Learning, leading and living systems

The discussion of alternative educational structures reminds me of the words of Yogi Berra, the renowned American baseball player noted for his unintentional wit and wisdom: ‘This is déjà vu all over again’. As a veteran educator, I find the advocacy for new models of schooling reminiscent of the discussions of the 1960 and 1970s, in which blueprints such as that of the Plowden Report, Children and Their Primary Schools in the UK and the Living and learning in my own province of Ontario, called for major retooling of education to respond to changing economic circumstances and the accelerating pace of change. I can recall using the same language myself to advocate for changes to the structures of Ontario schools. Sadly, as I have chronicled in one of my least successful books, Good schools/ real schools: why school reform doesn’t last (2000), substantive changes foundered on bureaucratic inertia, political timidity, community nostalgia, and teachers’ resistance.

In his ‘think-piece’ on system redesign for iNet, Professor David Hargreaves, as we have come to expect, has provided an admirable survey of various alternatives that contemporary schools in the UK and elsewhere are employing to promote flexibility in the system. I particularly appreciate his acknowledgement of the constructive roles played by teachers and school leaders in providing more enriching school experiences for students. This is a refreshing change from the ‘bad old days’ when policy makers tried to drive change by ‘naming, shaming and blaming’ educational professionals for most of the problems of western civilization.  I would suggest, however, that without some wider political and professional consensus on the purposes of education, the focus on new and innovative structures for schooling will once again, in the oft-quoted words of Michael Fullan, leave us ‘doomed to tinkering’, (1988, p. 28).  

At present, the most common rationale for school change is narrowly based on the instrumental arguments of the corporate world for increased productivity and profitability.  I have had the opportunity of hearing presidents, prime ministers, secretaries of state for education, ministers of education, corporate leaders and senior political and bureaucratic leaders from around the world, and they all give essentially the same speech: ‘We must improve our educational system so that our country (province, state) can compete in the globalised market place’. Improvement is usually defined in terms of test scores, although there is little correlation between test scores and national productivity.  For example, my country of Canada ranks highly on most international comparisons of student achievement such as PISA, but is 13th in national productivity. These pundits of profitability declare that ‘We need more math, more science, more engineers, more university graduates’. Where’s the evidence?  In Ontario, for example, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (2005) states that:
‘Growing evidence suggests that Canada, and specifically Ontario, is not keeping up with the creation of jobs specific to the skills of available engineers. As a result, engineers are either becoming unemployed, or working in non-engineering-related areas. In addition, graduating engineers are finding it more and more difficult to find employment that would fulfill their licensure requirements. Finally, many internationally educated engineering graduates still have a great deal of difficulty getting their one year of Canadian work experience’ (p. 1).

The US has more engineers now than it can use (Freeman, 2007).  Moreover, why the big panic to push more and more young people through university when it is estimated that only 30% of the jobs in the United States available in 2010 will require university or college graduation (Cuban, 2004, p. 169)? I doubt the statistic is higher elsewhere.  A cynic might suggest that the corporate demand for more highly educated engineers, software developers and the like is more of a market -driven strategy to drive down the wages of these highly paid professionals, than a national approach to international competitiveness and economic wellbeing. There has to be more to education than preparing our students to make a living and enhancing the prosperity of a diminishing percentage of the population in most Western countries, as more and more people fall into poverty.

I would submit that the reach of the prophet of unfettered markets, Milton Friedman, extends far beyond his grave and, intentionally or unintentionally, influences educational policies that, in turn, determine how our school systems operate. If one were to venture into the economics department of the University of Chicago in the heyday of Friedman and his followers in the 1960s, you would read a sign that said ‘Science is Measurement’. By reducing economics to that which was measurable, and ignoring the human costs of an ideology that asserted that government has a very limited role to play in the economy, except to create a climate for investment, and everything including education, health care and social security can best be handled by the private sector, they gave an intellectual veneer to hyper-individualism and a rationale for ignoring social needs and economic inequities. Friedman was, and his followers still are, providing leadership to countries like the United States, Canada and, until recently, Australia, and to international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Even though the applications of their economic theories in Pinochet’s Chile and Suharto’s Indonesia failed miserably, and caused untold horror for vast numbers of people (Klein, 2007), Friedman’s true believers and their supporters remain convinced that, where society has a choice, private interests always trump public interests. For example, when Katrina wiped out much of New Orleans poorest neighbourhoods and destroyed most of its schools, the aged Friedman wrote, ‘Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the education system’ (Wall Street Journal, 2005). Before Katrina, the public school system ran 123 public schools, they now operate four; before Katrina there were seven charter schools run by private operators; there are now 31.  Four thousand seven hundred members of the New Orleans teachers union were fired and replaced by younger and cheaper teachers (Klein, 2007).  The Chicago school of economics not only influences the educational policy environment in New Orleans, to say nothing of the scandalous privatisation of the disaster clean-up (Klein, 2007; Giroux, 2006). It also provides a rationale for educational policies in many jurisdictions around the world. The dramatic increase in voucher programs and charter schools in the US, the ‘for sale’ signs on UK academies, which, for the bargain price of two million pounds, wealthy people can buy into state schools, the P3 program of private-public partnerships, to build and influence schools in Alberta (Pratt, 2007), and the increasing need for schools to turn to private funding sources to remain viable all point to the work of Friedman and his supporters. Similarly, the measurement sign on the university door has been given a life of its own through a plethora of testing and inspectoral regimens that, in many situations, determine the success or failure of students, teachers, principals and schools on very narrow measures of human potential. Friedman’s economic policies have failed the tests of democracy and equity in countries such as Brazil, Argentina and, more recently, Iraq, and I would argue that they have failed the tests of efficacy and fairness in education. Fortunately, there is increasing evidence that the social costs of globalisation are not inevitable and that nations and other jurisdictions can prosper without gutting social institutions like schools and hospitals (Cuban, 2004; Ralston Saul, 2005; Stiglitz, 2003; Klein 2007).

Before we start running off in all directions experimenting with this structure or that, we should first pause and ask the questions: ‘What business are we in?’ and ‘What is our purpose?’  It isn’t good enough to talk about ‘moral purposes’ without coming clean about what one views as the moral purposes of education (Fink, 2005).  For me, the moral purpose for educators involves, ‘convictions about, and unwavering commitments to enhancing deep and broad learning, not merely tested achievement, for all students’ (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p. 28). 

To explain the meaning of ‘deep and broad’ learning, Andy Hargreaves and I borrowed from the UNESCO Commission that proposed ‘four fundamental types of learning which, throughout a person’s life, will be the pillars of knowledge’ (p. 85).

‘Learning to know’ includes the acquisition of a broad general knowledge, intellectual curiosity, the instruments of understanding, independence of judgment, and the impetus and foundation for being able to continue learning throughout life.  Additionally, ‘learning to know’ ‘presupposes learning to learn, calling upon the power of concentration, memory and thought’ (p. 86). To do this, Claxton (1999) explains that students and all other learners need to acquire resilience, the ability to ‘stay intelligently engaged with learning challenges’, despite difficulties and setbacks (p. 55), resourcefulness, the capacity to use a range of intellectual tools, including imagination and intuition, to address learning challenges, and reflection, the facility to ‘monitor one’s own learning and take a strategic overview’ (p. 4).

‘Learning to do’ involves the competence to put what one has learned into practice (even when it is unclear how future work will evolve), to deal with many situations and to act creatively in, and on, one’s environment. It includes teamwork, initiative, readiness to take risks, being able to process information and communicate with others and also to manage and resolve conflicts. 

‘Learning to be’ addresses who we are and how we are with people. It incorporates our aspects of the self – mind and body, emotion and intellect, aesthetic sensitivity and spiritual values. People who have ‘learned to be’ can understand themselves and their world, and solve their own problems. ‘Learning to be’ means giving people the freedom of thought, judgment, feeling and imagination they need in order to develop their talents and take control of their lives as much as possible (p. 38). The Body Shop, in one of its many publications, captures the need for such learning goals when it declared:

‘Let’s help out children to develop the habit of freedom. To encourage them to celebrate who, and what, they are’.

Let’s stop teaching children to fear change and protect the status quo. Let’s teach them to enquire and debate. To ask questions until they hear answers. And the way to do it is to change the way of our traditional schooling.

Our educational system does its best to ignore and suppress the creative spirit of children. It teaches them to listen unquestioningly to authority. It insists that education is just knowledge contained in subjects and the purpose of education is to get a job. What’s left out is sensitivity to others, non-violent behavior, respect, intuition, imagination and a sense of awe and wonderment.

Education is more than preparing students to make a living, although that is important. It is also about preparing them to make a life.

‘Learning to live together’ calls upon students and others to develop an understanding of, respect for and engagement with other people’s cultures and spiritual values. It calls for empathy for others’ points of view, understanding of diversity and similarities among people, appreciation of interdependence, and being able to engage in dialogue and debate, in order to improve relationships, cooperate with others and reduce violence and conflict. ‘Learning to live together’ is an essential element of deep and broad learning in an increasingly multicultural world, where millions of families and their children have been mired in decades or even centuries of racial hatred, religious bigotry or totalitarian control. It is truly amazing how many ways policy makers find to separate students from each other – socio-economically, racially, religiously, by gender, and so on. How can we learn to live together if we never get to know ‘the other’?

To these four pillars, we added a fifth: ‘learning to live sustainably’:

‘Learning to live sustainably is about learning to respect and protect the earth which gives us life, to work with diverse others to secure the long-term benefits of economic and ecological life in all communities; to adopt behaviors and practices that restrain and minimise our ecological footprint on the world around us, without depriving us of opportunities for development and fulfillment; and to coexist and cooperate with nature and natural design, whenever possible, rather than always seeking to conquer and control them’ (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p. 38 ).

Let me add one final thought about moral purpose. In our hurried educational environment, in which performance cultures force students and teachers to cover content in preparation for ‘high stakes’ tests, as though education was a series of sprints rather than a life-long marathon, we ignore, at our peril, the fact that ‘deep and broad’ learning often requires slow knowing.  Psychologist Guy Claxton, in his book Hare brain, tortoise mind (1999) says that slow knowing is essential for our learning and our lives. It gives depth to our experience and provokes the greatest breakthroughs in human understanding. Claxton makes the case for slow knowing like this:

‘The unconscious realms of the human mind will successfully accomplish a number of important tasks if they are given the time. They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see; make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyse; and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect’ (p. 4).

Slow forms of knowing, in other words:

are tolerant of the faint, fleeting, marginal and ambiguous
like to dwell on details that do not fit or immediately make sense
are relaxed, leisurely and playful
are willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for
see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring
are receptive rather than proactive
are happy to relinquish the sense of control over the directions the mind spontaneously takes
treat seriously ideas that come ‘out of the blue’.

A few years ago, I co-authored a book entitled It’s about learning and it’s about time (Stoll, Fink, & Earl, 2003). I liked the title then, and I really like it now, because it goes to the very heart of what education in the 21st century should be about. It is about time we focused on learning and not all the artifacts of learning that tend to dehumanise children by reducing them to aggregated and disaggregated numbers, and it is about time we gave students, teachers, and school leaders the time to focus on what the job is all about.

How, then, do we structure or restructure to promote these purposes for all of our students?   Many contemporary approaches to educational change see schools and schools systems as rational organisations, aligned with mechanical precision and driven by forms and functions designed to eliminate the vagaries of human decision-making. A more realistic and, over time, more sustainable but much messier way to view educational improvement, is to view the school, the locality and the state or nation as ‘living systems’ interconnected in spheres of mutual influence; each one a network of strong cells organised through cohesive diversity, and with permeable membranes of influence between the spheres. Metaphorically, they are ecosystems within larger ecosystems.  In this approach, leadership is distributed across the various cells that affect a school such as students, teachers, parents, unions, social services, county hall and local communities.  They come together or drift apart as circumstances and contexts dictate

All living systems, both natural and human, possess two qualities:

They are self organising networks of communication. ‘Wherever we see life, we see networks’ (Capra, 2002, p. 9).  Schools, districts, and indeed, nations are organised into a myriad of communities of practice that can interconnect to move society forward, such as the civil rights or the environmental movements or, conversely, join together to inhibit changes or block new directions.

Creativity, learning and growth are inherent in all living systems and the appearance of a qualitatively new order of things emerges with the creation of meaningful novelty in the environment. This novelty may be as small as an insightful remark or as large as a new government policy. It can be spontaneous or by design.

Schools, districts, and other educational jurisdictions are eco-systems within eco-systems - classrooms connected to schools, connected to school districts, connected to communities and their agencies, and so on. Like a web of interconnected communities, each has an essential skeletal structure of rules and regulations that frame relationships among people and tasks, distribute political power and guide daily practice. It is these formal arrangements that appear in seating plans for the children in a classroom, policy documents, organisational charts, written contracts and budgets. These are the structures, forms and functions designed by policy-makers, leaders and teachers to provide stability, order and direction to organisations and classrooms. This ability to design is solely a human function. 

In nature, all change occurs through emergence, evolution, and the survival of the fittest.  It is human design that keeps society from becoming a jungle and provides purpose, meaning and cohesion. Human design taken too far, however, can overwhelm and stifle emergence within the various eco-systems. For it is the informal interconnections and interrelationships among people that cut across formal structures and intersect with an organisation’s informal structures, ‘the fluid and fluctuating networks of communications’, that give the web its ‘aliveness’. (Capra, p.111)

The aliveness of an organisation - its flexibility, creative potential and learning capability – resides in its informal ‘communities of practice’.  The formal parts of an organisation may be ‘alive’ to varying degrees, depending on how closely they are in touch with their informal networks (Capra, p.111)

Educational change, therefore, is the result of this interplay of the design function, which provides direction, organisational structures, and operating procedures, and emergence, which produces the imagination, creativity, and innovation that drives organisational change.  Too much design and little if any emergence will occur; too much emergence, and the result is anarchy. Finding the balance that provides ‘life’ to systems is the leadership challenge involved in systems’ redesign.  

This suggests that leadership within ‘living systems’ operates on a different logic from traditional images. As noted management guru Henry Minzberg explains, in a web management has to be everywhere. It has to flow with the activity, which itself can not be predicted or formalised . . . Management also has to be potentially everyone. In a network, responsibility for making decisions and developing strategic initiatives has to be distributed, so that responsibility can flow to whoever is best able to deal with the issue at hand (p.141).

In webs or networks, control has to give way to collaboration. They have no centre or apex, just a multiplicity of connections and threads that link various communities that leaders must try to understand and influence to achieve organisational goals.  Minzberg adds that ‘bosses and subordinates running up and down the hierarchy have to give way to the shifting back and forth between ‘colleagues’ on the inside and ‘partners’ on the outside’.  Webs need designated leaders to connect and contribute, not command and control. ‘And that means that managers have to get inside those networks. Not be parachuted in, without knowledge, yet intent on leading the team. No, they must be deeply involved, to earn any leadership they can provide’ (p141). He contends that leadership within the organisational logic of a web is ‘not about taking clever decisions and making bigger deals, least of all for personal gains. It is about energising other people to make better decisions and do better things … it is about releasing the positive energy that exists naturally within people. Effective leadership inspires more than empowers; it connects more than it controls; it demonstrates more than it decides. It does all this by engaging - itself above all, and consequently others’ (p.143).

Systems redesign is therefore not just about choosing from an array of possible organisational designs, like selecting dishes from a Chinese menu. The task of building systems that sustain positive change over time requires an ongoing and time-consuming dialogue among key stakeholders about learning.   It involves replacing prevailing technocratic images of organisational structures and the change process with mental models of organisations as ‘living systems’ that are self-organising and hold within them the creative seeds of their own renewal. Finally, a system’s renewal demands a significant paradigm shift away from top down, imperialistic leadership models of organisational change towards a broader conception of distributed leadership, that spreads leadership over many people and communities of practice and requires formal leaders, to connect more than control, demonstrate more than decide, engage more than coerce, trust more than monitor.

References

Capra, F (2002). The hidden connections: a science for sustainable living. New York: Anchor Books.
Claxton, G (1999). Wise up: the challenge of lifelong learning. London: Bloomsbury.
Claxton, G (1997). Hare brain/tortoise mind: how intelligence increases when you think less.  London: Fourth Estate. 
Cuban, L (2004). The blackboard and the bottom line: why schools can’t be businesses. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Delors, J, Al Mufti, I, Amagi, A, Carneiro, R, Chung, Geremek, B, Gorham, W, Kornhauser, A, Manley, M, Padrón Quero, M, Savané, M A, Singh, K, Stavenhagen, R, Suhr, M W and Nanzhao, Z (1996) Learning: the treasure within - report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century.  Paris: UNESCO.
Fink, D (2005). Leadership for mortals: developing and sustaining leaders of learning. San Francisco CA/London: Corwin/ Paul Chapman.
Fink, D (2000).  Good schools/real schools: why school reform doesn’t last. New York: Teachers’ College Press.
Freeman, R (2007). The market for scientists and engineers. National Bureau of Economic Research: http://www.nber.org/reporter/2007number3/freeman.html, accessed 12 December 2007.
Giroux, H (2006). Stormy weathers: Katrina and the politics of disposability. London: Paradigm Publishers. 
Fullan, M (1988). Change processes in secondary schools: towards a more fundamental agenda. Unpublished document, Toronto: University of Toronto.
Hargreaves, A & Fink, D (2006). Sustainable leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass/John Wiley & Sons.
Klein, N (2007). The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. Toronto: Knopf, Canada.
Minzberg, H (2004). Managers not MBAs: a hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development. San Francisco CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p. 141.
Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (2005). OSPE meets with Minister of Labour and Housing to discuss over-supply of engineers in Ontario, from: http://www.ospe.on.ca/gr_connections_meetings_MPP_Fontana_Aug_05.html, accessed 11 December 2007.
Pratt, S (2007). ‘School board gag order flew in face of democratic representation’. In Edmonton Journal. 9 December: http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/columnists/story.html?id=bfec8c66-3c75-43f5-8e2a-591b357f8361, accessed 11 December 2007.
Saul Ralston, J (2005). The collapse of globalism: and the reinvention of the world.  Toronto: Viking, Canada.  
Stiglitz, J (2003). Globalization and its disconnects. New York: W.W. Norton.
Stoll, L, Fink, D and Earl, L (2003). It's about learning and it's about time. London: Routledge/Falmer Press.
Wall Street Journal, (2005) The Promise of Vouchers, 5 December, quoted in Klein, op.cit.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Dean Fink is a very well travelled international educational development consultant.  He combines an extensive practitioner background as a former teacher (elementary and secondary), vice principal (elementary and secondary), secondary principal and superintendent with the Halton Board of Education, in Ontario, with rich academic qualifications. He is presently a visiting fellow of the University of Hull, England.  Dean holds postgraduate degrees in both history (BA Hons., MA) and educational administration (M.Ed., PhD).  In the past 14 years, Dean has made presentations or conducted workshop in 31 different countries, including Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Mongolia, Spain, Singapore and the Baltic States. Recently, he has presented keynote addresses to major conferences in England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Lithuania and the USA. 

He has published numerous book chapters and articles on topics related to school effectiveness, leadership and change in schools in such journals as Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Administration Quarterly, Educational Leadership, the International Journal of Educational Change and School Effectiveness and School Improvement.  He is the author or co-author of Changing our schools (McGraw Hill, 1996) with Louise Stoll; Good schools/real schools; Why school reform doesn’t last (Teachers College Press, 2000), and It’s about learning and it’s about time (Taylor Francis, 2003) with Louise Stoll and Lorna Earl. His most recent, best-selling books are Sustainable leadership, with Andy Hargreaves, for Jossey-Bass Press (2006) and Leadership for mortals: developing and sustaining leaders of learning for Corwin Press (2006).

Dean is married and the father of two daughters who are both dedicated teachers in Ontario, and grandfather to two grandsons, ages 14 and 12, both students in Ontario state schools. He spends his spare time golfing or waiting for the golf season to begin.

 

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