Michael Horn and Co. rebranded, refocused as the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation yesterday. Awesome group, awesome mission. 

Seems like a good time to share some thoughts about disruption and “No Excuses” education reform.

I first read Innovator’s Dilemma while I was in business school in 1998. Christensen’s more recent book, Innovator’s DNA, is required reading for everyone on the 4.0 team.  Every single participant in 4.0′s formal training programs – 165 and climbing – has taken the Innovator’s DNA assessment. 

No Excuses school reformers are facing the Innovator’s Dilemma. 

The “No Excuses” approach to reforming school – focus on college, emphasis on culture of strict discipline mixed with warmth and personal attention, rigorous instruction in core subjects – is one that takes great skill and courage to implement.  And it is changing tens of thousands of lives. I’d bet you a beer it is the most impactful thing in schooling in the last decade.

In Christensen’s terms, however, “No Excuses” is a form of sustaining innovation. “No excuses” – if we could speak of the approach as an innovation, as a technology – doesn’t fundamentally change the way school is done; it makes the current model more efficient, better. To paraphrase Rick Hess: “No Excuses schools are the best example we have of a late 19th century model of schooling.”

Most groups who’ve faced the Innovator’s Dilemma made the wrong call, stuck with their sustaining innovation game plan, and are now dead.

When topics like MOOC’s, blended learning and edtech come up, many “No Excuses” school leaders I know remain skeptical, unable to see these as worth investing in right now. The first few times I heard folks say this, I thought they were being appropriately protective of the precious time and resources they and their kids had to spend. After all, a heightened sense of urgency is fundamental to “No Excuses” success.

But through the lens of disruptive innovation, this reaction sounds very similar to the reaction now extinct firms had when they faced the innovator’s dilemma. Horse-drawn carriage builders said this about cars. “Too loud, smoky; Who wants to smell like gas?” Oops. Big steel said this about mini-mills. “Quality’s too low; who wants recycled steel?” Oops.

That’s what makes this a dilemma. In the short run, disruptive innovations aren’t as effective as the status quo, as the best thing out there in the market. But the potential for long-term impact of disruptive innovation is huge if you are willing to get into the less-than-perfect stuff early and make it better and better with each quick iteration.

Yes, blended learning and ed-tech are totally over-hyped and too often chased as silver bullets. But if we’re going to count ourselves among the very, very few who’ve responded to the innovator’s dilemma by choosing to pursue disruptive technologies and ideas when it makes sense, then we better admit it now before it is too late – we’re saying the things extinct people said before right they got wiped out.

4.0 – For disruptors.

4.0 is a place dedicated to helping people make the right call when they face the Innovator’s Dilemma.

It starts easy – like “come grab a beer with crazy smart people and imagine what school could be” easy. Then comes Essentials – a one-day intensive where you’ll study your own Innovator’s DNA and meet people hacking on the right problems in education. After that comes the Cohort – where you define your own good problem to work on and testing new solutions to it. Then there’s Launch – where you get what you need to bring a well-tested solution to a well-crafted problem to people that need it.

Clayton Christensen is challenging you to be honest about how hard it is to try new things when you’ve got something working well. He called my inner sustainer’s bluff for 12 years before I admitted I was talking like a horse-drawn-carriage salesman. Not anymore.

This disruption stuff is messy, scary, and full of dead-ends and mess-ups.  But looking at education through the lens of the innovators dilemma, it feels like the right thing to do.

-Matt Candler

I wanted to share a great story from Seth Trudeau, the leader of a 4.0-sponsored team that won the social learning category at the Facebook/Gates HackED event earlier this spring.  - Matt

That Someone Might be me

We were two teachers (Burgess & Mike), two developers (Justin and Gordon), and a school administrator (me) who showed up at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA, on April 9 for HackEd 2.0. Over the course of the previous couple weeks we had hashed out an idea that we thought we could build in six hours and would be useful for educators working to close the achievement gap. Like so many of these things go, it had started as one thing and as each person weighed in with their different perspectives and skills it gradually became something quite different. But it was something we all liked and felt like we could be proud of…if we could get it done.

Our idea was this: with new Common Core State Standards in Speaking & Listening, students need even more formal instruction & practice in rhetoric and presentation than even a great classroom can provide, so we wanted to develop a platform that would take students through a rich learning cycle. Students would login through Facebook Connect, start by watching videos of great rhetoric and presentation while following along with the written text and answering basic comprehension questions, then they would be prompted to turn an analytical eye to what they had just seen by recording a video response. After uploading their response, they would watch & rate other student responses. Eventually they would create more polished videos of themselves giving great speeches and make a project that other students got to respond to.

We even had a name for our app: Outspoken.

I can still hear the voice of Justin, ringing in my ears: “in six hours, we are NOT going to be able to do all that.” So we made a list of all the functionality we knew we had to demonstrate, and after we had settled into the room of mismatched couches, armchairs, and love seats that make up a Facebook conference room our developers got cracking. Our teachers began finding example texts and videos then crafting great Common Core aligned questions.

At about the midway point, we reached a milestone: we would have something functional to demo. It wasn’t quite everything we had envisioned yet…but we still had three hours. We felt optimistic that we weren’t going to embarrass ourselves. Except for the one of us who kept walking too quickly to get his teammates coffee and tripping over other teams’ power cords – at one point in front of a sign that read, fittingly, “Move fast and break things.”

As I looked around the room, I was overwhelmingly curious about the other 29 teams in the room. What had they built? What would I want to take back to my school and my students?

By the end, we had something pretty close to what we had envisioned when we arrived that morning: users could log in through Facebook Connect, view a video w/accompanying text, answering questions, and record a video that would save to their timeline. We put the finishing touches on it literally as the clock expired. I get the feeling that’s kind of par for the course.

And then came the pitching marathon. Three minutes per team, 30 teams. Three different categories: college-going, social learning, and out of class learning (we had entered ourselves as a social app). I was fascinated by the different approaches each team had taken, and how much their experiences informed their designs. There were a lot of college-going apps that connected prospective students with current students or alums with similar interests. There were apps to help struggling students bolster their reading skills. There were pitches that made me think, “Damn, I wish I had thought of that” and pitches that left me in awe and thinking, “There’s no way I could ever have thought of that” (I’m looking at you Quizlet and your lock-screen language learning).

When it was all said and done, we felt pretty good about Outspoken. Apparently the judges did too – we won the prize for social learning. That was a transformative moment: coming in, I don’t know if any of us thought we’d carry this idea forward beyond the hackathon, but we’ve been going back and forth over email today about trying to do something with it. We’re looking at bringing in a UI/UX designer, and we even registered the domain name be-outspoken.com. So…who knows? At the beginning of the day, I thought, “maybe we’ll develop something and someone will see it & want to run with it.” At the end of the day I was surprised to discover that someone might be me.

The 4.0 team was talking today about who we might want on the board in the future – unanimous on more artists.

So it seems worth sharing some cool news from one of the most talented artists in the 4.0 community.  Justin Lamb is an amazing spoken word poet. And a damn good teacher, too.

His new album, However it turns out is perfect, just dropped. Buy it.  And while it’s downloading, let the title sink it.  This guy oozes “just ship it.”

Release party Friday in NO at 8, Red Star Gallerie (2513 Bayou Road).

One of the most interesting and important folks in the 4.0 story is a guy named Brad Feld. You probably know him if you’re a techie, you may not know him if you’re an educator.

Beth Heaton Seling and I met Brad a few months after starting 4.0 when we won a Kauffman Scholarship to attend a conference Brad helped start called Blur.

Since then he’s published a great book describing how Boulder became a place where good ideas come from. (Stephen Johnson’s book on this topic is a great companion read.)

Here’s Brad’s powerful Boulder Thesis

1. Entrepreneurs must lead the startup community.

2. The leaders must have a long-term commitment.

3. The startup community must be inclusive of anyone who wants to participate in it.

4.The startup community must have continual activities that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack.

So many people in New Orleans have done this stuff well – especially the inclusive part. Chris Schultz, Andrew Larimer, Dan Stein, Jen Medbery come to mind.

As New Orleans transitions out of recovery into What’s Next?, doubling down on our commitment to be inclusive will get harder.

And as we consider our role in New York, we’re committed to cooperating and sharing with others who are equipping educators and creatives with the tools they need to solve tough problems and re-imagine what school can be.

Great Atlantic article on the state of New Orleans, struggles, amazing opportunities in front of us. Great comments by friends of 4.0 Iike Ken Purcell, founder of iSeatz, and Jen Medbery, founder of Kickboard.

What if we reallocated a small part – call it 10% – of what we’re spending on scaling “what works” towards figuring out “what’s next?”

I talked about the need for funders to invest more and more thoughtfully in early-stage investments on Rick’s blog last month. I think there’s an overwhelming incentive to avoid failure as a funder - Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

The stories of innovation in other industries suggest there’s merit in investing a portion of  philanthropy towards smaller, faster, cheaper investments in the earlier stages of the innovation life cycle.

In an effort to really hear where funders are coming from on this, I figured I’d ask funders to talk about the idea with us.

We’ll keep this first try small to see what we learn.  If you are or you know a funder who’s curious about the future of school, please join me for 45 on April 12 at 4 eastern, 3 central, 1 pacific.  Sign up here or email me at mcandler at 4pt0 dot org.

If you are curious about blended learning, we’re hosting an Education Elements half-day workshop on April 17. If you’re interested in ed-tech, you kinda have to know about this topic, and if you’re or near the classroom, this is a great intro on ways to get after it on your own.

Sign up here!

Wednesday April 17, 2013 from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM CDT

4.0 Schools, 643 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130

Agenda:

1:00-1:15: Welcome and Introduction

1:15-1:45: Challenges Facing Education

1:45-3:15: Experience Blended Learning Activity

3:15-3:30 Break

3:30-4:00: Blended Learning Design Exercise

4:00-4:30: Review of Blended Learning Solutions

4:30: Closing, Light Refreshments and Networking

I’ve started trying to document moments in the daily life of 4.0 that illustrate what we mean when we say community – not hugging and talking community but unbundling, listening, shipping, reacting, adjusting, improving, hustling community). Ryan Hoch, co-founder of Overgrad, pretty much crushed it with his tweet after Education Pitch 2013. Look for the #commmunityis hashtag on twitter – @mcandler and@4pt0schools.

And while it doesn’t really fit into 140 characters, this report on the final 24 hours of Entrepreneur Week 2013 helps explain it a bit more.

Thanks to Rick Hess and his team for letting us tell stories last week.

Last night we hosted Education Pitch at Gallier Hall – the big finish to Education Day, part of Idea Village’s Entrepreneur Week in New Orleans.

I’m just damn proud to be part of a 4.0 team that equips curious people to identify and address real pain points in education. Many folks were stunned to find out it was the first pitch for a few of the teams. And the fact that we didn’t do any formal pitch training with these teams underscored for me the value of focusing on defining problems over burnishing pitch decks.

Thank you to Brian Bordainick for his amazing work with these teams.  And to Cambria Martinelli and Katie Beck for the work they do focusing members of our community on the right problems early in Essentials and the Cohort.  (Good luck to Brian and Dinner Lab; they’ll compete in The Big Idea competition today.)

Members of the audience shared real time feedback via twitter.  You can replay the whole event at #NOEWedu.

Here’s Nola.com coverage of the winners, mSchool ($25K) and HayStackEDU ($5K).

And thanks to Matt Makia, who wrote up a nice summary of all the presentations on his Coding Across America blog.

Today is Education Day of New Orleans Entrepreneur Week.

We’re:

- Cramming Essentials into a 90 minute dash this morning (in the 4.0 lab).

- Hosting Education Pitch 2013 - where 6 new organizations built by members of the 4.0 community describe the disruptive potential of their solutions to tough problems in education. Winners share $25K.  5 PM at Gallier Hall. Big t

- Heading to the Ditch to celebrate at 7.

Thanks again to Andre Feigler, Josh Densen, Alex Perez and Jason Martin for letting us share their stories this week on Rick Hess Straight Up over at Education Week.

New Orleans Entrepreneur Week kicks off today! If you’re in town, sign up for the $25K Education Challenge on Thursday, 5 PM, Gallier Hall, 545 St Charles. After party at Ditcharo’s.

To celebrate, we’re guest blogging all week at Education Week, covering for Rick Hess while he’s away.

We kick it off by introducing 4.0 Schools as a community of curious people committed to driving innovation in education – “Person A has problem B; we solve it with C” innovation, not “we’re the Ebay of Facebook with an airbnb value proposition” solution-looking-for-a-problem innovation.

Bricolage founder Josh Densen’s up tomorrow talking pop-up schools.  Don’t miss it.

Stay with us all week while we tell stories about what’s happening at 4.0.

TODAY’S ENTRY: A case for thinking small.

One of the most interactive sessions I attended at SXSW EDU was led by Tom VanderArk and 4.0 board member, Alex Hernandez. These guys are willing to tell the truth about ed-tech, funding and reform in a thoughtful, respectful, honest way.

Excerpts:

What problem are we trying to solve?

• K-12 academic performance is inequitably distributed; significant limitations in the traditional model.
• The technology toolset to enable new personalized models is still weak. Still difficult to make things “work.”
• But school innovation is primarily a design problem, not a technology problem. Breaking out of that requires courageous and entrepreneurial educators. The most interesting#BlendedLearning activity is happening in schools most willing to question existing assumptions.

Unsolicited advice. Cities should:

• Put together comprehensive plans to make themselves attractive to great educators (e.g., align philanthropy, policy, human capital, facilities, etc.)
• Attract/fund talent (e.g., Mind Trust in Indianapolis, EdPioneers)
• Incubate new education entrepreneurs and opportunities (e.g., 4pt0 in NOLA, Socratic Labs in NY, LearnLaunch in Boston, ImagineK12 in the Bay Area, Digital Harbor Foundation in Baltimore).
• Leverage assets with public and private partners.

Tom and Alex summarized the session on this post over at EdWeek.  A great read.

Brian and Chapman are in New York this weekend to mentor entrepreneurs at Startup Weekend EDU. So far, 45,000 people around the globe have experienced Startup Weekend’s 54-hour mad dash from idea to actual product. Members of the 4.0 Cohort program now get a shot at going to Startup Weekend EDU to pitch nascent concepts. So far, 4.0 alums have swept every event they’ve been to.

I think our success at Startup Weekend is based on Cam and Katie’s acumen in teaching a unique blend of curiosity and strong problem identification. They’re also really good at getting people to just ship it. Their intense bias-to-action is why we like being part of things like Startup Weekend and   Facebook’s/Gates Foundation’s HackED.

Too often the conversation about ‘tech in education’ degenerates into a discussion over smart boards and ipads.  Please. Take a minute to study HOW work is done in tech, especially what’s happened in the last decade in software.  It’s the mindset that we need to take from our friends in tech, not the over-priced hardware that extremely good sales teams cram down the throat of IT departments and superintendents.

We’re trying to get better at HOW we make change happen, not which device people are using. If you’re up for this conversation, here are some good places to start:  The Agile Manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters and Peter Sims Little Bets.

Jeanne Faucheaux is one of 18 amazing people here today at 4.0 for Essentials, our 24-hour intensive on Empathy, Unbundling, and Prototyping. Everyone who comes to Essentials receives a care package with everything they need to prepare for Essentials, including a random object they must re-purpose to describe something about their personality.

Jeanne took this to another level and shot a stop-motion unboxing video to introduce her found object. Brilliant. A few takeaways:

1. Cambria does an amazing job of finding amazing curious, insightful people to participate in Essentials. Everyone here today is pushing our thinking.
2. Details matter. How cool is it that Cambria’s created a brand around Essentials that makes unboxing exciting?

So, to Yes, And Jeanne and today’s Essentials crew, I’m issuing the 4.0 Extreme Unboxing Challenge.

The person who submits the best extreme unboxing video for the next 4.0 Essentials gets an orange 4.0 helmet custom designed by today’s crew.

Follow today’s Essentials on twitter and facebook. We just launched our first three vine videos today, too: empathy, unbundling, prototyping.

Last night (with NSNO, The Cowen Institute and AEI’s edu shop) we hosted our first ever Cage Match (pix here). Inspired by 4.0 board member Rick Hess’ new book - Cage Busting Leadership - it was rated by some as their favorite 4.0 event yet.

I think it worked because:
- The crowd was part of the program
- Rick set a great tone of urgency and rigorous thought
- The experts in the cage completely put their back into it

Here’s the format I shared in an email prior to the event. If you try something like it and find something that works, doesn’t, let me know!

Rick, Vera, Neerav, Jen,

I am looking forward to tonight! Thanks Lauren for the setup.

My idea is that the cage match is more about the crowd getting into the cage with us, not us all in the cage with each other. For me the best events like this challenge the audience to engage in a new way.

Game on.

I will use a timer on the screen or on an ipad, so please be prepared for beeps if you run over. The timer sets a great tone of urgency in my experience and it makes the event feel way more exciting. I’ll be polite, but if we model this it will allow the rest of the audience to feel more empowered and accountable when we get to the cage part.

Pretty standard panel intro stuff to start. Key is that this feels tight and quick paced. 

I’ll encourage you to speed up or wrap it up if you ramble. I’ll avoid rambles too, but hold me to that too.

After Rick’s intro, I’ll give each of you two minutes each to do any combo of the following:
Tell crowd what your organization does (30 second version),
Share a good example of Cage Busting,
Answer one of Lauren’s questions (if you all answer same one, great, if we answer none of them, cool too)

Goal is be through this within 10 min.

Open the door to the cage for 15-25 min.
We’ll ask members of the audience to get in the cage. I’ll give the crowd 3-4 minutes to talk with each other about problems they face in their school, then we’ll do a version of open mic (get in the cage) where any audience member will get one minute to stand up and share a problem they see in schooling. Then as a team we riff on ways to solve, attack that problem for 2 minutes. My dream is that we give them honest feedback – “yeah, that’s a really big problem, here’s some ideas of folks who’ve done smart things about it” or “you know what if you tried this or that, you might find that problem isn’t nearly as big as it seems to you now.

Everyone who volunteers to get in the cage gets a book.

Ideal would 3-5 of these exchanges then we wrap. If we are really feeling it and they are nice and tight, we may stretch for 6-8.

If that bombs, I’ll take the blame and ask you some more of the questions that Lauren shared.

This is part of a series exploring five common traits shared by successful innovators in the 4.0 community:

• Grit(Sweat): You have a growth mindset and see challenge/failure as an opportunity for growth.  Demonstrated through action, especially after you stumble.
• Coachability: You are receptive to differing opinions and demonstrate a thoughtful response to feedback-even if you disagree and don’t take the feedback.
• Openness to Innovation: You have an ability to flare and a hunger for things that haven’t been seen before.
• Strategic Drive:  You get the right shit done; not spinning your wheels or overworking simply to overwork.
• Risk appetite: Willing to take the uncomfortable step, evolve and push the envelope.

Brian talked about Grit first.  Now I want to illustrate Risk by leaning on a member of our kitchen cabinet, CJ Hunt.

CJ is the founder of AP Comedy, part of the leadership team at The New Movement Theater in New Orleans, a founding member of Stupid Time Machine and improv coach to dozens of 4.0 Essentials alums.

His Character-A-Day experiment is a great example of embracing the uncomfortable and pushing himself. Here’s an excerpt of his post explaining why he did it. (I didn’t pay him to use the word prototype, I promise.)

I’m trying to prototype more when it comes to my comedy.  So often with sketch and with comedy writing in general, the emphasis is on wowing the audience with a finished product.  That’s what I wanted this tumblr to be: a one stop shop for more polished pieces of writing.  However, now I’m realizing this Tumblr should be a collection of prototypes – half finished creations.  Things I am working on.

In that spirit, I present to you a new project I’m doing: Character-A-Day.
I was inspired by this guy Jonathan Mann who writes and records a new song every day on youtube.  I thought, “man, that is prototyping at it’s height!”  Even if the songs aren’t great (they are surprisingly and consistently good), the work he must complete in order to produce at that rate must really be making him a better musician.  I told my artist friend Sarah about this, and we agreed to make February our month.  Sarah will be producing a brand new sketch/painting each day this month.  Similarly, I will be making a new character video every day in February.  Can’t promise they’ll be great, but great is not the point.  The point is to be working.  Always working.

Watch the Character-A-Day series grow here.  Thank you CJ.

Ryan Hoch and Kevin Hoffman are co-founders of Overgrad.  They are currently part of the 4.0 Launch Accelerator.

When we agreed to join 4.0’s remote accelerator program back in November, Overgrad was no more than a bare-bones prototype.  Flash forward to a little over a week ago; we are now live with our college-readiness solution at three high schools. Nice.

When we released our beta to our pilot high schools, the launch looked a little something like this. But that is what is so great about 4.0. They teach you to fail fast, because if you think you’re perfect, you’re wrong.  Each biweekly update gets us that much closer to the solution our users love, need, and deserve. Every day is different, but that’s what makes it so fun.

- Ryan and Kevin

Elliot Sanchez is Chief Executive and Founder of mSchool, which provides community centers the technology and training to offer accredited math programs to their students outside of traditional school settings. You can reach Elliot at Elliot@mSchools.org

I don’t think I would have started mSchool in most entrepreneurial accelerators. 4.0 Schools is different because they are simultaneously patient and ambitious. The 4.0 team created an environment that pushed me and my cohort for almost a year not just to reform, but to re-design education.

I recently read an article by Dr. Gary Stager that made me appreciate the critical difference. On Ed Week’s Classroom Q & A blog, a teacher asked how to create a “balanced use” of technology in the classroom. As districts continue to increase their tech spending, this seems like an increasingly important question. Dr. Stager, though, unpacked the assumptions in the question, and called out the limitations with our current thinking. He writes: 

There are three competing visions of educational computing. Each bestows agency on an actor in the educational enterprise. We can use classroom computers to benefit the system, the teacher or thestudent. Data collection, drill-and-practice test-prep, computerized assessment or monitoring Common Core compliance are examples of the computer benefitting the system. “Interactive” white boards, presenting information or managing whole-class simulations are examples of computing for the teacher. In this scenario, the teacher is the actor, the classroom a theatre, the students the audience and the computer is a prop.

 

The third vision is a progressive one. The personal computer is used to amplify human potential. It is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that allows each child to not only learn what we’ve always taught, perhaps with greater efficacy, efficiency or comprehension. The computer makes it possible for students to learn and do in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. This vision of computing democratizes educational opportunity and supports what Papert and Turkle call epistemological pluralism. The learner is at the center of the educational experience and learns in their own way.

mSchool is aligned with that third vision – that student-focused personalization will radically change the face of education. Importantly though, to really harness the power of the advances we are making, the only thing that may need to change more than education itself will be schools.

Certainly teachers can bring better tools to their work and reach more students more effectively. We should celebrate each and every advance that helps one student succeed when they otherwise might not.  

Ultimately though, trying to fit disruptive advances within traditional systems will cause tension and frustration. As educators, we must be willing to look beyond our current roles and design solutions around meeting students’ needs in the most effective ways we can. By using technology to democratize education, we may end up getting more than we bargained for. And our students will thank us.