By far the best education book I read this summer – and perhaps the best in the past five years – is Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (Amazon citation) by Clayton M. Christensen (Wikipedia citation), Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.

This book challenges us to think very differently about education, and posits that disruptive innovation is coming to education faster than we think. “Disruptive innovation” holds special meaning for Christensen. His previous books, The Innovators Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution explored the role of disruptive innovations in industry, such as the transistor and the Internet. We’re talking huge disruptions which led to the demise of entire companies, made fortunes for others, and led to huge social and economic changes in society. Schools, which many would argue haven’t changed all that much in the last hundred years, are about to be similarly changed.

What’s behind this change is student centric technologies, including distance learning and adaptive computer assisted instruction, that changes the paradigm of education to make time to learn something a variable, instead of a constant, in the classroom. Students are typically taught content in a linear, lock-step fashion which is interrupted a certain intervals to assess comprehension and you either get it or you don’t. In order to “cover” a given curriculum, teachers are compelled to move to the next topic even when one or more students don’t comprehend the previous information.

The authors lay out compelling arguments for why schools seem to resist change, and how the disruptive innovations that are occurring can be used to propel schools forward into a more effective model of education. Based on their experience with other disruptive innovations, they predict that by 2019, just over ten years from now, about 50% of high school courses will be delivered online. This is not a linear progression in online learning, but the classic hockey stick curve. What are YOU doing to prepare for this?

The end notes in this book are much more than simply citations, but serve to elaborate ideas and are very readable. Don’t skip them.

Out of all the four books I read this summer, this is the one that I am most recommending to my colleagues to read. I’m already planning on a re-read for myself, and looking forward to discussing this with others.

Read this book, and check out the Disrupting Class website. You won’t regret it.

Perhaps it’s a terrible conceit for me to declare “This really makes sense to me!” when discussing Louann Brizendine’s (wiki citation) The Female Brain (Amazon citation). After all, it’s dangerous territory for one to make – or agree with – generalizations about the other gender. Nonetheless, as an observer of women for 50+ years, I must say that in my opinion this book not only makes sense but lays out a compelling case for understanding the physical, chemical, and neurological differences between the brains of women and men that serves to enrich our understanding of human behavior.

As the father of a daughter (now in her early thirties), a husband of a menopausal spouse, the adoptive parent of a new mother, an employee whose bosses were almost always women, and now an educator in an all girls school, I have had the great pleasure of interacting with strong women of all ages. Brizendine’s book – with almost 80 pages of citations – attempts to add a scientific basis to help women and men better understand what’s really going on inside female heads, from birth to puberty, child bearing and rearing, and later adulthood. I wish she would write a similar volume on male brains.

Brain research is not without its skeptics, and it may well be that what “lights up” in one’s brain during an MRI is really bogus, hormones are overrated, and the whole field is a bunch of hooey. But I don’t think so. It feels intuitively right, and that’s good enough for me.

So now what? Assuming that female brains and male brains are different in some fndamental ways, what does that mean for education in general, and education at an all girls school in particular? The answer is: I don’t know. Honestly, it’s hard for me to tease out the implications of this without making it sound sexist. The predominant model of education in our schools is, I think, oriented towards a male-dominated model of education. Suggesting anything else might imply to some that women are less capable, which really is ludicrous. And perhaps I am shying away from the implications simply because I am male and think that it’s best to leave that hard work in the more capable hands of my female colleagues.

But I will say this: I welcome the conversation, male or female, about what it all means.