This generation has allowed many to continue teaching, as schools closed by COVID are no longer unexpected; Just two decades ago, it would have sounded like science fiction.
What surprises many, however, is how sticky the schooling generation has been as schools have reopened.
In a recent article for The74, for example, Conor Williams describes how, after visiting nearly a hundred study halls in 3 states for six months, virtual learning is everywhere. the blackboard at the front of the room,” Williams wrote.
One of the effects of the work is to try to describe a radical change in American schools.
However, has virtual replaced the DNA of the schools themselves?
From the line quoted above, it is not transparent that this is the case. It turns out that the fundamental mechanisms of schools are still in place: age-graded classrooms, a “front” of the room, an instructor teaching the whole class. , a generation that has replaced the proverbial whiteboard that shows data to the entire class.
A word of caution. One hundred study rooms is not the length of a sample. And in fact, I don’t know what’s going on in the more than 3 million study halls across the country. I’m sure many schools combine learning, employing online learning in physical schools where academics have some control over the time, place, path, or speed of their learning. It’s a phenomenon that Heather Staker and I (and many others) wrote about a lot over a decade ago. There are lines of this in Williams’ work.
But I also bet that the maximum is doing (in many cases simultaneously) what Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and I have called the “cramming” generation in the classical classrooms.
In Disrupting Class, we wrote that when most organizations (across all industries) are faced with a new technology, their initial intuition is to try to implement it to do the things their style is already optimized for. We argued that the schools were no different.
One of the main reasons why generation is not a panacea in education is that, when integrated into an existing style, it can at best only serve as a more productive resource for existing processes and priorities of that style. This means you can make an operation more effective or allow you to take on more tasks, but you can’t reinvent the style itself. It also means that in many cases it will clash with the organization’s processes and priorities and therefore remain largely unused.
That’s why we’ve noticed so many uninteresting uses of Zoom, Google Classroom, and other technologies in the remote learning phase of COVID. Schools simply used generation to reinforce their existing processes and priorities, rather than rethinking the style itself. Here’s a bet. Let’s see similar things with AI now.
The truth is, of course, that this phenomenon was reduced long before COVID hit. COVID just accelerated it.
At Disrupting Class, we first predicted that through fall 2019, 50% of all courses from top schools would be powered through computer-based learning.
In fact, in the spring of 2019, according to a Digital Promise survey, 35% of teachers said they used the education generation on a daily basis, and another 23% said they used it almost every day. This suggests that more than a fraction of the teachers surveyed use generation in the classroom.
As Williams suggests, that number has most likely accelerated. But it did not replace the “grammar of school,” as David Tyack and Larry Cuban memorably described the design of American schools and classrooms.
Instead, we get stuck in a hybrid, an herb that occurs in many industries when they are in the midst of a disruptive transformation. A hybrid, as Clayton Christensen, Heather Staker and I wrote, “is a mix of disruptive new generation with previous generation and represents sustainable innovation over the previous generation. “
And there’s something about them. As Jal Mehta wrote: “These combinations are not the most productive of either world. On a basic level, they are contradictory.
I take Mehta’s point of view although I think it might be an exaggeration. There have been genuine positives that have emerged from blended learning. But in any case, this is a more basic set of observations.
As we predicted in Disrupting Class:
“Most other people who expand e-learning products . . . will try to market them within the [existing] system. . . for very rational reasons. Complex software, such as textbooks, Array. . . They are also scale-intensive due to consistently higher prices incurred in the progression phase (economies of scale are pronounced because the software generates virtually no replication and distribution prices). Other tactics are understood. This increases the length and complexity of the software, but the student does not have to deal directly with this increased complexity. Programmers can create multiple paths in a program to accommodate a student’s progress; Parts of the software that apply to your private trip.
“That’s smart news. Now the bad ones. This generation will be expensive and there are huge barriers to entry. The school district’s investment and reputation depend on how well students perform on standardized tests. While the e-learning team can incorporate real-time assessments, they must update the standardized tests that are the backbone of the existing formula in the short term.
“There are other mandates and regulations required through district, state and federal policies that describe in more detail, either implicitly or explicitly, what computer generation will have to do. These policies will limit this software to historically defined disciplinary disciplines” and, we might have added, many other traditional structures of education.
To say this is what happened would be an understatement.
As we continue:
“The evidence on this topic is overwhelming in our studies on disruptive innovation. When disruptive innovators target non-consumption for their implementation programs, they have an intelligent chance of success. But if those programs are then incorporated into a pricing network, a chain from suppliers to consumers whose definitions of quality and profitability have been subtle in the established way of doing things: disruption will only fly away if it fits the rest of the players. It is for those reasons that disruptive expansion is only triggered when the new generation comes to market not only through a disruptive business model, but also by employing a disruptive pricing network, from suppliers to distributors, whose economy is attuned to disruption. “
If you need to know more about this, check out my recent article here on so-called formula transformation, in which I practice that true formula “transformation” happens more when formulas break formulas.
We were given everything at Disrupting Class. We even received the correct prediction largely about the expansion of virtual learning. But one of the wonderful things we received in Disrupting Class was when we fell prey to magical thinking. Here’s my mea culpa.
In the book, we detail how new platforms would emerge for K-12 students beyond the success of classic classrooms, textbooks, and software. These platforms would be facilitated networks in which students, teachers and parents would connect to create modules to teach and be informed concepts in a student-centered way. In doing so, those platforms would be the fate of large numbers of school reformers and philanthropists who have bloodied themselves by breaking down barriers that save you in the existing system.
In many ways, you can think of YouTube as representing this kind of platform. As one CTO of a non-educational company told me, “When my child wants to learn, he jumps on YouTube. “
We continue to write: “We suspect, however, that when disruptive innovators begin to shape facilitated networks in which professionals and amateurs (students, parents and ters) they bypass the existing price chain and instead market their products directly to others, as described above. , the balance of forces in schooling will change.
But instead of those teams sucking users out, as happens in markets where disruption is underway, in a whirlwind of illusions, we wrote that schools would adopt them to usher in global student-centered, user-generated learning. adoption of the virtual learning team’s S-curve to this transformation, even though the two phenomena are disconnected and the knowledge underlying the S-curve prediction was likely filled with many virtual learning offerings for classical schools.
As Williams’ article suggests, we wrote what would happen, we were to blame for a leap of religion that hoped schools would simply make the leap and fundamentally replace the grammar of training in the process. However, rules, restrictions, regulations, processes, priorities, profit formulas, etc. They were not magically swept away, nor do they deserve to be hoped.
If other people are serious about a new education system, we will have to be much more patient. And keep the construction from the outside.
That’s not to say that innovations, hybrid inventions, don’t matter. Sustainable inventions are for those who remain in the mainstream formula, and they can stay there while disruption remains complicated in a formula where education is flexible and compulsory.
But we shouldn’t, that’s enough if transformation is what we really need.