Disrupting Class: Chapter One

Okay, continuing this voyage I re-read chapter one of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns last night.  As I mentioned in my entry on Rewind: Virtual School Symposium And Disrupting Class, chapter one is where the problems with this book begin for me.

In this chapter, the authors lay out their underlying premise for the book…  that students learn in different ways.  As I’ve mentioned before, this is not where the problem begins for me.  I too believe that different students learn in different ways.  The problems begin with the fact that they base this belief on the whole line of inquiry surrounding learning styles and multiple intelligences.  While they acknowledge that there are some problems with the research in this area, they nevertheless soldier on under the umbrella of multiple intelligences.  It makes for a nice way to keep the book together and to argue their point, but if the research that you base your whole understanding on is flawed (which the authors readily admit, see item #1 in Michael Horn’s comment to my first entry), then isn’t your whole understanding flawed as well.

I’m not saying that learning styles and multiple intelligences are a bunch of crap (like I do most literature on generational differences).  What I am saying is that it is flawed research.  Good research is work that is both reliable and valid. Reliability is essentially how good is the data.  So if I were to have the same subjects, under the same conditions, take the same tests the results should be the same if the tests were reliable.  Validity, on the other hand, speaks to the degree to which the test actually measures what it was designed to measure.

The problem with research into learning styles and multiple intelligences is that it is both unreliable and invalid.  I can get you to come to my classroom on Monday morning and take a learning styles inventory to measure your learning style or your multiple intelligences.  I can have you come back again the following Monday, and even if things went exactly the same for you that morning and even the day before, research has shown that you are more likely to score differently than you did the first time.  Essentially this line of inquiry is unreliable because there is no consistency in the measurement.  People under the same conditions (controlled as best as we can with human research) will score differently each time.  In some instances these differences are only minor, but in some cases they are quite major.

The problem with this lack of consistency, beyond making the instruments used reliable, also points to the lack of validity.  If we inherently learn better in a particular way or have aptitude for a particular intelligences, unless something dramatic happens we should score higher in those areas regardless of any minor changes in the conditions surrounding the testing.  The problem is that we don’t!  There are dramatic differences in some cases without dramatic changes in the conditions.  This alludes to the fact that maybe the instruments aren’t measuring a learning style or multiple intelligences at all, but are measuring some aspect of our mood that particular moment or our belief at that time about how we learn best or what we are good at.

All of these problems stem from the fact that all of the research in this area is based on self-report (that is instruments that participants fill out on their own, reporting what they believe to be their response).  Self-report is generally a poor data collection method, particularly when it is the only data collection method.  For example, there are numerous examples within the professional development literature where teachers report that they believe in a particular notion and indicate that they are implementing it in their class.  However, when actually observed during their classroom teaching what the teachers report and what they are actually doing are two very different things.  In the case of teacher professional development, we are able to use multiple methods of data collection to get at what is really happening, and not have to simly rely upon the teacher’s self-report.

The authors acknowledge in chapter one that the technology isn’t currently available for us to do this when it comes to how we learn – although they mention that this technology is getting closer all of the time (and on this point they are right when one looks at what is possible even today with functional MIR technology for example).  But we aren’t there yet.

So, the remainder of the chapter is devoted to discussing the need for students to be taught based upon whichever intelligence(s) they possess, but how schools aren’t set-up to provide that kind of smaller group (or even one-on-one) instruction because of the modular nature of the system, and also how the system is interdependent of many factors.  Here I can’t say I disagree with the authors.  I believe that this is one of the reasons why schools, and how we teach in them, have not changed that much in the past century.  I also don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing. I don’t necessarily believe it is a good thing either.

My concern is that if schools were easy organizations to change, we’d be in a worse state than we currently find ourselves in.  Can you imagine what education would be like if we could change schools in the span of a year or two?  Because they are a public entity and because people like to blame many of the ills of society on them (unfairly in many instances), schools would be nothing but a revolving door of whatever school of thought or educational gimmick was popular at that moment.  And those of us who have been in education for more than two or three years recognize how quickly these popular items change.  The problem with that stability is that when genuinely positive innovations are introduced they often don’t make much different because system has become so resistant to change.

Getting back to Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, the problem still remains that when the foundation of your ideas are flawed than your ideas will be flawed.  This is where we begin at the end of chapter one.