What will the school of tomorrow — the place that is outfitting students with 21st-century skills — look like? We know it won't be today's linear arrangement of students moving through grades and classes in lockstep; nor will it be solitary learning through a computer and screen that monitors every keystroke. Michael Horn would have it somewhere in the middle. He describes a place not unlike today's office cubes, where people work in smaller groups that change according to task, have individual responsibilities (learning), and use a heavy dose of information technology. And it is an ideal that is nonetheless radically personal in placing students at the center of their own learning.
Horn is cofounder and executive director of education of Innosight Institute, a nonprofit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to education outlined in Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill, 2008), which he coauthored with Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson. A lesser and largely unexplored theme from Disrupting Class focused on student motivation.
Horn and his coauthors point out that while school attendance is mandatory, education is a service that students approach as consumers, and either “buy” or choose other options. Horn believes blended education — the melding of information technology-based distance learning with school attendance — may be the best way to educate students. But, blended learning will require deep changes in teacher training and teacher evaluation schemes.
KAPPAN: In Disrupting Class, you essentially said students attend school for two reasons: to make and show progress and to associate with their friends. How does blended learning turn those motivations into academic achievement?
We have to understand that we are competing for students' time.
HORN: Because students have some control over the time, place, path, and pace of blended learning, there is a huge potential to have the learning material be just above the student's level — not too hard that it demotivates them; not so easy that it's totally boring, but just above such that they can constantly be making progress.
Someone can say online learning does that, too. And they'd be right, except that a lot of students like being in school because it's fun, and they get to hang out with their friends. Blended learning very elegantly solves that problem because it occurs in a brick-and-mortar facility that is supervised and away from home. Clearly some people who do online learning in a distance setting also have great experiences with their friends, but the reality is most families have difficulty creating that type of environment, so school is important for those students. As a result, blended learning does a good job on both axes.
KAPPAN: Is there really a student motivation problem?
HORN: We don't think there is a student motivation problem. Students are plenty motivated to make progress and feel successful in their lives and to have fun with their friends. The problem is that teachers want to give students the experiences of making progress and having fun, but the system is not set up to do either of those jobs well. It's often built to fail students. For example, many of the places where they can experience success are in extracurricular activities. It's very telling that we call them extracurricular activities as opposed to being embedded in the actual experiences that we value. All too often, we think students are buying school for school's sake and that really misunderstands that students act the same way that we all act: We want to feel successful and make progress in any endeavor and so we do things that help set us up for that. So our argument is that, if we understand that fact of human nature, then we could make schooling fit those jobs such that students would attack learning with a vibrancy and excitement and thereby have much higher success rates.
KAPPAN: How can educators do this when so much of the time they get that deadeye stare from their teen students?
HORN: It's not that students are not motivated. We really need to do a much better job of hitting the intrinsic motivation within students to be successful. School is something that is competing with video games and lots of other such options. We have to understand that we are competing for students' time.
KAPPAN: But many students are thriving in the way we do things now. Why change it?
HORN: With a system that is set up for every child to realize success, they would actually just fly faster in some sense. They would learn more; they would be able to absorb more, work with more people, attack more interesting problems, go deeper on interesting concepts where they really want to excel and pursue their passions. I
think about my own experience in middle and high school and the amount of times I said, “Gee, I get the game, I can just skate by here and do great,” and yet I was sort of missing the big picture of how much more I could have done. It shouldn't be about mastering the game, it should be about bettering yourself, and there are far better ways to do that for everyone.
KAPPAN: What's wrong with the whole “eat your spinach” approach to student motivation? Yes, geometry is boring and so is Chaucer, but this is what is you need to learn, so, dang it, do it!
HORN: (Laughs.) Sometimes, you get good results with that, but a lot of times you don't — it seems like you have to pick and choose based on the individual student. We have to be better at explaining the beauty of these subjects, why they are interesting in and of themselves, and align them with how students best learn. It's not always the hammer approach to say, “Hey, sit down and just do it, buddy.” Instead, we should be using the approach of “How can I get your motivation going so that it's targeted on this?” Competing for students' interests and time is an important part if we want to do our jobs as educators well.
Technology will be the backbone, if you will, that helps customize, individualize, and personalize learning for students who doubtless will have different needs at different times.
Student learning outcomes
KAPPAN: The U.S. Department of Education asked you to comment on its Race to the Top competition for school districts. In your comments, you stressed three concepts: 1) Emphasize learning over teaching, 2) Do not use attendance as a metric for success, and 3) Leave room for innovation by avoiding prescribing specific inputs and focus instead on desired outcomes. What is the common thread running through those concepts, and why is it important?
HORN: The common thread is student learning outcomes. It's become so important for students to be prepared for life, the workforce, and participating in our democracy. When you focus on such things as how to teach or prescribing inputs or micromanaging minutes as opposed to learning outcomes, you constrain innovation. It would be like your friend telling you that you need to cook an innovative dinner and come up with whatever you can. But, you can only use five ingredients, and you can only cook with them, mix them, and match them in these exact ways. In fact, here's your recipe. But, make it innovative. You can guarantee the outcome, whether it's good or bad, because you are just going to follow the recipe. If you mandate and prescribe inputs, you don't leave room for innovation. We shouldn't be doing this. We should be focusing on the objectives and outcomes, and be very strong on those — but allow people to realize them in different ways, given what makes sense for different circumstances.
KAPPAN: Following those precepts, what does a school that is optimizing education for its students look like?
HORN: People will often ask me that. The only thing I can say back is “whatever I tell you is going to be wrong.” Having that level of humility is important. But I think there are some underpinnings that are really important. Competency-based learning is a critical one — students move on when they actually master concepts, not when the calendar or time says they should. There's a broad view of what competencies mean. It's not the definition that we've always had. What's emerging is that there is a very broad set of skills needed for the 21st century and that life demands as important. Another piece of it is that technology will be a part of it regardless of whether every student is learning predominantly through technology. Technology will be the backbone, if you will, that helps customize, individualize, and personalize learning for students who doubtless will have different needs at different times. I can visualize that one day one child will be working in a small group of students with a teacher on a concept, and the next day they'll be going on their own path in an online learning modality. The day after that, they will be working with a tutor remotely on another concept. It will be a very flexible system underpinned by making progress and realizing success for each child.
Radically personal
KAPPAN: What you are describing sounds radically personal. Is this a radical departure from the framework we have now?
HORN: Yes. It's a big transformation. And yet it's what I think people are hungry for. It's what people are clamoring for, and it's common sense.
But, some people will say “well, gosh, students are going to be totally solitary, never working with other people. What about their communication and social skills?” That's a reasonable worry, but communication is a critical skill in a variety of media. We want a system where every child has opportunities to engage with others, have conversation, go deeper in dialogue, have students teaching other students — all those elements will be part of a toolbag in getting students to their goals.
KAPPAN: How does blended learning help to develop and deliver the so-called 21st-century skills?
HORN: What I see when I go into good blended learning environments is students really understanding that they are going to be part owners in charting their own paths. As a result, they are going to have to communicate more; they are going to have to understand how they learn best, so there is a metacognition element there. What's interesting about 21st-century skills is that, in some sense, it is a misleading term because those skills have always been important for many of us. What I think is different now is that those skills tend to be important for every one of us. And having a learning system that says each child will make growth is critical as a result.
KAPPAN: Can the system you are proposing make teachers more accountable?
HORN: Given that each student will have a different path toward realizing their goals, mandating them from the top will be extremely difficult. I'll give one concrete example: In response to Race to the Top, a lot of states are tying one student's performance to one teacher. The thinking is that we can track back based on student outcomes to the performance of the teacher. The problem with that is that, in the learning models of the future, students may interact with two, three, four different teachers as they work through and master a single body of material. If you are creating data systems that evaluate based on the one-to-one framework, you are going to be restricting and limiting innovation. It seems we've got it backwards. We've got to focus on competency-based learning first. We have seen that happen in some schools that have instituted a competency-based learning model or in some virtual schools. In some of those schools, teachers have come forward to the administrators and asked for performance-based pay because, to them, it doesn't make sense otherwise. But, that is a very different conversation because it's driven by the teacher saying, “This is how you set it up; this is how it makes sense for our model.”
KAPPAN: What does that bode for teacher training?
HORN: Teacher training is interesting; professional development is critical. But a lot of the teacher training we do today in schools of education and so forth prepares teachers to lead a classroom as we have always known it — to lesson plan, manage the classroom, deliver the lesson, and on and on. In a blended learning environment, a lot of those skills are actually totally irrelevant. The skills that become much more important are diagnosing why a student is struggling, working with him one on one, helping to pair them in small groups, and being flexible. It's a very rewarding and interesting set of skills, but it's a very different job. And so being very prescriptive about these sorts of things is very dangerous.
What I see when I go into good blended learning environments is students really understanding that they are going to be part owners in charting their own paths
KAPPAN: Does that mean teacher training and evaluation must change, too?
HORN: Absolutely. I've seen some blended learning environments where teachers are really acting as mentors and motivators to students, while keeping students on task and answering basic questions — helping to keep people moving forward and tuned in. These environments will have virtual content experts, too. I can imagine that there could be a third set of adults, some who are caseworkers dealing with nonacademic problems that trip students up so much. You could have a very robust differentiated model that our current teacher training doesn't prepare for well at all. Of course, that means the evaluation systems we're putting in place right now wouldn't work in this type of environment.
Close the gaps
KAPPAN: Much of the thinking in the educational establishment has been focused on the achievement gap. Can blended learning solve that?
HORN: That's an open question with a lot of views on it. It will lift all boats and allow all students to move much faster. The evidence is that those furthest behind often move the fastest in these systems. But, it will lift the highest-achieving students faster, too. In some sense, it could exacerbate or maintain the achievement gap. What I think we'd like to see is that the achievement gap isn't based on race or socioeconomic status, that it's not predetermined, that we won't be able to call out ahead of time that this is what the system is going to do to you.
KAPPAN: How could blended learning be tweaked to help narrow the achievement gap?
HORN: The broader point is that online learning, blended and distance, first serve the nonconsumers who are literally dropping out and falling behind in their classes and with their credits. It is going to be a lifesaver for many of them. Instead, you will have different teaching models where you have caseworkers in abundance alongside teachers, motivators, content experts who can help any struggling child get the support they need relatively quickly, helping them assemble resources more than we do today, and in much easier fashion. That's something the Internet is really good at — increasing the flexibility and ability of systems to customize really quickly around a problem. And it's not prohibitively expensive to do. We're not reliant on superheroes, and we're not reliant on flush times, which at the moment it doesn't appear we are going to have for some time.
We've got to focus on competency-based learning first.
KAPPAN: Can you give some examples of this?
HORN: Sure. I recently visited the Silicon Valley Flex Academy, which is a blended learning charter school here in Morgan Hill, Calif. You walk into the school and every single student has their own office, if you will, that they decorated and so forth based on their interests and goals, and teachers are getting lots of data and feedback immediately as soon as students are struggling. In addition, they're able to see the facial and verbal cues and so forth, and they are constantly grouping students or bringing them in for one-on-one sessions, walking around the floor and saying, “you look like you are struggling, how can we help you?” The technology of blended learning makes the feedback loops much, much tighter. And, by the way, teachers are not spending as much time lesson planning and things of that nature anymore. The online curriculum can do a lot of that. Instead, they are thinking of ways to help unlock students, to increase their learning and get back on track. In many ways, computers do what computers do well so teachers can focus on what humans uniquely do well.
KAPPAN: You've predicted that by 2019 half of all high school courses will be delivered online. Is that prediction still on track?
HORN: I still think we're going to hit that roughly — plus or minus a couple years. What I don't know is will it be a student-centric system or not? Certain elements of it will be inherently student-centric because you just won't be able to avoid it, because of the ability to customize with technology. But, for a variety of reasons around policy and others, I think there are big questions.
I don't think the statistics are capturing nearly the amount of online learning that is happening right now in this country. People aren't thinking about Khan Academy and flipped classrooms as online learning. The more we know, the more we realize we don't know about how much innovation is going on by teachers, principals, and students. Much more is happening than people realize. We know that at least 55% to 60% of school districts are offering online learning and having students take it. There is a lot of energy in this space. What's exciting is that the technology is improving consistently. The content is getting better, and the platforms and the data systems that are necessary to support a student-centric learning system are going to start catching up in the next few years.
KAPPAN: Finland, Singapore, China — countries at the top of the PISA results — aren't adding blended learning to their quivers. Why should we?
HORN: Finland is basically a competency-based learning system. It is actually built around the tenets that we're talking about in our work where students progress upon mastery. There are clear learning objectives, and students understand what they are.
Also, we need to look at this question more broadly. When a country reaches relative prosperity, as we have, academics tend to decline unless they develop some sort of intrinsic motivation. Finland will always have intrinsic motivation because its geography and climate give it some very grave disadvantages. But, the U.S. lacks such motivating forces. Here, prosperity has been relatively assured for many, but not all.
KAPPAN: And what does that mean for us?
HORN: For education to continue helping to provide a great quality of life as it has in the past, we've got to rethink how student motivation works to make school truly intrinsically motivating so that students choose to engage in learning and their education rather than all of the distractions in front of them. We don't have the luxury of using the intrinsic motivation of escaping poverty. So, shifting to a student-centric model that essentially places the student at its center and understands how to motivate them and make the learning itself engaging is imperative if we want to continue to compete, lead, and improve our quality of life.
