Disruption in American Education

Several weeks ago I was at a conference and Hall Davidson of Discovery Education was speaking.  His audience of Superintendents listened as he talked about the need to look for and use technology in interesting and powerful ways if we are going to reach students.  He was amazing in his ability to connect throughout his talk with websites and technology tools that helped his audience learn.

During the course of his presentation he made an interesting comment about how educators sometimes assume that things can't or won't change because we believe we are just too important.  He suggested that other industries have made the same fatal comment in the past.  His example was the newspaper industry, who, when faced with incredible challenges from technology, probably believed that their delivery system did not need to change because everyone needed a newspaper.  After all, where would one get daily news and insight.  How could anyone live without the daily newspaper being delivered?    

He said that educators sometimes act like the newspapers.  "Schools don't need to change.  We are as important as newspapers!"  Uh-oh!

I thought of that presentation as I read two articles this week.  One appeared in the New York Times and the other in the online version of Newsweek.  These two articles, unrelated except for their commentary on how life in the 21st century keeps changing, made me think about how education needs to be sensitive to the changes that are occurring all around us.

The Newsweek article talked about the difficulty an online company was having remaining competitive and finding a way to turn a profit.  The article said that this company was being replaced by a competitor that really was not supposed to be a competitor.  The author stated that the company was struggling and it was surprised "But this is how disruption happens in tech . . . something comes out of left field and provides a new way to do something."

The New York Times article provided a great example of how something is coming out of left field and will potentially change education. Students in Britain were being taught math online through tutors in India.

Is how we do things in American education the best and only way to do things?  I would like to say yes, but the evidence is accumulating that there are other ways to teach and learn.  Just because classrooms today look a lot like the classrooms of forty years ago or the classrooms of one hundred years ago, does not mean that the classrooms of next year will look the same.

This is how disruption happens.  Something comes out of left field and provides a new way to do something.  Those of us responsible for educating todays's youth need to be aware of and sensitive to the changes that might happen.  Instead of being shaken by the disruptive forces at work in our world, we need to be involved in shaping those disruptive forces to help our students learn.