The post Most Innovation Efforts Won’t Transform K–12 Education appeared first on Education Next.

If you’ve followed the K–12 education dialogue over the last decade, then you’re probably familiar with the term “disruptive innovation.” Edtech entrepreneurs and school choice advocates sometimes invoke it as an indomitable force that will redeem and transform broken school systems.

Meanwhile, people on the other side of these debates worry that “disruption” is a flawed yet rhetorically powerful narrative used to rationalize K–12 privatization. Somewhere in the middle are skeptics who give consideration to the idea, but wonder if “disruption” is an oversold term that is likely to underdeliver on its proponents’ promises.

So how do we make sense of the tumult of opinions? What is disruptive innovation as it relates to K–12 education?

K-12 schools are not getting disrupted — here’s why

Talk of disruption in K–12 education took off when Clayton Christensen’s 2008 book, Disrupting Class, used Disruptive Innovation theory to conclude that online learning is poised to transform K–12 schooling. Since the book’s publication, virtual charter schools have continued to expand, and a number of innovative brick-and-mortar charter schools that make heavy use of online learning have made notable headlines.

So, are these schools fulfilling the book’s prophecy? For the skeptics and the deeply concerned, I want to offer some words of solace: K–12 public schools are not getting disrupted. And for the record, Disrupting Class never claimed that they would be.

First, charter schools are not disruptive innovations relative to traditional schools. Disruptive innovations always start out serving people who lack access to mainstream options. But in the United States today, all students have access to some form of public education. This means that charter schools cannot be disruptive because they compete head-to-head with district schools for enrollment.

Second, full-time virtual schools and other purely online options are not disrupting traditional public schools either. Disruptive innovations need a technology that can improve over time until customers see it as comparable to traditional options. But when it comes to schooling, technology cannot substitute for everything parents value in a traditional school. In addition to academic learning, most families value the caretaking role that schools offer for working parents. This important benefit of brick-and-mortar schools has no technological substitute, which means only a small segment of the population will ever be interested in full-time virtual schooling.

Charter schools and virtual schools certainly compete with district schools, but their differences relative to district schools do not make them disruptive.

Then where does disruptive innovation happen in K–12 education?

As Disrupting Class points out, online learning enables disruptive innovation in K–12 education. But online learning is not disrupting the K–12 education system. Rather, it fuels disruption within the markets that provide resources to K–12 schools. Over the last few decades, a host of new online learning providers—offering everything from adaptive learning software, to mastery-based learning management systems, to fully-online courses—entered the scene and began selling their services to districts. In doing so, these players leveled a disruptive threat to the hegemony of textbook vendors.

The road to transforming education is paved through change management

Disruptive entrants in the K–12 marketplace offer schools fresh opportunities to better support their students. But using technology to make learning more student-centered will be neither automatic or intuitive. In an EdSurge article, my colleague Julia Freeland Fisher explains that many of the most innovative online-learning technologies have slow adoption curves because they are not plug-compatible with traditional schools. Similarly, some of my recent research points out that schools trying to personalize learning might want to rethink traditional school staffing models; but redefining educator roles and responsibilities is no easy task. Even with all the new opportunities that online learning has to offer, transforming schools still comes down to the hard work of change management.

Disruptive innovation is happening in K–12 education. But it isn’t going to replace traditional schools. Rather, it will change the menu of instructional resources that schools can use to serve their students. To take advantage of these resources, school leaders first need to carefully consider how new tools impact educators capacity. Then they need to implement new tools, programs, and approaches in ways that actually motivate teachers to change how they teach.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org.

The post K-12 Schools Aren’t Getting Disrupted, but Markets that Provide Resources to Schools Are appeared first on Education Next.

Earlier this month, education news outlets buzzed with a frustrating, yet unsurprising, headline: Most educational software licenses go unused in K-12 districts. The source of the headline is a recent report by Ryan Baker, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Learning Analytics. Baker analyzed data from BrightBytes, a K-12 data management company, on students’ technology usage across 48 districts. That data revealed that a median of 70% of districts’ software licenses never get used, and a median of 97.6% of licenses are never used intensively.

The findings unveil a clear disconnect between district software procurement and classroom practice. To be clear, not all software is high quality, which means teachers may have good reason to not adopt some software products that fail to deliver positive student learning outcomes. But for quality software tools that can yield breakthrough student outcomes, underutilization is a huge missed opportunity.

So when districts license high-quality educational software, why might teachers still choose not to use the software at their disposal? Some of our latest research at the Christensen Institute offers answers to this question.

Understanding teachers’ ‘Jobs’

In September, my colleagues and I released a research paper that explains what motivates teachers to change how they teach. Drawing on the Jobs to be Done Theory, we interviewed teachers to discover the ‘Jobs’ that motivate them to adopt blended learning or other new approaches to instruction.

According to the theory, all people—teachers included—are internally motivated to make changes in their lives that move them toward success or satisfaction within their particular life circumstances. The theory labels these circumstance-based desires as ‘Jobs.’ Just as people ‘hire’ contractors to help them build houses or lawyers to help them build a case, people search for something they can ‘hire’ to help them when ‘Jobs’ arise in their lives.

Through our interviews we found four Jobs that often motivate teachers to adopt new practices. Three of these Jobs seem relevant for explaining why licensed software often goes unused.

Job #1: Help me lead the way in improving my school. Teachers with this Job are eager to demonstrate their value as contributors to broader school improvement. These teachers will be interested in using district-licensed software when it 1) seems like a viable and worthwhile way to improve the school as a whole, 2) seems simple and straightforward to share with their colleagues, and 3) offers them an opportunity to help shape the direction of school improvement efforts.

Job #2: Help me find manageable ways to engage and challenge more of my students. Teachers with this Job are generally confident with how teaching and learning happen in their classrooms. But they have a few students each year who they struggle to reach. They are often open to software as a way to engage those students. But that software must not only be worthwhile for their students, but also practical to incorporate into their current practices and routines.

Job #3: Help me replace a broken instructional model so I can reach each student. Whether from perpetually low test scores, low graduation rates, ongoing student behavior issues, or a general sense that learning lacks joy and passion, teachers with this Job struggle constantly with a sense that they aren’t living up to their responsibilities to their students. For these teachers, software can be a powerful resource for helping them transform their instructional models. But that software needs to offer new approaches to teaching and learning, not just new takes on traditional textbooks and worksheets.

Accounting for the 70% of unused software licenses

We suspect that in many cases, quality software goes unused because it either fails to align with teachers’ Jobs or fumbles at delivering a good solution for meeting their Jobs.

For example, teachers who are looking to lead the way in helping their schools improve (Job 1) likely don’t look first to software as a way to fulfill their Job. Their school improvement instincts typically orient them to look for new instructional programs, not silver bullet software. To meet their Job to be Done, software providers need to start by offering an evidence-based set of practices that will help schools improve on key metrics. Then, once they’ve made the case for new instructional methods, they can discuss how software tools help to facilitate those methods.

As another example, teachers in search of manageable ways to engage and challenge more of their students (Job 2) could find a lot of benefit in the multimedia-rich and game-like aspects of many edtech products. But software platforms that are great for engaging students may yet fail to get used because teachers find them hard to incorporate into daily lessons. Software developers, hardware suppliers, and district technology teams all need to consider things they can do to make it easy for teachers to incorporate software into their lesson plans and then manage devices during class.

As a third example, consider a teacher who is frustrated by a sense that he is failing to meet the needs of most of his students because he feels stuck teaching to the nonexistent middle of his class (Job 3). The right software could be a powerful platform for helping him create individual learning pathways and mastery-based progressions that meet each of his students where they are. But if the software available from his district just supplements whole-class, direct instruction, that software won’t fulfill his Job.

Explaining why 97.6% of software licenses are never used intensively

One significant finding from our research illustrates another potential pitfall for software utilization. When new software licenses come down from the district office without clearly communicated benefits for teachers or pedagogical support, many teachers likely take a quick look and conclude that the software doesn’t fulfill any of the first three Jobs for them. Nevertheless, they feel compelled to use the software, at least occasionally, so as to not set a bad tone with their administrators. They do what they need to do to check the appropriate boxes on their teacher evaluation rubrics, but they don’t actually use the software enough for it to make a difference for them and their students. The new Job that the software creates for them amounts to, “Help me not fall behind on my school’s new initiative.” This insight likely explains why even though 30% of software licenses that get used, only 2.4% are used intensively.

In education, money isn’t easy to come by, which makes it especially frustrating to learn that many districts spend money on software that doesn’t get used. The district staff members who make software licensing decisions surely don’t intend for their purchases to go to waste. But yet, as Baker’s report illustrates, there is a disconnect between software purchases and classroom adoption. A good sales pitch may get a product through the district office’s front door. But only by helping teachers fulfill their Jobs can high-quality educational software make it through the classroom door and into the hands of students. In short, software only gets used in classrooms when it meets a Job to be Done for teachers.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org.

The post There’s a Reason Why Teachers Don’t Use the Software Provided By Their Districts appeared first on Education Next.

Nearly everything in education hinges on teachers. Higher standards only raise achievement levels if teachers teach to those standards. Better curriculum only improves outcomes if teachers plan their lessons using that curriculum. And new strategies—such as project-based learning or blended learning—only enhance student learning if teachers put them into action. Because children’s minds and hearts are complicated, we need teachers’ intuition and expertise to figure out the best ways to engage, motivate, and inspire them.

This reality creates a conundrum for education leaders and reformers. None of their ideas will succeed unless those ideas gain traction among the teachers who carry forward the work of education on a day-to-day basis. Many promising programs, reforms, and innovations fall flat because school leaders can’t get teachers to buy what they’re selling.

So, what’s the key to getting teachers on board with new approaches to instruction?

Using a powerful theory and methodology called Jobs to be Done—developed and validated through extensive research in other sectors—we set out to uncover the factors that motivate teachers to use new practices in their classrooms. Specifically, we interviewed teachers who had recently pivoted to blended or project-based teaching to identify the events and circumstances that prompted them to bring these new practices into their classrooms.

According to the theory, teachers change their practices when they have an unmet “Job” they need to fulfill. We call these Jobs because just as people hire contractors to help them build houses or lawyers to help them build a case, teachers search for something they can “hire” to help them with a particular issue. Jobs Theory cuts through the noise of what teachers say they want or what school leaders expect them to do, in order to identify the events and circumstances that actually cause them to make the decisions they make.

Through our interviews, we uncovered four Jobs that motivate teachers to change their instruction:

Job #1: Help me lead the way in improving my school. Teachers with this Job were eager to demonstrate their value as contributors to broader school improvement efforts. They looked for promising yet simple practices that would be straightforward to share with their colleagues.

Job #2: Help me engage and challenge more of my students in a way that’s manageable. Teachers with this Job were happy overall with the teaching and learning in their classrooms, but wanted practical strategies for reaching a few students who were slipping through the cracks.

Job #3: Help me replace a broken instructional model so I can reach each student. Teachers with this Job taught in circumstances where few students were succeeding academically. They were eager for radical new approaches that would help them find a renewed sense of purpose as teachers.

Job #4: Help me to not fall behind on my school’s new initiative. For these teachers, their schools’ initiatives didn’t seem to offer viable ways to reach their goals, and thereby created compliance-oriented motivation. They focused on doing what they had to do to not disappoint their school leaders, colleagues, and students.

At first glance, these Jobs may seem intuitive or even obvious to anyone who works in schools. But the nuances of the Jobs reveal key parameters that any new instructional program must meet to gain traction among teachers. School leaders can employ insights from these Jobs in two ways.

First, school leaders should design their programs to fulfill Jobs that are already relevant for their teachers. You can’t force a teacher to have a particular Job. But, when you appeal to a Job they already have, adoption happens organically.

For example, if a substantial portion of a school’s teaching staff finds motivation in fulfilling Job #2, school leaders should work with teachers to pinpoint the students that are particularly difficult to reach, and then select new instructional approaches designed to engage those students. Importantly, however, to fulfill Job #2, those new practices need to be straightforward complements to whatever teachers are already doing. If the new practices are not manageable additions to teachers’ current strategies, those new practices will be dead in the water. Teachers with Job #2 aren’t interested in “great ideas” that double their workload or require them to throw out their favorite lesson activities.

Second, if a program doesn’t line up well with existing Jobs, leaders can prime teachers for new initiatives by shaping the circumstances that activate latent Jobs.

For example, many of the teachers we interviewed with Job #3 only came to that Job after their experiences gave them a strong sense that far too many of their students were slipping through the cracks. One high school math teacher was routinely frustrated when his students just wanted to regurgitate steps without trying to understand mathematical concepts. Another teacher felt defeated by ongoing behavior issues from a large proportion of disengaged students. Helping teachers reckon with such experiences can be a powerful catalyst for motivating them to set aside their long-standing approaches and seek something better. When school leaders highlight the shortcomings in a classroom in ways that help teachers realize for themselves that the status quo needs to change, those experiences can activate dormant Jobs for teachers and lead them to proactively seek new approaches to teaching.

Understanding teachers’ Jobs is the key to shifting from coercive to inspiring forms of management. When school leaders use Jobs to shape their school improvement programs, they create the circumstances for those programs to flourish organically across their schools. For more insights into the Jobs that motivate teachers and the strategies for activating and leveraging those Jobs, check out our recently published paper, “The teacher’s quest for progress: How school leaders can motivate instructional innovation.”

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org.

The post The Secret to Activating Teacher Motivation appeared first on Education Next.

Jennifer, a new high school principal, beams with enthusiasm as her school’s girls basketball team clinches a win during the first game of the state championship playoffs. After a seven-year slump of losing seasons, the team’s new coach, Coach Goodman, has taken them to a shot at the state championship for the first time in 20 years. But a few hours later, Jennifer catches word that one of her team member’s parents vented strong frustration during the school board meeting that evening over the language Coach Goodman uses when talking with the players.

The next morning, Jennifer receives a call from the superintendent, who explains that the Board is concerned about the parent’s allegations and wants some action to be taken. While she knows that their school made the state playoffs in large part because of Coach Goodman, she can’t turn a blind eye to these allegations. Further complicating the matter, a local news reporter just left Jennifer a voicemail informing her that he is writing a story covering both events of last night: the game and the parent’s accusations.

How should Jennifer respond?

Fortunately for Jennifer, the situation described above is not real.

Jennifer is immersed in an online simulation designed to put her through tricky administrative situations that hone her leadership instincts so she’ll be prepared to handle similar situations as they inevitably arise in her job.

Simulations can be a powerful approach for helping educators gain quick iterations of practice and feedback in low stakes settings. Simulations are also a potential catalyst for transformational change in the field of professional development. Given the technology that mediates the simulation experience, could they eventually disrupt incumbent approaches to how we train educators?

The answer to that question isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem. Disruption depends not only on an enabling technology, but also on the business model that brings the technology to bear. To truly understand if simulations could be disruptive, we need to look at the specific organizations that offer simulations on a case-by-case basis. In this post, we’ll consider Ed Leadership SIMS, the developer of Jennifer’s simulation, that offers web-based simulations for school leaders. Below, we put them to the test with six questions for identifying potential disruptive innovations.

1. Does it target nonconsumers or people who are overserved by an incumbent’s existing offering in a market?

Yes. Most school leaders receive little to no formal development after they complete their training to become administrators—a clear case of nonconsumption. A few programs such as Relay Graduate School of Education’s School Leaders program, The Chicago Public Education Fund’s Programs for Principals, New Leaders’ Principal Institute, and a handful of programs through University-based schools of education offer robust training regimens for developing school leaders’ potential for impact. But the cost of these programs in dollars, time commitment, and travel place them out of reach for most practicing school leaders. Furthermore, these options likely overserve school leaders who only want specific support or guidance on a few narrow areas of development.

2. Is the offering not as good as an incumbent’s existing offering as judged by historical measures of performance?

Yes. The in-person programs mentioned above give school leaders opportunities to get outside their school sites to learn directly from revered experts, receive personalized coaching and feedback, and network with other leaders. In contrast, school leaders complete Ed Leadership SIMS from their personal computers, progress through the simulated decisions by selecting among pre-set choices, and debrief the simulations with colleagues from their school systems. The in-person programs are likely more inspiring, informative, and personalized than Ed Leadership SIMS.

3. Is the innovation simpler to use, more convenient, or more affordable than the incumbent’s existing offering?

Yes. School leaders access Ed Leadership SIMS through a simple-to-navigate website at any time of the day and wherever they have access to a computer. For just $650 per site license, school leaders get unlimited access to the Ed Leadership SIMS library of simulations—a price miles below the cost of sending multiple school leaders to in-person leadership development programs.

4. Does the offering have a technology enabler that can carry its value proposition around simplicity, convenience, or affordability upmarket and allow it to improve?

Potentially. Over time, the company could create additional simulations for more circumstances, make them more multimedia-rich, and build more complex narratives. Hypothetically, the company could also incorporate artificial intelligence into the simulations so that users could input constructed responses and receive feedback customized to their responses. Over time, these improvements could allow the simulations to approach the quality of learning experiences available through in-person administrator training.

One foreseeable uncertainty—and this is a major possible hangup in the technology’s disruptive potential—is whether the technology can get good enough to scale from simulating one-off leadership scenarios to facilitating scenarios where school leaders model instructional coaching. Giving teachers live coaching on their classroom practices is more complicated than making leadership decisions at discrete decision points. It may be some time before the software can capture and evaluate the instructional leadership aspects of school administrators’ work.

5. Is the technology paired with a business model innovation that allows it to be sustainable with its new value proposition?

Yes. The main operating cost is the upfront expense of producing new simulations. Once Ed Leadership SIMS develops a simulation, it can run that simulation for any number of school sites at very little additional cost with only minor tweaks to adjust for local contexts and evolving cultural trends.

6. Are expert providers motivated to ignore the new innovation and not be threatened at the outset?

Yes. In-person school leader training programs might see value in taking a hybrid approach that supplements their in-person training with simulations. But they are unlikely to risk their reputations for high-quality leadership development by substituting simulations for the training they offer from experts.

One question that remains is whether Ed Leadership SIMS actually addresses a real Job to be Done—or circumstance-based goal—for school administrators. The simulations are a preventative measure for helping school leaders handle difficult scenarios that may come up in the future, but they don’t offer any immediate solutions to the acute challenges school leaders face on a given day. Just as living a healthy lifestyle is something all people should do, but it isn’t actually a Job to be Done for most people, Ed Leadership SIMS offer a type of professional development that school leaders should value, but that they may not choose to prioritize over other daily demands.

Nonetheless, if Ed Leadership SIMS is able to develop a disruptive business model with a scalable technology core, it could, in time, become a major player in improving the overall quality of primary and secondary education systems. Effective school leadership is a key attribute of high-quality schools. Thus a convenient, affordable, and effective program for expanding access to the development of strong school leaders could drastically improve overall education quality.

Make sure to keep an eye out for the second installment blog post in this series, looking at the disruptive potential of simulations for educator professional development.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org

The post Innovators Worth Watching: Ed Leadership SIMS appeared first on Education Next.

The success of our schools—and of our education system at large—hinges on teachers. From decades of research we know that teachers influence student outcomes more than anything else a school has to offer. Given the importance of teachers, many of the prominent ideas for improving education focus on increasing teacher impact through better recruitment, preparation, and development or through giving teachers better tools and resources. Yet perhaps one of the best ways to expand teacher impact doesn’t require extensive reform or new technology.

For some time, I’ve wondered if schools might help their teachers accomplish more by allowing them to focus more narrowly on what they do. This idea isn’t new to education. Middle and high school teachers already specialize by subject so they can hone deep expertise in teaching particular content areas. But what if schools took this idea a step further by having teachers specialize not just by subject, but by the roles they fulfill in the classroom?

Teaching is a multifaceted job that might benefit from some streamlining. In addition to being content instructors (often in multiple content areas), we also expect teachers to be curriculum designers, assessment creators, and experts at evaluating student work and analyzing student learning data, not to mention experts in classroom management and culture, coaching students on self-management, providing students with social and emotional support, and being the primary school connection with parents and families. Add all these tasks to a teacher’s pack of responsibility, and the burden becomes exhausting, if not crushing. Not only is it hard to get really good at any particular area of responsibility when juggling so much, but teachers likely lose a lot of time and energy switching between different tasks and trying to plan and prioritize all the things they need to do.

When we launched our innovative staffing research last year with Public Impact, I looked forward to using that work to gauge whether role specialization might be an effective method for increasing teacher impact. Our research methods would not tell us if specialization caused gains in student achievement or wellbeing. But if we could find schools that were divvying up typical teacher responsibilities across multiple roles, those examples would suggest that specialization might be worthwhile.

Our research led to visits and interviews with eight pioneering district, charter, and private schools and school networks to learn about how they used blended learning and new staffing arrangements to personalize instruction. Among those schools, many used specialized educator roles. For example, the teachers at two elementary school networks specialized in either English language arts or math. Some schools created specialized data-analysis roles for teachers apart from classroom teaching. One school shifted all the lesson planning for an entire team of classroom teachers to one lead educator. And at one school, math teachers specialized in either content instruction or in monitoring and supporting students’ individual progress through a mastery-based curriculum. These examples deliver tentative evidence that role specialization may be a worthwhile practice.

But before we conclude that all schools should start creating more specialized roles, we also have to wrestle with some anomalies. First, many of the schools we studied didn’t point to benefits of specialization as their main rationale for creating new roles and teams. Some developed new educator roles primarily to provide teachers with career progression opportunities and to expand the influence of their best teachers to more students. Other schools created non-certified support staff roles as a budget-friendly approach for increasing adult support for students. A few schools also created team teaching arrangements to give students more adult connection. Importantly, many of the roles and staffing arrangements at the schools we studied maintained most or all of the responsibilities that typically land on teachers’ plates.

In short, we did find some examples of role specialization, but it was not nearly as common or extensive as I hoped to see at the outset. How might we reconcile the theoretical benefits of specialization with the current evidence? Why didn’t the innovative schools we studied turn more to specialization to expand the impact of their teachers? Here are a few hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Specialization requires too much coordination

The time and effort to coordinate work across specialized roles may outweigh the benefits that come from specialization. When high school teachers specialize by content area, coordination is simple: separated classrooms, bell schedules, and course content standards let teachers do their work without much need for collaboration. In contrast, if teachers were to specialize across responsibilities such as lesson planning, assessment design, and data analysis, the educators in these roles would likely need to communicate on a fairly regular basis about the progress of classroom instruction and student learning needs. Given that we don’t yet have efficient tools and processes for coordinating work across these hypothetical roles, the collaboration that further specialization would entail may simply be too time consuming to be worthwhile.

Hypothesis 2: Specialization hurts student/teacher relationships

Perhaps the benefits of specialization are outweighed by negative impacts on students’ sense of connectedness. When specialization means that educators work with more students on a given day, it will be harder for those educators to form strong relationships with each student. Additionally, students likely feel less supported if their interactions with adults at school entail many brief encounters and handoffs that never allow for substantive interaction. Harvard economist Roland Fryer landed on this hypothesis after studying elementary schools where teachers specialized by content area and finding that specialized roles hindered student achievement. Likewise, Roots Elementary, a charter school in Denver, decided to pull back from having students rotate between instruction from multiple adults because the arrangement detracted from the staff’s ability to support students’ social and emotional needs. (Assuming specialization negatively impacts students’ sense of support and connectedness, I think there are ways to mitigate this downside to specialization using blended learning. But I’ll have to elaborate on those ideas in another post.)

Hypothesis 3: Innovator’s dilemmas keep schools from having teachers specialize

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen explained why companies often fail to adopt market-transforming innovations: new innovations, despite their clear benefits, are often incongruent with an organization’s established practices and priorities. This is why RCA lagged behind Sony in developing solid-state electronics, why Walmart has floundered in the face of Amazon at developing online retail channels, and why taxi companies struggle to offer the convenience and affordability of Uber.

I suspect that this same phenomenon may keep schools from figuring out how to separate teaching into more specialized roles. Most schools’ instructional practices are hewn from the time-proven model of assigning teachers to classes of 25 students and then putting those teachers in charge of all the curriculum planning, lesson planning, classroom management, assessment, and data analysis for their classes. From that starting point, it’s hard to make a rational argument for throwing that working model out and fumbling along as you figure out how to divide up and coordinate responsibilities across new roles, while also working to mitigate any negative impacts on students’ sense of connectedness. It may very well be that specialization can work, but just won’t emerge from schools that start with the one-teacher-per-classroom model as their template.

If you’ve made it this far through this post, I’m eager to hear what you think. Do your experiences provide additional evidence for any of the hypotheses above? Do you have other potential explanations for why schools aren’t working to expand teachers’ impact by allowing them to have more focused responsibilities? Do you have ideas on how schools might overcome their constraints to make specialization work? Please share your thoughts by starting a conversation with me on Twitter (@ArnettTom).

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org

The post Do Specialized Teaching Roles Help or Hurt Students? appeared first on Education Next.

There’s growing recognition today of a huge problem slowing innovation in personalized learning: we don’t have a clear pipeline for preparing and developing personalized learning teachers. Although many aspects of teaching translate across personalized and traditional settings, the schools driving personalized learning forward often find that their teachers need some additional skills and mindset shifts that they just don’t pick up in traditional teacher preparation.

The solution, as many funders, experts, and school leaders see it, is collective action. They talk of bringing together a diverse array of stakeholders to define a common set of educator competencies and then working with established teacher education programs to create new pathways for developing next-generation educators.

On the surface this approach makes sense; no single organization today has the scale to impact all of K–12 education. But if we look to how innovation problems have played out in other sectors, it’s clear that the “collective action” approach will likely flounder at creating the pipeline of excellent personalized learning teachers that the field needs.

The collaborative approach

A close analogy is the problem that the computer industry wrestled with when trying to launch touch-screen devices. Today everyone knows the story of how Apple created an entirely new product category with the iPad. What’s less known, however, is that PC makers tried for roughly a decade ahead of Apple to launch mobile tablets. So why did the PC makers flounder and Apple succeed? The answer is multifaceted, but innovation theory makes clear that “collaboration” was a major hindrance to success.

PC makers, like many education thought leaders today, tried developing something new with an ecosystem of partner organizations. No one company had enough scale across PC components to make a complete touch screen device, so companies like HP and Lenovo worked on the overall hardware architecture; Microsoft made the operating system; and a host of other companies supplied the central processors, hard drives, etc. These companies thought they had everything they needed to make a successful mobile tablet: the core components and specifications were basically the same as the desktop and laptop machines they had built together in the past; the new devices just needed to be compact and touch compatible.

A restricted design

But the devil was in the details. No one really knew how to design a great mobile tablet because it had never been done before. Getting the form factor just right in order to nail what customers needed meant making important tradeoffs between interdependent components—things like processing speed, weight, software compatibility, and cost. However, with all the companies relying on predetermined standards and specifications to define how the interdependent components would work together, no one had the design freedom to experiment with all the important feature tradeoffs to get the user experience just right. In other words, the ability to continue innovating on the overall design of the devices was ultimately sacrificed for the common set of group-determined design goals. Yet this freedom to test and experiment with new designs was critical for early innovation, since no one had yet proven how to design a great tablet.

The result: devices born of these partnerships came to market, but they never gained much traction beyond tech enthusiasts. They were too heavy to carry comfortably in one hand, their screen buttons and menus didn’t work very well with fingers, and their battery life didn’t last very long when they were untethered from a power cord. As can be seen in this example, the supplier partnerships that worked well for building laptops actually held back efforts to create great tablets.

An explanation in Modularity Theory

Clayton Christensen’s Modularity Theory illustrates one important reason why the PC makers’ approach proved less effective. According to the theory, when new innovations are still stretching to meet our expectations, the best strategy for pushing a product’s performance forward is for a single entity to control all the interdependent pieces of the solution (e.g. the processor, screen, memory, and operating system) that affect performance. Only by doing this, can innovators gain the degrees of freedom they need to tinker with the interdependent components of a solution to meet customers’ expectations. If a single PC component supplier had integrated its business across all the interdependent parts of a mobile tablet it would have been better able to meet customers’ needs.

Hopefully, those working to develop teacher pipelines for personalized learning don’t make the same mistake. Although we have a rough idea of the instructional models, teaching practices, and educator mindsets and skills (i.e. interdependent components) we want teachers of the future to have, we’re still a ways off from having clear and reliable blueprints for effective personalized teaching and learning. Given this current reality, there’s little chance any collaborative group of stakeholders is going to collectively develop clear and common standards for defining the teacher of the future at this stage in the field’s development.

Potential solutions

So, what should personalized-learning proponents do instead? Given where education is at as a field, the best solutions are going to come from integration. Rather than working to build consensus on common educator competencies and form partnerships with established teacher education programs, the field should focus on supporting leading innovators, like Summit or Lindsay Unified, in developing their own integrated talent pipelines to meet the needs of their particular contexts and instructional models.

This integrated approach is not without precedent in the education space. A decade ago, when a few equity-focused charter school networks in New York City found that traditional teacher preparation programs weren’t preparing teachers in line with their instructional philosophies and approaches, they launched their own teacher preparation program, which went on to become the Relay Graduate School of Education. Now with sites in 14 different metropolitan areas, Relay provides a unique, practice-oriented approach to teacher preparation, and its graduates go on to work across the district and charter landscape. In a parallel fashion, I can imagine Summit’s teacher residency, or something like it, becoming for personalized learning schools what Relay is for equity-focused schools.

The tale of touch-screen tablets also bears testament to the wisdom of an integrated approach. By engineering the iPad from end to end, Apple could be more strategic about tradeoffs between various design decisions in order to make sure it could deliver the optimal user experience.

Lastly, for those worried about the need for partnerships in order to reach scale, Modularity Theory also offers hope. The theory predicts that modular, partnership-based solutions can eventually work—and may well dominate—once the integrated innovators pave the way. For example, Android and Windows tablets—whose components come from multiple suppliers—have gained substantial shares of the mobile device market today; they just needed Apple to first show the world how a good tablet should be made.

When it comes to training personalized learning teachers, modular “partnership” options will have only mediocre success until a single organization with an integrated solution proves how to do personalized learning and teacher development really well. Thus the better strategy, at least for now, is to put our bets on integrated solutions.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared at ChristensenInstitute.org.

The post Why Collective Action is the Wrong Approach for Developing Personalized Learning Teachers appeared first on Education Next.

With Digital Learning Day around the corner, many teachers may be inundated with research, how-to’s, and intricate tools, all revolving around the descriptor “digital.” But does digital technology need to be that complicated?

When most people picture world-changing technologies, they immediately conjure mental images of rockets, computers, and smartphones. But when the word “technology” or “digital” is too closely associated with devices or software, we can easily overlook powerful technologies of a different sort–especially in today’s schools.

So what exactly is one of the powerful tools in today’s schools? One answer is low-tech, digital lesson plans.

Technology doesn’t have to be synonymous with difficult

In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and his colleagues define technology as “the process that any company [or individual or organization] uses to convert inputs of labor, materials, capital, energy, and information into outputs of greater value.” When we broaden the term “technology” to this definition, we start to see that many important advances do not have screens, buttons, or mechanically motivated parts. New test procedures for quality control technicians, new surgical techniques for cardiac surgeons, and new lesson plans for teachers are all valuable forms of technology.

For example, a study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that giving middle school math teachers access to lesson plans from the company Mathalicious resulted in a statistically significant increase in student achievement. Moreover, the lesson plans had the greatest impact in the hands of weaker teachers. Similarly, a study published by the Brookings Institution found that upgrading teachers’ curricula had a substantial effect on student learning.

Although not viewed as very high-tech, digital lesson plans and curricula are nonetheless valuable technologies for improving teacher effectiveness and student learning.

Low-tech, digital tools for better teaching and learning

Using low-tech, digital tools and resources, like digital lesson plans, in the classroom can help benefit teaching and learning in a few ways:

1. By codifying complex teaching skills

In education, we expect teachers to have wide-ranging expertise—from content knowledge to pedagogical knowledge, to curriculum design, to classroom management, to designing and administering assessments, to managing relationships with parents, to overseeing non-academic activities. With so many complex tasks falling in teachers’ domain of responsibility, it’s no surprise that there is often wide variation in teachers’ skills and expertise and, as a result, in their impact on student learning.

But simple innovations, like digital lesson plans, that codify complex and intuitive teaching skills into simple instructions for teachers to follow can go a long way toward improving teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. As the authors of the Mathalicious study noted:

In our model, lessons designed to develop understanding substitute for teacher effort on this task so that teachers who may only excel at imparting knowledge can be effective overall–simplifying the job of teaching. … Benefits were much larger for weaker teachers, suggesting that weaker teachers compensated for skill deficiencies by substituting the lessons for their own efforts.

2. By saving time for classroom management

Depending on the lesson plan, it can automate tasks such as logging assignments and checking multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank answers on tests and quizzes. Teachers will also change how they plan curriculum, units, and lessons as software can take care of some basic instruction.

As more classroom management functionality becomes automated, this frees up time for teachers to spend more of their skills and mental energy on more important things for students and their learning; such as tailoring learning to student needs and focusing more on individual and small group instruction than on managing large classes.

Schools looking for ways to leverage technology to improve student learning should note that some of the most worthwhile technologies may be low-tech lesson plans and curricula that turn complex teaching tasks into simple, rules-based practices with options for freeing up valuable classroom management time.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org.

The post Can Digital Also Mean Low-Tech? Yes, and It Can Enhance Teaching appeared first on Education Next.

If you’ve followed the K–12 education dialogue over the last decade, then you’re probably familiar with the term “disruptive innovation.” Edtech entrepreneurs and school choice advocates sometimes invoke it as an indomitable force that will redeem and transform broken school systems. Meanwhile, people on the other sides of these debates worry that “disruption” is a flawed yet rhetorically powerful narrative used to rationalize K–12 privatization. Somewhere in the middle are skeptics who give consideration to the idea, but wonder if disruption is an oversold term that is likely to underdeliver on its proponents’ promises.

So how do we make sense of the tumult of opinions? What is disruptive innovation and is it relevant in the current debates about K–12 education?

In the mid-1990s, Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe how large and well-resourced industry incumbents like U.S. Steel and RCA were toppled by upstarts like Nucor and Sony. Christensen’s 1997 best-selling book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, articulated a theory to explain this phenomenon and catapulted the term “disruptive innovation” into the popular business lexicon.

Talk of disruptive innovation in K–12 education took off when Christensen’s 2008 book, Disrupting Class, used the theory to conclude that online learning is poised to transform K–12 schooling. Since the book’s publication, virtual charter schools have continued to expand, and a number of innovative brick-and-mortar charter schools that make heavy use of online learning have made notable headlines. So, are these schools fulfilling the book’s prophecy?

For the skeptics and the deeply concerned, I want to offer some words of solace: K–12 public schools are not getting disrupted. And for the record, Disrupting Class never claimed that they would be.

First, charter schools are not disruptive innovations relative to traditional schools. Disruptive innovations always get their initial foothold by offering low-quality solutions either to people who lack access to mainstream options or for whom mainstream providers are uninterested in serving. But in public education, these footholds do not exist. By legislative mandate, all students have access to some form of public education, and schools are required by law to serve all students. This means that charter schools compete head-to-head from the outset with district schools for enrollment.

Second, full-time virtual schools and other purely online options are not disrupting traditional public schools either. At the heart of every disruptive innovation is a technology that can improve over time until it offers performance that is good enough to compete with incumbent providers on the dimensions that most customers value. When it comes to schooling, most parents value not just the academic learning that schools provide, but also the caretaking role that schools meet for working parents. This important benefit of brick-and-mortar schools has no technological substitute, which means only a small segment of the population will ever be interested in full-time virtual schooling.

Charter schools and virtual schools certainly introduce new competitive dynamics with which district schools must contend. But disruptive innovation is not an accurate characterization of how they compete.

To understand how disruption works in K–12 education, we need to recast the popular application of the theory.

When people tell the story of disruption in the computer industry, the narrative usually focuses on how desktop computer companies like Apple disrupted incumbent minicomputer manufacturers like Digital Equipment Corp. But we tend to gloss over the fact that there were other organizations—such as universities, automakers, banks, and airlines—that switched from buying minicomputers to buying desktops.

In K–12 education, schools are analogous to those other organizations. As online-learning resources improve, schools will increasingly adopt them in the place of traditional instructional resources. Thus, it is likely that textbook publishers and PD providers will be disrupted. Schools, meanwhile, will remain and become the benefactors of this disruption.

But as schools adopt online learning, they will need to think carefully about how to reengineer their classrooms to take advantage of this new technology. In a recent EdSurge article, my colleague Julia Freeland Fisher explains that many of the most innovative online-learning technologies have slow adoption curves because they are not plug-compatible with traditional schools.

Another industry parallel is valuable here. In the early 20th century, factory managers powered their equipment using a system of axles, pulleys, gears, and crankshafts that connected to a large steam engine at the center of the factory and organized their equipment to maximize efficient access to the central power source. Later, when factory managers first replaced their large steam engines with large electric motors, the new electric motors were less noisy and didn’t produce smoke, but they had little impact on productivity. It wasn’t until decades later that electrification doubled factory productivity as factory managers began putting smaller electric motors in individual pieces of equipment and then organized the equipment based on the natural workflow of materials.

The impact of online learning in education will follow a similar pattern. Most schools today are making online learning part of their classrooms. But substantial gains in student outcomes will only come as they reengineer schedules, teacher roles, grading, classrooms, and courses. As new online learning resources disrupt traditional learning resources, schools will in turn need to disrupt their traditional instructional models. Schools have the most fertile opportunities for this type of internal disruption when they use online learning to provide learning experiences that would be otherwise unavailable to their students.

Disruptive innovation is happening in K–12 education. But it isn’t going to replace traditional schools. Rather, it will replace the traditional instructional resources and instructional models that schools have relied on for decades. All types of schools—traditional and charter alike—stand to benefit from this disruption as it amplifies the capacity of their teachers to better serve their students. Let’s stop using the term “disruptive innovation” as a rhetorical tool and instead use the theory of disruptive innovation to help schools improve.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org.

The post Is Disruptive Innovation Driving K-12 Privatization? appeared first on Education Next.

Blended-learning proponents can point to a growing number of schools that consistently achieve extraordinary student learning results. But is technology the key to their success?

Recently, I visited five blended-learning schools in Las Vegas and the San Jose area that are earning accolades for serving low-income and minority students and achieving strong student learning outcomes: Dr. Owen C. Roundy Elementary, Vegas Verdes Elementary, and Elaine Wynn Elementary, three franchise schools in Las Vegas’s Clark County School District, and Hollister Prep and Gilroy Prep, two charter elementary schools operated by Navigator Schools in the San Jose area. All five schools use some variation of the Station Rotation or Lab Rotation blended-learning models for core instruction in math and English language arts. But even though blended learning is a deliberate part of their instructional approaches, it didn’t seem to be the differentiating factor driving their success.

When I observed their classrooms and interviewed many of their teachers and administrators, the thing that stood out as the likely key contributor to student learning was high-quality teaching practices, inspired and supported by effective school leadership. This should come as no surprise given that education research consistently shows that the quality of a school’s teachers has a bigger impact on student achievement than any other school-level factor.

So what does high-quality teaching in these blended-learning schools look like?

Teacher coaching

All five schools have created systems and structures to help drive teachers’ professional learning through individual coaching and goal setting. At the Clark County schools, a few experienced teachers serve as “growth analysts.” Growth analysts’ responsibilities include observing teachers’ lessons, modeling best teaching practices, and meeting with teachers on a regular basis to provide targeted feedback.

Similarly, at Navigator Schools, school administrators observe and provide live coaching to teachers on a daily basis and meet with teachers weekly to discuss specific areas of improvement. These school administrators have reported that they spend roughly 70 percent of their time providing coaching to teachers.

Research supports these five schools’ emphasis on coaching. A recent meta-analysis of 37 studies on teacher coaching revealed that coaching positively impacts both teaching practices and student achievement.

Data-driven instruction

Data-driven instruction is another core strategy that all five schools have employed to improve student learning. At the Clark County schools, teachers meet individually with each of their students at the beginning of the school year to help students set individual academic growth goals and show students how to track their student learning data using individual tracking sheets. Teachers also display and regularly update student growth data on wall charts in their classrooms so that students can know their learning progress at any given time. Additionally, growth analysts’ coaching and support to teachers starts with analyzing data on student learning growth.

Similarly, at Navigator Schools, teachers hang charts on their classroom walls that show students their learning progress throughout the school year. Navigator Schools also uses student learning data to plan instructional units and to identify students in need of targeted interventions. Additionally, school administrators’ weekly coaching sessions with teachers center on analyzing student learning data.

Small-group instruction

All five schools have also designed their class schedules and instructional models to provide teachers with opportunities to work with small groups of seven to 10 students. The philosophy guiding this practice is that working with small groups of students allows teachers to give students more individualized attention and provide instruction targeted to students’ individual learning needs. Working with small groups of students also gives teachers more opportunities to build stronger relationships with individual students..

… and technology?

During my interviews at these schools, blended learning was mentioned only occasionally as teachers and school leaders described what they were doing to ensure the academic success of their students. But if blended learning were unimportant, why did these schools spend money and time to implement blended learning in their classrooms?

Although technology is not the driving force behind student learning at these schools, it amplifies the real driving force: high-quality teaching. Online assessments through the Evaluate and Illuminate platforms significantly reduce the burden on teachers to administer, grade, and aggregate the student learning data for data-driven instruction. And this data, in turn, is an essential component of purposeful teacher coaching. Teachers also use learning data from online software—such as ST Math, Accelerated Reader, DreamBox Learning, Reading Plus, and Lexia Learning—to invest students in learning by making it easy for students to see how their efforts contribute to their learning success. At all five schools, technology is also a key tool for engaging students in learning while their peers received small-group instruction, thus making small-group instruction logistically feasible. Finally, many teachers noted anecdotally that online learning gives students daily differentiated instruction and immediate feedback that would be hard for teachers to provide through offline learning activities.

Blended learning at these schools provides real-world illustrations for one of the key themes from my recent paper, “Teaching in the Machine Age.” As online learning and blended-learning models improve, high-quality schools of the future will increasingly use technology to magnify the impact of teachers. Just as combustion engines are the key power source for both automobiles and airplanes, good teachers power high-quality instruction in both traditional and blended settings. But as we continue to seek innovative ways to improve learning for all students, blended learning will enable teachers to push their students’ learning to new heights, just as wings enable combustion-powered vehicles to lift into the sky.

— Thomas Arnett

Thomas Arnett is a Research Fellow of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

This post originally appeared on ChristensenInstitute.org

The post Technology Doesn’t Drive Blended Learning Success … or Does It? appeared first on Education Next.