. Explain the difference between interdependence and modularity.  How is education currently organized?  



   - We have an interdependent architecture in our schools today. The curriculum is rather similar no matter where you are or who you are teaching because there is mandated standardization, and trying to change one part of the school system causes a change from another part and so on. On the other hand, "[m]odularity allows for customization" (Christenson, 2011, pg. 23). Modularity will allow us to teach students differently because we know they learn differently. In addition, students need to build knowledge off experiences. Different students have different experiences, and thus our teaching toward them should be different as well.


Chapter 2: Making the Shift:  Schools meet Society’s need

2. Explain the disruptive innovation theory.  What does this have to do with schools?


   - Chapter 2 describes two types of innovations that are visible in any industry. The first, there are the type of innovations that improve and sustain an existing industry. In Disrupting Class, the authors write about how "[a]irplanes that fly farther, computers that process faster, cellular phone batteries that last longer, and televisions with clearer images are all sustaining innovations. On the other hand, disruptive innovation is the phenomenon of products entering a market that are not labeled as "breakthrough improvements," like the improvement of high definition TVs. A disruptive innovation benefits people who had been unable to consume the oft-expensive product that the sustaining industry offers. In the text, the authors explain how the personal computer is a great example of a disruptive innovation. Successful disruption changes the market; everyone (almost everyone) has a personal computer, and I have never even heard of minicomputers.
   What does this have to do with schools? Well, the the problem with the public education system is that it is basically a monopoly. In addition, everyone uses it (kids/adolescents basically have a requirement to be educated). This means that it is basically impossible for the new business models that disruptive innovation theory creates to be allowed to develop on their own and mature naturally. 
   Our schools need to improve by embracing disruptive theories within existing schools, a task not yet done successfully in a private industry (yet there is hope, as schools have proven to be able to assimilate to disruptive redefinitions of performance in past).


Chapter 3: Crammed Classroom Computers

3.  Why doesn’t cramming computers in schools work?  Explain this in terms of the lessons from Rachmaninoff (what does it mean to compete against nonconsumption?)


   - We have implemented computers in school by "cramming" them into the existing teaching and classroom models that were in place before they arrived. We have yet to let them disrupt the old methods to improve and transform the way we teach and learn, with the idea to become a more modularly framed school system. 
   We have been trying to implement computers into a classroom in such a way that would be analogous to selling tickets to people expecting to see Rachmaninoff play his second piano concerto, but instead having Rachmaninoff push the play button on a phonograph recording of himself. It would seem ridiculous. The phonograph did not get popular by replacing live music, but by providing music to those whom could not be at a concert when they wished to hear music. Disruptive innovations originate and mature by competing first with nonconsumption. For example, the personal computer originated by providing a computer to those whom did not want to put a gigantic and expensive minicomputer in their garage. 


Chapter 4: Disruptively Deploying Computers

4. Explain the pattern of disruption. 


   - The pattern of disruption, where new substitutes for the old, almost always follows an S-curve when measuring the percentage of the market using the new approach over time. "[T]he initial substitution pace is slow; then it steepens dramatically; and finally, it asymptotically approaches 100% of the market" (Christenson, 2011, pg. 97). 



5. Explain the trap of monolithic instruction.  How does student-centric learning help this problem?


   - The trap of monolithic instruction is that teachers in this model teach in a way that benefits very few types of learning intelligences. With limited time to instruct, the teacher can't possibly cater to all learning styles for each bit of content students are to learn. "As the monolithic system of instruction shifts to a learning environment powered by student-centered technology, teachers' roles will gradually shift over time." With student-centered technologies, teachers will be able to "coach" students to fit their unique style. 


Chapter 5: The System for Student-Centric Learning

6. Explain public education’s commercial system.  What does it mean to say it is a value-chain business?  How does this affect student-centric learning?


   - Public Education's system operates like a value-adding process (VAP) business. A VAP business "brings input materials into one end of their premises, transform them by adding value, and deliver higher-value products...at the other end" (Christenson, 2011, pg. 126). Using this definition, students in a school are the input materials, and they are the educated material output the other end. 
   The public education's current commercial system hinders student-centric learning. Textbooks are predominantly geared toward the dominant learning style of the authors whom create them, which are geared toward the style of the standardized assessment given at the end of the term that checks for understanding. The current business model could be more student-centric; but, if publishers were to create "different books for each type of intelligence, their volume per title-and their profitability-would decline markedly" (pg. 129). The text goes on to say that a new facilitated network, rather than a VAP business, needs to emerge to provide student-centric products for students in our public school system.


Note: I found the question about value-chain business to be synonymous with VAP business. If you feel I am incorrect here, please comment.

EDSS 531 Journal #3

Robert Gordon

Journal #3

Prompt: To what degree do you think you really understand the needs of your students and what they need for the 21st century?  How wide is the “gap” between them and you? In what areas are the gaps? What can you do to make connections?
Response: I feel that I understand the needs of my students in the 21st century. I believe that schools need to be reformed in order to equip the needs of diverse student bodies in a way that fosters right-brained innovation (instead of placing it in the backseat). Along with this thought, the world of standardized testing needs to be revamped to be able to recognize students of all abilities (and races) that are required for 21st century jobs.
Because of the globalization of modern economics, America today needs to educate kids to become innovators. Its been said that this century is going to be the one where the right side of the brain gets its time in the sun. However, like Daniel Pink has stressed in his book, A Whole New Mind, analytical thinking shouldn’t be thrown away with. Rather, it needs to be conceptualized in such a way helps capture context and emotion. For example, Pink writes, “Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking...it supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds...Abstract analysis is easier to understand when seen through the lens of a well-chosen story” (Pink, 108). It places educators in a situation where the old way of doing things will not suffice. This shows that we need to be able to give academics a higher conceptual meaning for students to gravitate toward versus repel from.

This leads to the gap between me and my students; they want that good story to inspire them into gaining knowledge. I think our students today, whom are bombarded by technological stimuli, are losing their sense of imagination, and hence the need for stories to give them interest in academic content.Teaching with a good story will help form my students’ thinking about whom they are and whom they are to be. We need to enhance the creativity of our kids, and the resulting imagination is what is going to help sustain human life on Earth (although we mustn't forget the dramatic loss of wildlife we have seen and will continue to see unless we do something about it)..

Although I am older than my students will be, I grew up in a time when social media was starting up and Internet was becoming widely available. I understand my students need to be able to become comfortable with technology without “relying” on technology, where the latter often seems to be the case these days. This is where I feel our gap is the smallest. I am going to be able to mentor my kids into using the technology around them to their advantage, to see the big picture in things, and to be proactive with the use of their time (which can get out of hand when using technology!).

The need for more creativity in our student bodies must be reflected in the way we test our students. Standardized testing, as it stands right now, is no way to determine the growth potential of a 21st century student. I have heard that the government has invested a lot of money to research new methods of testing students and I hope it evolves into a more equitable assessment tool than it is today.

Thoughts on Linsanity

http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/jeremy-lin-gives-sports-world-much-needed-wow-moment

I tweeted this link to an article written by Greg Couch, but here it is through another medium.

So, I realized tonight that I hadn't gotten my 5 minimum posts, so here is another. Although I am rather happy to post, as it allows me to give my thoughts about the recent "Linsanity" and my personal biases....

Jeremy Lin is one of 4 Harvard grads to make it to the NBA. (You are, statistically, more likely to become the President of the U.S. than you are to become a professional basketball player if you are someone who graduates from Harvard). His first six games as a professional are among the best in the world.

You can read the article for specifics, and the author does some great analysis that makes you think. For example, Couch wonders, after noting that Lin is an Asian-American, "How many scouts look at a guy like Lin, or even looked at Lin himself, and passed because he didn't look the part? How many college coaches? None offered him a scholarship out of high school...In fact; it makes you wonder how deep these stereotypes sit in our sports psyche. Do parents, who more and more keep specializing their young kids in sports, steer them into stereotypes? How much greatness is missed?"

As someone who loves the world of sports, the game of basketball being the least of possible exceptions, I would hate to imagine being one of those kids that Couch contemplates gets overlooked because of the way he/she looked off the basketball court. It should be your quality of play that determines your basketball respect.

I mean think about how many black basketball players would we never have known unless Jackie Robinson and the color barrier was dropped. Makes you think now "How many Jeremy Lins have we missed during our blind steering toward stereotypes.

I have biases. I don't know if I have acknowledged them in my 4+ posts (or if I ever want to, as I feel that gives them more credibility), but I work all the time to get rid of them. I try always to remember the golden rule.

I had a friend whose dad was a mathematician. He was a great person to talk about because he always formulated his own opinion based off of his personal inquiry and experiences; he never came off as one with preconceived notions. If he wanted to know something about you, he asked nicely. If he wanted to know what you thought about particular subject, he did so cordially. It made me think about how I can be less likely to succumb to my own preconceived notions, because it limits your ability to truly connect with an individual.

I am going to bring this mentality toward my future students, as I've had good time to practice my preach/reflect on my experiences with this gentleman, which has been over a year now since his passing (5+ year bout with cancer).

We need to provide equity in the classroom. Lin was privileged in that he didn't rely on his basketball skills to support himself. He made sure to go to college, something many of our student-athletes forget to do.

I want to educate kids so that they can try to understand this world, and to teach them beliefs need to originate from within, not from media, parents, nor even teachers. Teachers just facilitate the liberating process that is learning.

EDSS 531 Journal 2

Journal 2_Tovani Chart

Quote form the Text/Video	What it Means	Deeper Thinking
1. “Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” - Sir Ken Williams	1. Educators in schools should foster creative thinking. Teaching only about what is known to be right or wrong is not going to prepare kids for a future that we ourselves have no ability to predict or imagine.	Kids are not frightened of being wrong, which is a perfect time of their lives to be allowed to create things and let their minds “invent.” Much of the high stakes teaching strategies prepare students to bubble in the “right” answer. When you are bred this way, students get transformed into thinking it is not okay to be different, it’s not okay to get an answer that isn’t what the back of the book says. Fostering students’ creative minds means that we need to prepare them to be “wrong” sometimes, and to learn from their own mistakes. Because, as Sir Ken said in his talk, “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
2. “The purpose of public education around the world is to produce university professors.” -Sir Ken Robinson	2. The hierarchy of subjects in school are universally the same. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.
3. “The education system has mined our minds the way we’ve strip mined the Earth: for a particular commodity.”	This way of education will not service for the future.	We need creativity now more than ever before. The Information Age of the world has exhausted the uses of the left side of our brains. Computers today can do most of what many people used to do for a living. The jobs in those industries that do remain are being outsourced to other countries where labor is cheaper. We need to rethink the way we teach our kids. We need to foster and nurture their creative minds. We need to stop putting the right-brained function in the back seat.
4. “Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us much happier.” - Daniel H. Pink	“The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged.”	Contrary to how the world has changed so dramatically in the past couple hundred years, our genetic make-up is very much the same. Every person has the desire to be happy. I think that there is something happening, in our peripherals in such a way that when we turn to look at it, it seems to disappear, something that has counter-balanced the awesomeness that has been the technology and information era that we’ve grown up in. I have a deep respect for the laws of physics, and Newton’s Laws of Motion are some that we all live by whether we like it or not. Newton’s 3rd Law says that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. I think that we have exploited the system in we live on and call Earth in such a way that “defies” the Laws of Physics. We need to be conscious of our actions. We have exploited the resources of Earth for the material gain of a few. This material gain hasn’t made us happier, and I imagine it likely never will.

Recent Student Interview and My Thoughts

 2/6/12

            I conducted a student interview with a student from Carlsbad High School last week. The student, lets call her Sara, is a 10^th grader whom is currently enrolled in Algebra II. I understand that she took Algebra I in 8^th grade and Geometry in 9^th grade (last year). She says that math is not her favorite subject (usually gets A’s in her other subjects vs. B’s and C’s in math). For the interview, I provided paper (blank, lined, as well as gridded), a ruler, protractor and compass for Sara to use. 

Note: The problem is the following area/perimeter problem one might see in a geometry textbook. My instructions as interviewer are to simply be the observer. I am there to try and examine the student's mathematical thinking & understanding, and to not play the teacher role.

You can see some of Sara's work on the sheet

            Sara seemed to be really stuck at the beginning. I asked her first to restate the problem for me. She said that she needs to figure out which area was biggest and which was smallest. I then asked her to try to verbalize to me what she was thinking. She didn’t have much of anything to say so I asked her “What do you know about area?” She contemplated about that for awhile, thinking that it meant length; I told her I thought length was a measure of distance, like the length from one point to another. She remembered, agreed with me and was able to come up with her own definition in saying that area was the amount of space something has.

            Now this dialogue of determining what our goal of the problem was resulted in Sara still being stuck. I asked her to reread the informational portion of problem statement and tell me what it means. She said “The pastures are made of half-circles. Pasture A is made of three half circles.” I said that was interesting and to show me these half circles because “I am having a hard time seeing them.” From the attached work, you can see that Sara drew the boundary lines of all the half circles in the figures. At this point I asked her if she felt she had all the tools for answering the problem and she said she wasn’t sure. This led to more questioning…

            She said she could remember the formula for area of a rectangle, length times width, but that she couldn’t remember the area formula for a circle (despite high marks on her geometry report card). Resisting the urge to verbally damn the teachers (or school system, I know it’s not always the teachers fault) of Sara’s past, I brought up similar problems to give to Sara that I was confident she could solve. I asked her an alternate area problem involving rectangles (see attached work). She knew right away that the area of a 2x3 rectangle was 6 and the area of a 2x4 rectangle was 8. I wanted to tell her the area formula so that she could solve this problem the most accurate way, but as veteran student interviewer, I kept my cool. I asked Sara instead how you can answer an area problem without using multiplication, there was a pause. So I drew the previous 2x3 rectangle in grid form and she told me right away that you can count the number of squares…

            I won’t go into the nitty gritty of the rest of the interview. I was much temped to be a teacher in the situation, especially watching the student try to count squares. But a method is a method. I did notice some important aspects of Sara’s mathematical understanding. The main one was that if two circles (or half-circles in this case) have the same radius, then they must have the same area. When Sara noticed that the three pastures all had a large semi-circle of radius 6, she decided not to try and count those squares. Similarly, she noticed that the 3 smaller half circles in Pasture B were of the same radius length and therefore of the same area, hence the equal 7 count written inside those semicircles in her work.

            What I also learned about Sara’s mathematical understanding is that her arsenal for solving problems is often maintained only for a short period of time, often forgotten soon after it will no longer be on the test. I asked her what problems she had done like this before and her response was that she did problems like this in geometry the school year before but could remember what she did to solve them (what the formula was). To her credit, memorizing the area and perimeter of a circle is really the only way kids are able to “understand” it at that point in their public school mathematics careers.

            It is in my opinion that one student in a public school like Carlsbad High could not grasp the reason of why the perimeter and area of a circle is “2 Pi r” and “Pi r-squared” (respectively) until they have learned trigonometry, without intrinsic motivation to understand “why.”

            I respect the subject of math in such a way that I see it unfair to teach rote memorization to kids as they do today. I have been able to learn a lot, in a little bit of time, in my observing of kids’ mathematical thinking. My challenge now is to absorb, analyze, and respond to this thinking that will effectively foster their mathematical minds.

EDSS 541 Week 2 Reading Responses

Please click the link to my GoogleDoc for Reading Responses 7-10. Feel free to leave comments for me in red.

EDSS 530 Blog Post: Reflection of Dr. White's "Residents and Vistors"

Dr. White's video relating web users as residents and/or visitors of online “space” is a very well thought out and accurate picture of the online communities today. Visitors and Residents often have very different views of the web. Visitors often see the web as a collection of “tools.” Visitors who go online are like opening an untidy toolbox, grab what they need, use it, and then close their toolbox until they have another need for it. Residents see the web as a “space.” They are visible and work at remaining visible; especially on the platforms like twitter that is constantly refreshing itself. 

In watching the presentation/video, I found myself thinking how I view myself as a visitor in certain spaces and a resident of sorts in others. As a mathematically inclined individual, I was very much drawn toward the portion of Dr. White's presentation when he explains that he himself identifies himself on different parts of the continuum relative to the context. In regards to the professional aspect of his life, he revels in the opportunity to be an online resident, and he is comfortable when his name appears in public spaces that reference this part of his life. On the other hand, he identifies himself as, and chooses to be, a visitor to the online world with regards to his non-institutional, or private, life. He doesn’t want information about his family or his whereabouts to be so visible in this world.

My views seem to coincide with Dr. White. In the professional, or institutional, part of my life, I plan on being very visible and hope to be an effective collaborator with educators and colleagues in the online world. With regards to my private life, I plan on being relatively the same in the future as I am now. I have a Facebook, but I have it blocked to the public. I use it to socialize with friends that I have in my non-institutionalized world. I plan on keeping that platform for that purpose. My other platforms will be an open space for me to broaden my professional and educational horizons.