Google defines disruption as a “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” However, we need to look at disruption as a concept to use and implement in education not as a problem, but as a strategy to formulate solutions to current problems.

Like many other trends in education, we also need to avoid viewing the term disruption as a mere buzzword and instead embrace it in a way that moves us toward creating tangible, positive solutions.

Disruption as a concept seems heavily lofty and often unapproachable. There are many reasons that stop educators from disrupting the status quo in education, which is why we need to look at disruption from an individual’s perspective rather than from a grandeur one.

What can you do today in the classroom to disrupt the status quo?

Creating positive change

In a recent article by Melinda D. Anderson of The Atlantic titled “How Teachers Learn to Discuss Racism,” she covers how recent urban education programs are preparing to have “imperative contemporary conversations with students.”

What are these conversations like? The article focuses on racism in urban education and what teachers can do in their classroom to address and confront their own biases. Melissa Katz, an urban education student at The College of New Jersey in Ewing quoted in the article, is constantly “unlearning and relearning what it means to be a white teacher in an urban school district.”

Katz encourages white educators to “think critically about race, justice, and our own privilege, and most importantly—how these play out in the classroom as teachers.” Her advocacy, writing, and her ability to reflect on her own biases and privilege is disrupting the status quo and impacting students, teachers, and their communities.

For many educators, disruption is a necessary act to move things forward. Jose Vilson, a New York math teacher and EduColor founder, states on his blog that “people need to get more real about the conditions within schools and disrupt for the sake of progress, not for the sake of disruption.”

In other words, disruption shouldn’t be seen as a trend or a buzzword, but it should be done because it’s what is necessary to create positive change in the classroom.

Revitalizing teaching and learning

Jessica Liftshitz, a fifth-grade teacher from the suburbs of Chicago, is slowly shifting and disrupting the status quo with subtle actions that make an immense difference in the lives of her students. She works directly with her students to “better understand where our biases and stereotypes come from in regards to different races, genders, and family structures.”

Liftshitz is doing this work through analyzing the diversity of their classroom books. In her blog, Crawling Out of the Classroom, she writes about the importance of exposing children to diverse books, stating, “I truly believe that books, of all kind, play a large role in shaping how our students see the world. So often, children have little choice in what kinds of books surround them.”

And it is with this mind-set that Liftshitz is disrupting the classroom status quo and is truly advocating for change in her world. Believing that students need to have a choice in the books that surround them and, more important, that students need to see themselves, their families, and their culture represented in the diversity of choices of books they read, is truly a shift and a disruption in education, teaching, and learning that we need to see.

Eric Sheninger, a senior fellow at Rigor Relevance, in an article titled “Education Is Ripe for Disruption,” argues that “disruptive innovation compels educators to go against the flow, challenge the status quo, take on the resistance, and shift our thinking in a more growth-oriented way.” An important aspect of disruption in education is to disrupt traditional ways of thinking and old processes that no longer meet the needs of all students. This does not mean that everything that’s traditional is outdated and can no longer be used. However, it’s vital for educators to look outside of education for new learning processes and paradigms that are relevant and will help to revitalize teaching and learning in the classroom.

Developing your own framework

Mustefa Jo’shen is partner and principal at Ci. Strategy+Design, which offers professional development for organizations and workshops for learners to help them understand and adopt an entrepreneurial and design thinker’s mind-set. Students learn about a framework developed through Ci. called “Applied Design Thinking.” Jo’shen explains that “Applied Design Thinking creates a framework for learners to own their own critical approach to create ideas that have impact.”

New learning processes in education such as Applied Design Thinking work to disrupt education in a way that advances learners’ ability to take control of their own learning. Jo’shen believes that “empowering students to create their own frameworks helps them consciously identify and put to paper the way they think and work.” This gives students a chance to visualize and iterate their thinking processes.

The education system requires a change for us to enable students to learn to work and work to learn. Disruption is happening right now in the real world and it's happening in our industries, our businesses, our communities, and our governments. It’s time for us to empower students by disrupting education so that they can make a greater impact on the issues that are changing their lives.

We must also remember that an important aspect of disruption in education is resistance. Educators, parents, administrators, and students must work together to resist the status quo. As disruption doesn’t happen easily, resistance also requires us to work together to identify the problems that are directly impacting our students and to find solutions “by any means necessary.”

Rusul Alrubail, an ILA member since 2016, is a writer on education, teaching, and learning. Her work focuses on teacher development and training, English learners, and pedagogical practices in and out of the classroom.