Skip to: 01:14 Could you give a brief overview of the Christensen Institute and your role within the organization?

“After teaching for a while, I came to the realization that I could keep trying to get better as a teacher, and that’s, I think, valuable work, or I can start to try and be a part of coming up with new models and approaches to education that make education more student centered…but also make it easier for teachers, for educators, to better meet the needs of their individual students.”

Skip to: 03:50 How was the research conducted for the Carpe Diem report?

“When the pandemic started back in 2020, we’d been studying online learning in education for close to a decade…And then when the pandemic hit and, almost all schools were doing some kind of online learning overnight, we thought it’d be really interesting to get snapshots of what does this actually look like? How are schools using online learning resources in response to the pandemic? Where are they seeing opportunities? Where are they seeing challenges?”

Skip to: 06:50 Why is student-centered learning important and is it more important now that we are cognizant of the effects of the pandemic?

“How do we help education transform from kind of the mass education system we have where students are all kind of moving the same, to a system that is mass education when it makes sense but can also individualize better to help students with different needs.”

“It’s really about how do we create new models of education that help teachers serve those different students’ needs so that all students can be successful and fulfill their potential. And I think that’s especially important now, given that the pandemic has just widened a lot of the disparities that have been around for a long time. A lot of the equity issues.”

“I don’t think we can solve those issues by just trying to give students, you know, the same one size fits all approach. We really need to find ways to identify what does each student need. How do we meet them where they’re at, both academically and socially and emotionally, and then help them progress from where they’re at toward their goals and toward helping them fulfill their individual potential.”

Skip to: 10:54 What can be learned from the report in terms of creating student-centered spaces in classrooms?

“Using the time that you would use normally for class where you’re on that video call, less for how do I cover my material and more for how do I check in with my students? How do I find out what they’re struggling with, find out what they need, and then give them the targeted support, the targeted interventions they need, really spend more time on the relationship building and the social emotional check-ins.”

“I often think of it as it’s not replacing yourself with technology, but it’s offloading some of the just foundational content coverage and foundational assessment and feedback to online tools so that you as a teacher can do more of the things that technology absolutely cannot do, the relationship building and the personal feedback, the orchestrating deeper learning experiences like discussions and projects, coaching students through projects.”

Skip to: 13:38 Explain what Disruptive Innovation means and what place it has in K-12 public education?

“I don’t think online learning on its own is interesting, but really the new instructional student-centered models that online learning enables have these same patterns of being the kind of innovations that we’d call disruptive innovations. And so we look at what does it take for these new innovations to really scale and provide their benefits more broadly within the education system that we have right now.”

Skip to: 16:52 What other research subjects does the Christensen Institute focus on and study?

“They look at opportunity gaps and how so many of a student’s opportunities come from who they know in their family, in their community, and how do we help expand students’ networks so they have more access to opportunities.”

Skip to: 18:09 Where can listeners go to learn more about the Carpe Diem report, the Christensen Institute and the concept of Disruptive Innovation?

Q: So would you mind starting by giving us a brief overview of the Christensen Institute and then your role within the organization?

A: Yeah, absolutely. So the Christensen Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that was founded by Clayton Christensen, who was a professor at Harvard studying innovation across a whole bunch of different sectors and founded our Institute, basically with the intent of using some of the theories he developed for how innovation impacts different sectors and looking at some of the challenges in areas like education, healthcare, global prosperity and global development, to try and understand how can we use these theories to help inform innovation and help it happen with more predictable success and see the progress that we wanted to see with these social sector areas and institutions.

My role… I’m on the, as you mentioned, on the K-12 education side of our work, and I’ve been here for eight years now, and I guess I’ll… To describe my role, I’ll give a little bit of background. So coming out of my undergrad degree, I started off my career as a middle school math teacher in Kansas City, Missouri, and felt deeply committed to the work, but really struggled with the challenge of meeting all the needs of my different students.

I had, you know, students ranging from kids that were homeless and kids that had a lot of trauma at home, to kids that were highly supported and, you know, they were just at different places academically, at different places with their social and emotional needs and I really struggled with how do I, how do I even know what all these students need? And then even beyond that, how do I actually, you know, differentiate to their needs?

And so after teaching for a while, I came to the realization that I could, you know, keep trying to get better as a teacher, and that’s, I think, valuable work, or I can start to try and be a part of coming up with new models and approaches to education that make education more student centered, and I think will talk about that later, but also make it easier for teachers, for educators, to better meet the needs of their individual students.

And so I left teaching, actually went to graduate school there in Pennsylvania, and while I was in graduate school, came across the research of the Clayton Christensen Institute and found it really compelling as offering powerful theories for change for how do we take some of the innovations that I could see kind of in niches and in the periphery of the education system, what would it take to make those more accessible and more mainstream? And so I found my wife here and I’ve been here for the last eight years.

Q: Interesting transition. So the report, Carpe Diem, how was the research conducted for this report?

A: So, this report is really our latest output in a series that we’re doing in conjunction with some survey work. So when the pandemic started back in 2020, we’d been studying online learning in education for close to a decade before the pandemic hit. And then when the pandemic hit and, you know, almost all schools were doing some kind of online learning overnight, we thought, you know, it’d be really interesting to get snapshots of what does this actually look like? How are schools using online learning resources in response to the pandemic? Where are they seeing opportunities? Where are they seeing challenges? And so we conducted last year, two surveys: one in the fall, one in the spring. We’ve got another round coming out this fall and this spring. And the report, Carpe Diem, was a report we released in August that looks at our spring 2021 data and tries to paint a picture of what did pandemic instruction look like during that first full year of the pandemic, the first full school year of the pandemic?

And I guess largely I’ll say what we saw was that there was a lot of variety in terms of teachers that some teachers that taught mostly in person, some teachers taught in hybrid settings where it was some students in person, some remote, and some teachers that were teaching fully remotely. It was kind of a mixed bag, but those that taught in a hybrid setting and in the remote setting, by and large the dominant approach was to have students log into a video call and trying to take the model of conventional classroom instruction and replicate it over those calls.

And in our free response to that survey, we saw that was a real struggle for a lot of teachers. They just found that, you know, teaching kids over the internet, that just, I’ve used the analogy that’s like, it’s like trying to eat pudding with chopstick or like trying to make a jigsaw puzzle wearing gardening gloves. Like you can do it, but the medium just really constrained a lot of the things that they were used to doing and then to make it even harder, those that were in those hybrid settings, it was like you’re trying to do two different mediums at once and it was just a real challenge.

But amidst that general kind of theme, there were also some interesting outliers of educators that said, I actually got to know my students better and meeting their needs became easier. And in many ways, those were teachers that were using online learning for some of the purposes that we documented well before the pandemic that were less about how do we provide continuity of learning when we can’t go into school buildings, and more about how do we make this instruction more individualized to students’ needs. And so we the report tries to highlight kind of both of those, those themes that we saw in our data.

Q: Okay, interesting and interesting that you began this research well before the pandemic was even a thing, you know. So, why is student-centered learning important and is it more important now that we are cognizant of the effects of the pandemic? It sounds like you may have had your focus on that previously but talk a little bit about that if you would, student centered-learning and the importance of that.

A: Well, to really illustrate that, I like to think of an analogy of the conventional way we do education that we’ve done education for the last hundred years is a mass education approach.

And it’s evolved. I think there’s fault in some people in the field say, you know, there’s nothing that’s changed. Education has actually changed a lot in 100 years, but some of the core features of how we do education haven’t changed. You know, for all students in a given district or different school, the calendar starts on the same day, it ends on the same day. They all come to school at the same time, they all move through the content at the same pace.

Usually it’s, you know, one teacher with 25 to 30 students, they’re all doing more or less the same activities and that, like, it served us well as a society. It’s what made public education affordable on the public dollar. It’s what, you know, brought education from where it was 100 years ago to where most kids didn’t even get an eighth-grade education to now the kind of system we have today. But it’s also a system that isn’t very adaptive to individual needs.

And so I think of it as being kind of like, you know, railroads also emerged during that time of the last century. And if you think about railroad travel, you know, it was far better than crossing the United States on foot or on horseback or in the back of a bouncy carriage or stagecoach. But, you know, to ride on a train, you had to show at the train depot, you had to follow the schedule, the train, you know, the railroad company set, you had to go through the connecting stops that the railroad company provided, and so if you lived far from a train depot, or you needed to travel on something that didn’t fit the rail company schedule, rail just didn’t adapt to your needs very well.

Well, fast forward, and in the early 20th century, we saw the development of the automobile and automobiles don’t completely replace trains, there’s definitely settings where we still use trains at the primary mode. But automobiles provided much more flexibility to where, you know, think about it today, if you live in a mountainous area, you can get a four-wheel drive vehicle that’ll handle that terrain. If you live in a city, you can get a commuter car that helps you navigate narrow streets and doesn’t, you know, consume a lot of fuel. And so there’s different types of vehicles for different needs. You know, you can travel on your own schedule, you can get a vehicle that’s comfortable to you.

And so it, it just enabled a lot more of an individualized type of approach to transportation. And I think if student-centered learning is really being the analogy of how do we help education transform from kind of the mass education system we have where students are all kind of moving the same, to a system that is mass education when it makes sense but can also individualize better to help students with different needs.

So one more quick story, I think of when I was teaching, you know, I mentioned I had that spectrum of students, it’s really about how do we create new models of education that help teachers serve those different students’ needs so that all students can be successful and fulfill their potential. And I think that’s especially important now, given that the pandemic has just widened a lot of the disparities that have been around for a long time. A lot of the equity issues.

And so I don’t think we can solve those issues by just trying to give students, you know, the same one size fits all approach. We really need to find ways to identify what does each student need. How do we meet them where they’re at, both academically and socially and emotionally, and then help them progress from where they’re at toward, you know, their goals and toward helping them fulfill their individual potential.

Q: And so taking that, you know, what you learn about the needs that a student might have different from another student, what can be learned from the report in terms of creating student-centered spaces in classrooms once those needs and differences are identified?

A: Yeah, well, I will say in the report, most of our insights on that topic come from free responses from a few teachers and follow up interviews we did with a few teachers. But like I mentioned earlier, there were those few outliers that seemed to have a very different experience last year. And a lot of what seemed to be working for them was using online resources to kind of shift their role as a teacher.

So to, to give some concrete for instances, these were teachers who often realized, you know, trying to engage my students over a video call, especially when many of them have their cameras off and it feels like I’m just teaching to a void is really tricky. But what they would do often is take some of the resources that now exist for developing online learning materials, whether that’s, you know, recording yourself, teaching your lesson and posting it online, or develop taking your slides and developing them into a little like self-directed mini lesson with quizzes embedded in it, the students can move through online, posting those to the internet as assignments, and then using the time that you would use normally for class where you’re on that video call, less for how do I cover my material and more for how do I check in with my students? How do I find out what they’re struggling with, find out what they need, and then give them the targeted support, the targeted interventions they need, you know, really spend more time on the relationship building and the social emotional check-ins.

And it was teachers that kind of leverage the online tools in that way. I often think of it as it’s not replacing yourself with technology, but it’s offloading some of the just foundational content coverage and foundational assessment and feedback to online tools so that you as a teacher can do more of the things that technology absolutely cannot do, you know, the relationship building and the personal feedback, the orchestrating deeper learning experiences like discussions and projects, coaching students through projects. That’s really kind of the shift we saw both with these kind of outlier teachers in our survey data, but also with, again, we’d been studying this from before the pandemic teachers before COVID, that had really used online tools effectively. We’d seen this happening with them as well.

Q: OK. So disruption is obviously something that we don’t typically think of as being a positive attribute or trait of a classroom environment, but explain if you would, what disruptive innovation means and what place it has in K-12 education.

A: So that term, it’s a really tricky term for us because it has so many negative connotations in education. But it actually is a term that predates our work in education. As I mentioned, Clayton Christensen, our founder, he studied innovation across a whole bunch of other sectors, everything from automobiles to computers to healthcare. And in that research, he saw this phenomenon where new innovations would emerge and they wouldn’t be out of the gate better than the existing solutions out there, the mainstream solutions that were commonly used. But they offered these other benefits. They were often more affordable, or they were more user-friendly or they were available in more context and more circumstances. And because of these other benefits, these new, what looked like crummy innovations, were actually game changing and life changing for people who couldn’t access the mainstream solutions that were out there.

But then what happened over time is that as these new crummy looking innovations emerge and serve these people that are left out of the existing ecosystem of solutions, they improve over time until they start to get traction as mainstream solutions. And that shift in technologies is what he termed “disruptive innovation.” And so I guess to give some examples, you know, personal computers, when they first emerged were really crummy devices compared to the mainframes and the terminal computers and minicomputers that the large corporations and research institutions were using.

But personal computers made it so that for the first time, individuals and households could afford to buy a computer and you didn’t have to have a whole room to set the computer up in, you could set it up on a desktop. And so they made computing accessible to many more people and then improved over time until desktop computers kind of became the norm for most computer uses, even in corporate settings or in, you know, research settings and universities.

Similar things have happened in retail, you know, think of early days of Amazon or early days of Netflix, how much they’ve evolved since then. And so that phenomenon that’s core to our research, really what we look at is how can, what kind of innovations like that are emerging in education.

Now, the dynamics of how disruption plays out in education is often quite different from those sectors, because, you know, education is a publicly funded public good. It’s not something that’s just provided in a purely market setting.

But we still see the same phenomena of solutions like online learning and really, I don’t think online learning on its own is interesting, but really the new instructional student-centered models that online learning enables have these same patterns of being the kind of innovations that we’d call disruptive innovations. And so we look at what does it take for these new innovations to really scale and provide their benefits more broadly within the education system that we have right now.

Q: What other research subjects does the Christensen Institute focus on and study?

A: A lot of, like I mentioned my works primarily in K-12 education. I have colleagues that have done some work in higher education, other colleagues that have looked at students access to networks and social capital, and they often talk about the difference between, you know, we’ve often talk about achievement gaps in education. They look at opportunity gaps and how so many of a student’s opportunities come from who they know in their family, in their community, and how do we help expand students’ networks so they have more access to opportunities.

And then kind of beyond the more education-related spaces, healthcare, global development, one of my colleagues is looking at, you know, what does it take for countries that have historically, you know, just had much higher poverty than the United States, what does it take for them to progress and become the kind of countries where more people have access to quality healthcare, quality education, and many of the, you know, the benefits that we all take for granted here in the United States.

Q: Sounds like an interesting organization, honestly. And I’d like to look for more, you know, research when you guys release it. Where can listeners go to learn more about the report that we discussed, the Institute and the concept of disruptive innovation?

A: All of our research is publicly available. We’re a grant funded organization and everything we produce is available on our website. It’s www dot Christensen Institute. And I’ll spell that C-H-R-I-S-T-E-N-S-E-N institute.org. You can find all of it there on our website, or if you’re interested in the latest stuff that’s coming out, you can follow us on Twitter. ChristensenInst is our Twitter handle. I’m available on Twitter as well as Arnett Tom, @ArnettTom.

Thomas Arnett, senior research fellow

Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on using the Theory of Disruptive Innovation to study innovative instructional models and their potential to scale student-centered learning in K–12 education. He also studies demand for innovative resources and practices across the K–12 education system using the Jobs to Be Done Theory. Thomas began his work in education as a middle school math teacher in Kansas City Public Schools through Teach For America and as an Education Pioneers fellow with the Achievement First Public Charter Schools. He has also served as an elected trustee and board president for the Morgan Hill Unified School District in Morgan Hill, California, and currently serves as a member of the board of Compass Charter Schools in California. Thomas received a BS in Economics from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Clayton Christensen Institute
Carpe Diem: Convert Pandemic Struggles into Student-Centered Learning (report)