Tuesday, June 30, 2009

disrupting class, clay christensen


here's a little insight into the book i'm currently consuming...

"managing innovation successfully has been the primary focus of my research and writing at harvard. i'm a teacher, the husband and son of teachers, but i'm not an "expert" in education. i've
practiced it for sure, but until we began writing this book, i hadn't studied education. nearly a decade ago, however, representatives of a national network of school reformers called education evolving - men such as ted kolderie, joe graba, ron wolk, and curtis johnson who had played pioneering roles in the chartered school movement - visited me with a proposal: "clay, if you'd just stand next to the world of public education and examine it through the lenses of your research on innovation, we bet you could understand more deeply how to improve our schools." kolderie's arguments about schools' institutional capacity for change and graba's refrain that, "we simply cannot get all the schools we need by trying to fix the ones we have," compelled me to accept their invitiation........the harvard business school is an extraordinary place for teachers to learn because in the case method of instruction, the teacher asks the questions and the students do the teaching.

clay writes about co-authorship since in his previous book, innovator's dilemma, he single authored it: for this book i wrote with 2 co-authors because i desperately need colleagues who see things differently from the way i do.

and johnson, one of his co-authors writes of the book: we respect the nation's push for standards and accountability and the effort over the last decade to open up the supply side through chartering laws. but it is a mistake to confuse either the permission to create new school or setting rigorous standards with learning. what matters is what happens in class, whether physical or virtual.