Bring On the Disruptors

The pandemic forced us to change the way we do school. Rather than return to the status quo, it’s time to embrace the concept of disruptive innovation.

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For many teachers, the 2020–2021 school year was characterized by chaos. Navigating the switch from in-person to remote (and then remote to in-person) learning required more flexibility and creativity — and technology — than ever before. Whether we were figuring out how to use Zoom, Webex, Teams, YouTube, and even TikTok, our ultimate goal was to meet the new needs of our communities, a daunting task that left many of us on the brink of burnout.

In the final weeks of the school year, teachers across the globe seem to be breathing a collective sigh of relief: we’ve reached the light at the end of the tunnel, a light that signals a return to the normalcy we desperately craved in the midst of so much disruption.

But what might happen if we shift from ignoring (or even fearing) disruptors to embracing them — and more importantly, using them to innovate?

According to Thomond & Lettice (2002), disruptive innovation is “a successfully exploited product, service or business model that significantly transforms the demands and needs of a mainstream market and disrupts its former key players” and can be identified by the following features:

1. It meets the unfulfilled needs of a niche market.
2. Its methods are initially unappreciated by mainstream consumers and competitors.
3. Its adoption by a niche market further increases its performance.
4. Its continued success draws the attention of mainstream consumers and competitors, who are then inspired (or forced) to change their perceptions of its value.
5. When value perceptions are changed, the innovation is then able to “disrupt” mainstream products, services, or business models.

These attributes, in turn, should prompt us as teachers to ask the following questions in this new era of post-pandemic pedagogy:

1. What are the unfulfilled needs of my students?
2. What existing methods, strategies, or materials have I attempted to use to meet the unfulfilled needs of my students?
3. What new methods, strategies, or materials have other teachers used (whether on my campus or around the world) with success but little fanfare?
4. How can I adapt these new methods, strategies, or materials to meet the unfulfilled needs of my students?
5. How can I measure the use of these new methods, strategies, or materials to determine their “success” in meeting these unfulfilled needs?
6. How can I communicate the “success” (or failure) of these new methods, strategies, or materials to improve learning outcomes (whether on my campus or around the world)?

As uncomfortable as it is to admit, the pandemic exposed the shortcomings of schools in meeting the demands of our communities. While it’s important for educators to recover from the grueling realities of pandemic teaching, it’s also important for us to capitalize on the skills we’ve gained from this experience — especially those in educational technology — to foster innovation in our classrooms and improve learning outcomes for our students. After all, we don’t want to teach kids the wrong lesson.

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