Clay Christensen Shakes Up School
I interviewed management guru Clay Christensen about his new book, "Disrupting Class." He's applied his research on business innovation to education, a key issue for 21st century business (see my earlier post on the book). Here are four questions and answers from a longer interview. 
Big Think: Thanks for taking some time to talk with me about your recently published "Disrupting Class." I wanted to start with just having you very quickly describe your central idea, student-centric learning.
Christensen: I've been powerfully influenced by Howard Gardner's work, which gave me a language to something that I had seen in my own life: almost all of us are very smart in a couple of dimensions, and clueless in a couple of others.
We have different types of intelligence, different styles of learning, and then different paces at which we can learn. That just demands customization in the way each student is taught. If you look at that on the delivery side, there is an architecture to education that is what I would call interdependent. Interdependent architectures, you see them everywhere. For example, the Windows operating system for Microsoft employs an interdependent architecture, which means if you change any one thing in the product Windows, you have to change everything. You change ten lines of code, you've got to change ten million lines of code.
Big Think: You mention in the book that there are four major interdependencies within a typical school. For instance, you talk about project-based learning being something that we know would be very effective, but most schools aren't physically designed to do project-based learning.
Christensen: The economics of all that interdependence mandates standardization. So you've got this conflict between the economic drive to standardize the way we teach and the way we test, and the need on the students' side to have learning be customized, and so you've got that collision in the classroom. The way we've dealt with that in the past is we've just said, "Well, some students are smarter than others." At any given time, a few students in the class are learning right up there with the teacher, and most of the other students in the class are not learning at all, or they're learning very inefficiently. Then we blame the schools for not improving, or blame the teachers for not improving, but it's really that inconsistency between the way we learn versus the way we teach that's the problem.
Big Think: You actually raise the question in the book of whether customization in learning is a pipedream. Can you just give us one example of why you think this isn't a pipedream?
Christensen: The computer. The great thing about a computer as a platform through which knowledge can be delivered to the student is that it is inherently customizable. In other words, you can put a piece of software on the machine that can help Clay Christensen learn physics in a way that's consistent with his spatial type of intelligence. I can see patterns and things. Then you could put a piece of software on the machine that helps my best friend learn physics in a mathematical way because that's the way his brain is wired. The computer actually has the potential for solving that problem. The technology can do it. There just needs to be an industry.
Big Think: One of my readers suggested I ask if you really think you can avoid having the political structure of schools not turn this into a sustaining innovation, to crush the life out of the disruption. That's a huge challenge for talented managers at companies, as you note in "The Innovator's Dilemma." What do you see that could reframe this situation and help push forward some of your ideas about student-centric learning?
Christensen: I think there is real value in having a way to frame the reason why we've got these problems in giving us a common language, and forgive me for going back to corporations as an illustration. We had these guys from GE Medical Systems come here a while ago. GE Medical Systems makes these mammoth MRI machines and CAT scanners that sell for millions of dollars apiece. They said, "You know, we read your books, and we kind of looked down at the bottom of the market and saw that there's an opportunity there to make ultrasound machines that can be held in your hand. When a doctor is doing a physical exam, right now they have to touch to see if you've got a lump on your thyroid, or listen to get a sense if there's anything funny going on in your heart, and they'll push on your abdomen. Instead of having to do those things, let's just give them this little hand-held ultrasound machine so they can look inside the body."
That is very disruptive. You know, instead of $1 million, these things sell for $6,000 to $10,000 and a completely different set of customers. They said, "We realize there's a great growth opportunity there, but we've got to set up a rule that we will not leverage anything that exists in our mainstream business. We've got to create a new sales force, a new brand, a new pricing mechanism." So they did it, and they've got a business that does almost a half-billion dollars a year now, all on their own, just because they said, "Oh, here's an opportunity, but we've got to follow this different set of rules in order for the core business not to co-op this technology into kind of making it work in the core," and so on.
I have hope that if we have done a reasonable job at articulating the rules that you have to follow, then a school committee and a school administrator can say, "Yeah, there's a great opportunity here but we've got to follow these rules. We need to set up chartered schools, or we'll have to do a pilot school," or something like that.
(This is an edited and condensed version of the original transcript. I welcome reader feedback on whether they want more questions for authors, and whether the number of questions and length of answers work ).