Questions for "Disrupting Class"
1. Explain the difference between
interdependence and modularity. How is
education currently organized?
Interdependent is
standardized and monolithic. You get it
or you don’t. Modularity is about the
experience and giving responsibility to the students. The school struggles to teach differently
because they follow an interdependent design.
Teaching monolithically is the more simple way to blanket over material
in one strategy. Unfortunately it does
not cater to all students’ needs and styles of learning. Thus in the system, many students do not have
access to their learning potential because they do not learn how to conform to
this blanket form of teaching. Then there
is modularity teaching. This style
presents different learning intelligences giving different students access to
the material. This form removes
responsibility from the teacher and places more of it on the students. It is based more off of the experience and
process than the end result.
2. Explain the disruptive innovation
theory. What does this have to do with
schools?
The market must be
modified to reach those who are non-consumers to survive. Disruption is when non-consumers enter the
market. This disruption is not a break
through improvement but reaching out to those who previously did not
consume. The shift to online courses is
a disruption to the school market in which it provides students a different
form of learning. Those students who
were non-consumers in Arabic or Mandarin because the school did not have the
means to support a teacher, now have the option to take the class through
online learning. This online learning is
disruptive in offering new courses to students who were previously
non-consumers. New disruptions need to
be implemented into the school system.
There are too many students who can be considered non-consumers to the
traditional form of teaching because they are not benefiting from the
traditional teaching style. To disrupt
the pattern of traditional teaching we could potentially reach out to those
students and create more consumers in public education.
3. Why doesn’t cramming
computer in schools work? Explain this
in terms of the lessons from Rachmanioff (what does it mean to complete against
non-consumption?)
Loading a room with computers
that are going to collect dust and never be used in the back of the classroom
is not going to improve student’s teaching.
It is how the teachers are going to implement the computers in the
classroom that is going to make a more effective classroom. Teachers need to be able to utilize them in
effective ways, to use them to implement student centered learning.
In the past if someone
wanted to listen to music, they had to go to a music venue. Then RCA created a way to bring music home to
non-consumers creating a new market. As
a result this new form of produce dominated the industry and became much more
effective and convenient for music listeners.
Music venues still exist, but RCA created a new dominance. The same needs to happen for computers to
work in schools. In the preliminary stages
of introducing computers right now, they are not creating a flip like RCA
created. Once computers have become more
effective and “user friendly” to the classroom environment, they will have the
same effect as RCA has on music. It is
just a matter of time till computers are able to reach students who are not
benefiting from traditional teaching.
4. Explain the pattern of disruption.
The start off is always
slow, and then increases dramatically until it reaches a ceiling of 100%. To gain more consumers from non-consumers
always has a little bit of a slow starting point. Once this foundation starting point is
finished you can see the S curve begin to form when more non-consumers are
becoming consumers at a rapid rate. Once
the growth has leveled out, and new competitors enter the market the curve
begins to flatten out creating the last loop of the “S”.
5. Explain the trap of
monolithic instruction. How does
student-centric learning help this problem?
Monolithic is teaching is
not teaching to multiple intelligences.
It means that there is only one teacher to a diverse group of students
that receives one teaching strategy from the teacher. Student centered approach is taking different
learning intelligences into account and creating an individualized approach to
learning. Students receive education in
this form more as individuals. The
difficulty that arises with this approach is that it becomes much more
difficult to accomplish with growing class sizes. Take for example by class, I have 62 students
each period all with different backgrounds and learning styles. With a class this large it is extremely
difficult to cater to a student centered learning style, but can be done with
precise planning multiple intelligences can be presented.
6. Explain public
education’s commercial system. What does
it mean to say it is a value-chain business?
How does this affect student-centric learning?
The way we approach
learning and school procedures is very linear and systematic. The way students are lined up constantly,
organized, shuffled, and directed to do tasks is very systematic. They begin in kindergarten, and
systematically reach standards for each year until they hit the finish product
of graduation from high school. This
system’s term in the market world is a value adding process (VAP), when a
product is added or modified on an assembly line and then graduated to be
consumed by consumers. This
student/product is upgrade while moving through the system with a “value-chain”
number attached, known as a GPA. The
value of the student’s school ability is the GPA, and the value chain of the
school system. All learning in
traditional teaching is based off the GPA in terms of value and thus affects
learning on a huge level. Students are thought
of as product with a value number. If a
student it just a product they are not seen as an individual with different
needs, but another student with the same defect as the last and the same
approach to improvement is taken. By
adding on this value marker we degrade the process of learning enrichment. We lose the true reasoning of education in a
society.
Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives