"Disruptive Educational transformation is Marvelous!!! Move a few steps Forward!!!"

A disruption is a major disturbance, something that changes your plans or interrupts some event or process. A screaming child on an airplane can be a disruption of the passengers' sleep. A break in the action, especially an unplanned and confusing one, is a disruption.

Disruption Vs. Innovation: What's The Difference?

People are sometimes confused about the difference between innovation and disruption. It's not exactly black and white, but there are real distinctions, and it's not just splitting hairs. Think of it this way: Disruptors are innovators, but not all innovators are disruptors -- in the same way that a square is a rectangle but not all rectangles are squares. Still with me?

Innovation and disruption are similar in that they are both makers and builders. Disruption takes a left turn by literally uprooting and changing how we think, behave, do business, learn and go about our day-to-day. Harvard Business School professor and disruption guru Clayton Christensen says that a disruption displaces an existing market, industry, or technology and produces something new and more efficient and worthwhile. It is at once destructive and creative.

Educational Disruption Means

The most visible part of educational disruption is the proliferation of online learning through MOOCs, or massive, open, online courses. These programs, sponsored by elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and Wesleyan, have enrolled thousands of students around the world in high-level courses developed by top-notch faculty. And although the dropout rate is high, the business model is uncertain, and learning outcomes are not yet clear, these MOOC’s are rapidly evolving new technologies that will certainly change the higher education landscape, and dramatically increase access to learning.

The other force that is disrupting higher education is the expectations of students. One of my clients recently took a trip with her sixteen year old son to visit colleges. While my client was impressed by the schools with extensive libraries and physical facilities, her son was focused on the extent to which the institutions were enabled with wireless capability, video streaming, readily available collaboration tools, and more. This suggests that higher education is also being disrupted by the demands of digital natives. Having grown up in an online world, they won’t be satisfied with traditional lecture-oriented and paper-based education, especially as K-12 schools become more digital as well.

For universities, the changing landscape will mean a fundamental rethinking of the educational experience. For example, the classroom probably will be used more to discuss and internalize content that has already been provided digitally, a concept known as flipping; students and faculty will communicate not just in person, but also through continuously available digital channels; and teachers will have access to more data about student performance and learning, giving them the ability to track progress and participation throughout both a course and a curriculum.

These same trends are likely to affect corporations and the way knowledge is transferred to employees, customers, and other partners. For example, instead of starting new hires with a traditional orientation workshop, companies might require them to complete an online preparatory course and pass a test before even meeting their new boss. The same process could be used when someone moves to a new job or a new division within a company. Digital learning tools also could be used more extensively with customers, replacing instruction manuals and help desks; while remote diagnostics and smart products, with embedded instructions (what GE calls the Industrial Internet) will replace service calls. Companies are experimenting with all of these approaches and many more — so while we don’t know the exact shape of the future, we do know it will be different.

As a result, if you’re in a managerial position today, it’s probably time to get ready. Here are two things you can do:

First, if you’re not completely comfortable with the digital world, get yourself a digital mentor — someone under the age of 25 who can teach you the language and help you understand what’s possible. GE did this for all its senior people a number of years ago when the internet was just emerging, and it accelerated their learning curves tremendously.

Second, take an online course, either in your own company’s virtual university if you have one, or through one of the MOOC providers such as Coursera, EdX, or Udacity. There are an astounding array of topics already available — from “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” to “Aboriginal World Views” to “Songwriting” — so pick something of interest and go through the process at your own pace — both to get exposure to a new subject and to get familiar with a new way of learning.

Disruptive transformation is always painful and challenging. But when you know it’s coming, it’s usually better to be a few steps ahead than a few gigabytes behind

Classroom disruption is often cited as an obstacle to effective teaching, yet little is known regarding how disruptive students influence students with serious behavioral difficulties substantially reduce the academic performance of their peers. Since standard value- added models fail to account for these peer effects, Classroom learning and teacher evaluation some teachers’ value added is penalized because of the students she is assigned. Importantly, the assignment of disruptive students to teachers is non-random, so these peer effects do not impact the evaluation of all teachers equally.

Disruptive Peers and the Estimation of Teacher Value Added

• Understanding classroom peer effects is important both for determining optimal student grouping patterns and for generally understanding the educational production function. While classroom peer effects have been studied extensively, most research has focused on how the existence or absence of peer effects influences whether students should be tracked or placed in heterogeneous classrooms. While these considerations are first order, the existence of peer effects also implies that the educational production functions typically estimated in the literature omit an important input. To the extent that these unmeasured peer inputs are correlated with other school and classroom inputs, estimates of non -peer inputs will be biased. This point is illustrated theoretically by Lazear in the context of estimating the returns to class size, but little research has examined the issue empirically.

We should consider the extent to which peer effects bias the estimated impact of other inputs by showing how disruptive peers influence the estimation of teacher value added. While teachers are just one in put whose estimated impact could be biased by peer effects, the use of value-added estimates in high stakes personnel decisions makes it particularly important to correctly estimate teachers’ impact. Many different forms of peer interactions have the potential to bias value-added estimation; we illustrate the issue in the context of disruptive students for several reasons. First, surveys of teachers and administra tors frequently mention disruption s a major obstacle to learning (Figlio 2007). Second, while researchers have controlled for average peer demographic and peer academic performance when estimating teacher value-added, we are aware of no study that controls for measures of disruption. Similarly, to the best of our knowledge, none of the value-added models currently in use to make high-stakes personnel decisions control for measures of classroom disruption. Third, while there is a large literature on classroom peer effects, most of this research has focused on how peer academic performance impacts one’s academic performance, and few studies explore how the non-cognitive attributes of one’s peers impact one’s academic performance.

Though disruption is frequently reported as an issue by teachers and administrators, datasets typically do not include direct measures of disruption and so researchers necessarily use student characteristics that proxy for disruption (Carrell and Hoekstra 2010; Fletcher 2009 a, 2009 b; Figlio 2007). We follow this approach by using the diagnosis of an emotional disability to proxy for disruption. In the institutional context that we study, emotional disa bilities are diagnosed primarily because students exhibit disruptive behaviors in school, and we show that emotional disability correlates strongly with disciplinary action such as suspension. To the extent that some emotionally disabled students are not disruptive, our estimates will tend towards zero.

We should understand that one limitation of value-added estimates, it is important to note that we provide little evidence on the question of whether school districts should use value added for high-stakes teacher evaluation. First, it is very possible that observation-based evaluations are also subject to bias from peer effects.

Though observers aim to evaluate teacher quality, observer perception of quality may be influenced by classroom composition (Whitehurst, Chingos and Lindquist 2014). Second, the magnitude of the bias we document is sufficiently modest so that the cost of unfairly evaluating some teachers may be outweighed by other benefits of value-added evaluation. Finally, regardless of any limitations in the estimation of teacher value added, policies that evaluate teachers based on value-added may induce effort that improves student achievement. (Dee and Wyckoff 2013)

As school districts increasingly rely on value-added models for high stakes personnel decisions, principals should be aware that these models do not fully adjust for classroom composition. Teachers that are consistently given difficult classrooms may be evaluated to be less effective than teachers given less difficult students, even if their true quality is equivalent. Random assignment of teachers to difficult students would avoid penalizing any particular teacher, but may lower student achievement by reducing the match quality between teachers and students.

By disruption, we mean a period of time when a student’s regularly assigned teacher is absent for an extended period of time or leaves their teaching position during the school year. These disruptions are uncommon; our analysis (focusing on teachers of math and English in grades 4 through 8) indicates that they affect less than three percent of classrooms per year. However, we find these disruptive events have significant negative effects, lowering student achievement by 0.06 and 0.03 standard deviations in math and English Language Arts, respectively. This suggests that policies which help maintain instructional quality during periods of teacher absence and disruption can have significant benefits to students. Additionally, we find evidence that teacher health can impact student achievement above and beyond any relationship it bears with disruptions and absences.

Specifically, we find student achievement is significantly lower when teachers go on medical leave, go on maternity leave, or take additional absences for medical reasons after students have already been tested. All of these estimates are identified from variation within teachers, which suggests that strategies for measuring the causal impact of absences that assume static selection with regard to teacher quality may be biased.

Disrupting the One-Teacher Standard

In a perfect world, education experts would shrink class sizes and children would learn from multiple teachers.The Teachers. Will one instructor teach every subject or will students have a different teacher for each class?

Imagining the ideal school system

We need to disrupt the idea of having only one teacher in front of a group of students at once. With so many different learning styles and students at different places in their learning within a grade and within subjects, students and schools will benefit greatly from co-teaching models. Depending on the complexity of the topic and how the concepts are integrated into the curriculum, students might have teams of two, three, or four teachers at once. If students are learning about the recent recession, for example, they will have a math or economics specialist tag teaming with a historian. If students are learning how to write a persuasive essay, they will benefit from having multiple language-arts specialists each provide their own unique perspective and response to students’ writing and approaches. Individual teachers will not be responsible for individual students as much as the team of teachers will be responsible for the learning outcomes of each student they touch within the school day.

The good thing about having several teachers is that if one of them is not very good, you only have him or her for part of the day. Also, shuffling from class to class breaks up the monotony and allows for brief jokey chats in the hallway.   

During class, side conversations seem to sprout when a class goes above five students. Chaos is logarithmic. One micro-class made up of one, or two, or three students, plus a sympathetic tutor, can get more done in an hour than a roomful of 25 bored, loud fidgets plus a shouting, pleading instructor can accomplish in a week.

Ask elementary-school parents if they prefer their child be in a class of 15 or a class of 30, and you can bet what their answer will be! If you want to know whether low class size is valued, just look at the class sizes of exclusive private schools.

Lower class size has been associated with higher achievement, better test scores, higher student self esteem, lower dropout rates, and other positive outcomes. The effects of lower class size are especially beneficial for disadvantaged students, especially in the early grades. The most extensive study ever on class size, the Tennessee STAR study, showed that the positive effects of smaller class sizes were doubled for poor and minority students.

In a recent research brief on class size, the National Education Policy Center identified class sizes of 15-18 to be ideal, with the understanding that there would be some variation in some classes, such as larger classes for band or for physical education.

Ideally, every classroom will have two teachers, or at least one teacher and a well-trained assistant. An extra set of eyes on the work of learners can provide invaluable feedback and assistance to the lead teacher.

I like the idea of team teaching, especially for subjects like science and math where students could benefit from more one-on-one attention from teachers. I don’t think teachers always feel like they can, singularly, meet the needs of all of their students. There will be a ratio of no more than 1:16 for cooperative learning, so students can be broken down into groups of four or even dyads. For younger students, 3- to 7-year-olds, the classroom sizes would have a ratio of 1:5 in order to foster the development of relationships between the teacher and younger students. I would avoid a 1:1 ratio because it would exclude the social engagement and development students benefit from as part of the learning experience.

The notion of “teacher” will change significantly in the future. The growing number of formal and informal learning options is causing an unbundling of the teacher role. Whereas in the traditional, one-size-fits-all learning model, teachers are responsible for everything that happens in the classroom, as blended learning—online learning in schools—grows, students will experience multiple learning modalities originating from multiple sources. Sometimes they will connect with a teacher online to learn something, and other times they’ll work with a teacher in person to understand a concept. This creates opportunities for teachers to specialize, particularly in schools where teachers work in teams in the same learning environment. In the future, we will see teachers choose among a variety of options, including:

• Content experts who focus on developing curriculum
• Small-group leaders who provide direct instruction
• Project designers to supplement online learning with hands-on application
• Mentors who provide wisdom, social capital, and guidance
• Evaluators to whom other educators can give the responsibility of grading assignments and, in some cases, designing assessments
• Data experts

The configuration of teachers—the number per classroom, the number of students for which teachers will be responsible, the assignment of teacher by subject matter—will be decided with input from teachers themselves according to the needs of students in a particular school. In many cases, this will mean more team teaching that allows collaboration among teachers.

The original inspiration from charter schools—publicly funded schools that allow for experimentation—was that rank-and-file teachers have some of the most promising ideas about how best to educate a particular group of students. Albert Shanker, the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), visited a school in Cologne, Germany, in which teachers taught in teams (larger classrooms with two teachers), and teachers stayed with the same set of students for six years, capitalizing on their knowledge of the individual needs of students.

Giving teachers a say in how teachers are assigned to students will not only increase the generation of good educational ideas, but will also model for students the very essence of democracy: Not all good ideas come from a single authority figure who bosses everyone else around but rather from the collective wisdom of front-line professionals. Today, AFT president Randi Weingarten likewise argues that education reform—including ideas about how teachers will be assigned to students—should be done with educators, not to them.

Elementary-aged children will have one primary teacher, with opportunities to learn from other teachers, specialists, and paraprofessionals on special projects or themes outside the classroom curriculum. Further, parents and community members will be invited to the classroom to share in learning with students and engage kids in real-world applications of the topics they are discussing. At the middle- and high-school levels, students will have high-quality teachers for each subject and be exposed to a variety of teaching methodologies, personalities, and structures. There will also be opportunities for “combination” classes that teach skills of multiple subjects within one content area, such as a world-studies class that tackles both English and history.

Educators will teach the content they have studied and know. For an elementary teacher, that will often mean broad competency in academic subjects, with a focus on child development. For a high-school physics teacher, well, he or she should be a content expert in physics.

But being an expert in your field doesn’t make you a great educator. We need to ensure our teacher-training programs are designed to meaningfully prepare teachers for the classroom, that schools provide support and mentoring for new teachers, that teachers have time to collaborate and innovate with their peers, that paraprofessionals have a career ladder to climb, that veteran teachers have opportunity for growth, and that all educators are treated with the respect they deserve as professionals.

Standardized Testing: A Disruption To Quality Learning

I firmly believe the first step is to eliminate the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balance Assessment. Being an educator in a state that mandated that all districts implement the PARCC test, I can speak directly to the negative impact it created. PARCC is a computer-based assessment. The drain on school district technology resources both in the setting-up phase, which began in January, through the implementation phase, the months of March and May, were profound. The length of the tests, both in March and May were extremely disruptive to school schedules and classroom routines.

Many educators across the state questioned the developmental appropriateness of PARCC, in terms of format, length and difficulty. Although PARCC has announced there will only be one test instead of two in 2016, overall test time has not been decreased significantly. In addition, if the purpose of standardized testing is to inform and improve teaching and learning, PARCC is not the answer.

First round of tests were completed by April 1st and the second round by the end of May. It is mid November, and my school district just now received the results for our high school students; hardly timely if we are to use the information to improve instruction. We have no idea when elementary will receive the results. Given states can’t agree nationwide what curricular content is worth knowing, and given a growing number of states have opted out of Common Core standards and/or PARCC or Smarter Balance Assessment, more and more educators question the validity or purpose of a “one size fits all” test.

Let’s band together and work with our state legislators and create assessments that reflect what we as states have committed to in terms of standards-based teaching and learning. In addition, at the local level, let’s support individual school districts to develop and utilize assessment practices that align with instruction, provide timely feedback, and create partnerships of learning with teachers and students.

Disruptive Innovation And Education

Today’s education system all too often does just this. It’s not the fault of anyone in the system today, but patterned after the dominant factory model of the era in which public schooling scaled, our education system functions as though all students learn at the same pace and have the same learning needs, which we know is not true. The education system we have today is, in many ways, built as a sorting system as a result. Those students who can’t keep up with the pace are sorted out at various intervals—an arrangement that worked fine for many in the past, but in today’s knowledge economy is no longer OK.

Second, others told us that the theories would be useless for education because education did not operate as a classic market; it was much more of a monopoly. What I have learned, however, is that schools, as we have created them, do have underlying economic, or business, models. They are not naturally occurring arrangements in the world but rather more recent inventions; the way they operate is not preordained. Disrupting our school is impossible today because there is no nonconsumption of education in this country, but helping our schools use disruptive innovation to disrupt the classroom—the way they arrange teaching and learning—is possible. The theories have a lot to offer schools to help them manage innovation—both of the sustaining and disruptive sort. One misreading of disruption theory has been that disruption is good and sustaining innovation is bad (I suspect that’s one reason for the gross overuse of the word disruptive). This could not be further from the truth. Successfully introducing sustaining innovations is vital for any organization to be successful; a sector without sustaining innovations stagnates.

Understanding that schools have economic models—and that they have resource allocation processes and hire products and services from various providers and people that are shaped according to governmental rules and regulations—helps to understand the market at work inside the education system. And what’s exciting is that there are plenty of opportunities to use the first disruptive innovation in education since the printing press—online learning—to transform teaching and learning to better serve each individual student within each school by personalizing and humanizing learning—and undo the factory-model assumptions that dominate our schools and treat uniformly students in the process. Because online learning is inherently modular, it can help the education system customize for each child’s distinct needs and create opportunities for more meaningful collaborative work between children and teachers.

Disruptive innovation in education in the form of online learning is also the catalyst to bring about more equitable access to high-quality education. Far too many students attend schools that don’t offer the full suite of classes they will need in life to be successful, but through online learning, we can deliver high-quality teaching and learning experiences regardless of where students live.

And lastly, disruptive innovation introduces cost control into the system, so that we can deliver a tutor-like experience for each child at a cost that won’t break the bank.

In higher education, because the landscape is so much different from K–12 education, disruptive innovation is playing a different role. Here there is significant nonconsumption of higher education. Millions of people, in the U.S. and worldwide, cannot take advantage of traditional higher colleges and universities for any number of reasons having to do with convenience and accessibility, simplicity, and cost. But they would be glad to consume education if it were delivered in a way that fit their life realities. Convenience, accessibility, simplicity, and affordability are the classic benefits that disruptions extend when they emerge, and as a result—no surprise—disruptive higher education upstarts powered by online learning are jumping into the fray.

Because the fundamental underlying costs of many colleges and universities—not their tuition, but their expenses—have risen rapidly even as governmental subsidies have not been able to keep pace because of the rising red ink and other obligations facing governments, with the emergence of disruptive innovations in higher education, it is true that many traditional colleges and universities will ultimately be threatened, not by MOOCs per se, but by the general unbundling of higher education and the ability for students to customize their education for their different needs from a variety of components. Many traditional institutions will also be OK and continue to exist largely unthreatened—and even absorb online learning as a sustaining innovation to disrupt their classrooms but not the schools themselves.

What’s exciting here though is that through disruption, we have the opportunity to make a quality higher education fundamentally affordable and thereby allow many more people access to its benefits.

The disruptions happening throughout education more generally afford us an opportunity to revisit how we cultivate children's learning and futures—and hopefully allow us to do it in a way that is even better, given what we now know today. That's not preordained either, of course, but we have the opportunity. It’s now all of our turn to shape it appropriately.

Why it is important for India's education system to embrace disruption

The world is becoming an increasingly difficult entity to predict. Business, economy, politics and society are part of the same ecosystem, certainly, but the rules of engagement have changed and what held good once upon a time is no longer good enough. The future of the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world is completely different and its challenges, unprecedented. Disruptive technologies and the internet are driving these changes and it takes not only a well-informed manager to understand the implications, but a smart one to be able to realise the potential of such disruptions.

 

Educators therefore, have a duty to offer knowledge not only for the basic understanding and appreciation of the discipline but also for enhancing skillsets and expertise that will help the students face up to the challenges of the coming years. In this context, the higher education segment has a crucial role to play. My article is specific to the management education milieu.

  Lack of qualified faculty: While the regulatory authorities impose specific mandatory requirements for appointing qualified faculty members and principals, the word ‘quality’ is a tricky one. There is a huge variance in the quality of the qualifications that a person in India can acquire. You cannot equate a Ph.D. obtained from the say the IITs with one obtained from a fly-by-night school. However, both candidates can certainly be appointed professors since they do have the requisite Ph.D. qualification. One way to handle is to use the philosophy of “publish or perish” which will ensure that there is an emphasis on research output even after the Ph.D. has been obtained. One might argue that there are unverified and dubious “online” journals in which one could publish and once again quality will be suspect. Institutes need to insist on research and paper publications only in rated and peer reviewed journals. This will ensure quality and therefore equality in the overall standards of qualification.

  The low financ-ial packages in the education sector vis-à-vis the Industry: The pay and perks that many faculty get in India are not commensurate with rest of the world or even the rest of Asia. Faculty members have to become a “teaching machine” or take on “forced consulting” to generate the income needed to sustain a comfortable lifestyle and send their children to good schools. Thus, the effectiveness of their overall academic performance suffers. The package should be on par with the opportunity cost of having worked in the corporate domain. Ensuring decent package and providing incentives for scholarly work and effective performance are essential.

  NO discipline: The unfortunate reality that I see in today’s society is the general disregard for discipline and ethical values. Let’s be clear that without either, there is no success or achievement whether personal or professional. Teachers and parents especially in the k to 12 age group have to do their bit in moulding the youth with these fundamental strengths. Collegiate and higher education should certainly reinforce these qualities and this is the only way to create super-performers who are also responsible corporate citizens.

  Merit should prevail: Reservation should not take precedence over merit. If the government ensures access to basic, good and free education to all right from kindergarten the quota systems won’t be necessary in higher education. The merit system has to supersede and include standardised tests as well as an overall assessment of the achievements, quality and potential of the student leaving no room for subjective interpretation. No student is ‘unfit’ but there may be ‘misfits’. Everyone need not be a “book smart” person but can be “streetsmart”.

  Experiential learning: We need to focus on experiential learning besides class room teaching. Integrated and energised teaching should be encouraged. Also a questioning attitude among students must be encouraged and exams need to test that. The evaluation system currently encourages the students to master the ‘art of cheating’ as opposed to the ‘science of teaching’.

  Faculty members: Every class should have two faculty — one from industry stressing the business relevance and an academic who can bring “academic elegance” — the fundamental concepts and discipline of the subject. This way the shortage of academics can be filled to an extent with industry experts in an environment where the art of Leadership blends with the science of management. This is another way to ensure that the teachers are brought up to speed and they continue to learn.

  In sum, several mandatory changes are required in the way that management education is delivered in India. More so since the avenues for gaining said knowledge are going to multiply in the coming years. The faculty members are neither challenged intellectually nor are they financially motivated to engage in research. Evaluation methods are compromised and experiential learning is close to zero. If this continues, there will be a large number of textbook managers who won’t have the resourcefulness to excel in business and society. It is time to embrace the change.

Disruptive innovation as an analytical tool

In its most fundamental form, disruptive innovation theory, an analytical tool pioneered by Harvard University business professor Clayton Christensen, is a way of thinking about how technology can change an organization, sector, or industry. Disruptive innovation theory makes a distinction between sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation is when technology is applied in a way that makes it easier to deploy people and processes to better serve existing customers.

In contrast, disruptive innovation is when technology is applied in way that creates asimpler, more affordable product for a new group of customers who, in most cases, were not buying (or succeeding in) the traditional offering.

For disruptive innovation to be possible, it must include four interrelated elements:

?Technology enabler:

There must be a technology that transforms a business process that once required deep training, expertise, iteration, and intuition into a rules-based process that can be performed by computer software. Often the technology enabler makes it possible to “unbundle” a product or service that was once considered to be viable but was only delivered in a vertically integrated manner.

?Business model change:

The new process or solution must be able to fit into a business that can be profitable while delivering customers a more affordable and convenient product or service.

?New value network:

The solution and business must be able to connect with other businesses that offer complementary services and whose revenue models are also complementary.

?Standards:

Since the technology enabler, business model, and value network create entirely new ways of doing business and organizing resources, disruptive innovation requires a rethinking of industry standards for quality, safety, and interoperability that define how the industry operates and typically support traditional products, services, and financing.

Whether or not a new offering can be disruptive depends on a mix of these elements being present. That being the case, let’s examine if these elements are indeed present for competency-based education