What gets in the way of education innovation?
Gartner created the Hype Cycle model to illustrate how the market typically reacts to technology innovations.
Last week an independent school sent a letter to parents to assuage fears about mastery-based learning pilots taking place at the school. The school is a member of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, so presumably these pilots did not come as a surprise to parents.
Still, the letter goes to great lengths to reassure parents that grades are not going away, SAT prep and APs aren’t going away, and that the mastery-based model will not be applied to any additional core classes. (The pilots were run in electives and three core classes: Biology, Biology Honors, and Chemistry.)
If the Basecamp team is generally correct, mastery-based learning is living on the far left side of the Hype Cycle (see illustration below).
The Basecamp Team has adapted the Gartner Hype Cycle model to plot our estimates for education innovations as we approach the end of 2019.
So why aren’t parents thrilled that their school is so far ahead of the curve?
To answer that question—and to understand why so many innovations falter—we need to understand how the Hype Cycle maps onto another model: the Technology Adoption Lifecycle.
Innovations on the far left side of the Hype Cycle resonate strongly with Innovators and Early Adopters, who crave positive change. To these cohorts, implementation failures are merely opportunities to learn and improve.
The problem is that they represent only 15% of a community. And as the illustration above shows, there is a chasm between Innovators / Early Adopters and the Early Majority.
People in the Early Majority don’t crave positive change; they crave positive change that has the kinks worked out. So they get upset when a product is buggy.
If you want to adopt an innovation, you need to:
Know where it is on the Hype Cycle.
Recruit the Innovators and Early Adopters within your community to pilot it.
Have a strategy for protecting the pilots from the Early Majority and Late Majority.
Have a strategy for “crossing the chasm” [1] once the innovation has reached the “Trough of Disillusionment” and is about to climb the “Slope of Enlightenment.”
And remember: in a time of rapid change, the most dangerous thing is to do nothing.
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[1] For a deeper dive on this entire topic, and especially the question of getting across the chasm, check out Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.
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