Category Archives: Evolving school ecologies

Learning to live with ever increasing school variability

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

 

As evermore schools move to a digital operational base, take responsibility for their on-going evolution and transformation, plan for their unique context, adopt an ever higher order ecology and move ever further along the school evolutionary continuum so the variability between schools will increase. While some schools are in virtual equilibrium at the Paper Based evolutionary stage the pathfinders are moving at pace through the Digital Normalisation stage offering a 24/7/365 mode of schooling fundamentally different and in many respects antithetical to that provided by the traditional school.

Significantly the schools at the Paper Based or even Early Digital evolutionary stages will take years of astute and concerted effort to even reach the Digital Normalisation stage let alone provide a schooling comparable with the pathfinders.

When one recognises that all the other schools globally are at different points along the six stages of the schools’ evolutionary stages continuum you’ll appreciate not only why there will be the increasing school variability but also why governments, education authorities, school decision makers, curriculum designers, teacher educators and educational researchers should begin attuning their thinking and operations to the new reality. .

When you add to the significant natural growth that flows when schools shift to a digital operational base, the quest by governments globally to accord ever-greater autonomy and decision making to individual schools and the burgeoning imperative, identified by Helbing (2014) of each operational unit taking prime operational responsibility for its own evolution in an era surging computer power and increasing organisational complexity you’ll appreciate why school variability will be the new norm that all associated with schooling will need to live with.

It is a reality that astute prospective Net Generation parents globally are already aware off, they slowly but most assuredly seeking out those schools they believe will genuinely provide, and vitally will continue to provide, an apposite 21st education.

That said many governments, education authorities and even clusters of schools are still working on the assumption that all schools are basically the same and will continue to be so.

Variability doesn’t appear to have entered most education administrator’s lexicon.

National policies in 2014 are still implemented on the premise that all schools are the same. To assume that schools where but 30% of the teachers use the digital in their teaching should employ the same instructional program as one where the total school community has normalised the 24/7/365 use of the digital and is working within a much higher order, tightly integrated ecology is to show little appreciation of the educational reality of today.

The attributes required of teachers thriving in the latter higher mode of schooling are as indicated (Lee, 2014) significantly different to the former type of school or indeed to be found in the ‘one size fits’ approach found in the national teacher standards and employed by education authority HR units in the hiring and appointing teachers and principals.

Many regional and network staff development programs continue to be mounted on the assumption that all schools in an area are at the same evolutionary point and have the same needs. Pathfinder schools are openly criticised when they declare those common programs are a waste and no longer applicable to their situation.

Technology solutions are still notoriously based on the assumption that all schools must use the standard approach invariably devised by central office techs with seemingly no understanding of the situation in a diverse group of increasingly autonomous schools.

There appears globally in 2014 a pronounced inability by many educational decision makers to understand that every school is unique and that the time honoured ‘one size fits all’ approach has passed its ‘use by date’.

In the same way that many schools have difficulty personalising the student teaching so governments and education authorities seemingly have difficulty in individualising the enhancement of schools. For some reason the system-wide approach top down approach must still be employed.

As schools evolve at their own pace and create unique ecologies it’s vital governments and education administrators factor variability and not sameness into all aspects of their operational thinking, be it in relation to the curriculum, teaching, staff selection, home-school collaboration, school planning, marketing, school accountability, resourcing or the use of technology.

The development obliges all external school support bodies and agencies understand where each school sits on the schools’ evolutionary stages continuum, that school’s likely path ahead and to tailor its ‘support’ accordingly if it is to add value to the teaching in that school. If that agency can’t add that value it is better dispensed with, its stultifying presence removed and the schools be left free to take control of their own evolution.

 

 

Lee

Taking Control of Your School’s Evolution

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Mal Lee

Critical to the evolution of schooling is the necessity of each school taking control of its own evolution, daily shaping its ever evolving and distinct ecology to provide the desired education.

All of the pathfinder schools studied in the researching A Taxonomy of School Evolution and the forthcoming work on Digital Normalisation and School Transformation had been proactive, and had of their own volition for 15-20 years embarked on the quest to provide what they believed to be an apposite education for an ever evolving digital and networked world.

They were not, like so many other schools willing to sit and wait for those on high to provide the lead.

The growing imperative for every school to take charge of evolution, and not fall into a state of equilibrium is explored in the ACER’s new online journal Teacher at – http://teacher.acer.edu.au/article/taking-charge-of-your-schools-evolution

Complexity Science and School Evolution

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

The evolutionary nature of schooling, its remarkable global similarity, the existence of the six evolutionary stages, the emergence of ever higher order schooling, evermore integrated and complex schools and the increasing importance of unique living school ecologies needing to have operational responsibility for their own growth should bid educators and school administrators look very closely at the applicability of complexity science to the on-going transformation of schooling. That need is amplified when one reflects upon the following graph used by Helbing (2014) in his June presentation on the likely impact of the digital technology upon the organisations of the world.

chart_vp1

While complexity science had its origins in the explanation of the remarkable commonality that was found to emerge out of the seeming chaos in complex systems in nature in the last decade or so that thinking has been increasingly applied to complex human systems to try and explain the remarkable commonality that has emerged in the seeming chaotic growth of human organisations, particularly when they move to a digital operational base and become networked. A Google search and the Wikipedia entry on complexity science provide a ready entrée to the key readings. While as yet very little has been written on the application of the thinking to the evolution of schools there is a growing body of research that has been undertaken on businesses, and indeed health sector organisations that appears to be applicable to schools. In conceptualising the school evolutionary stages, the international nature of the evolutionary continuum, the existence of significant natural growth when schools go digital, the imperative of each school shaping its own growth and the impact of digital normalisation it was interesting to say the least to note the parallels with what had happened with all manner of business organisations. Yin for example as far back as 1979 used the term ‘disappearance’ to describe what we call digital normalisation while Bar and his colleagues at Stanford used the term ‘routinization’.

Yin therefore recognizes that the introduction of an innovation can result in organizational transformation through a process of increased embeddedness of the technology in the organization, which is consistent with the reconfiguration stage of our model (Bar, et al, 2000 p20). Interestingly the Stanford group also identified the same kind of evolutionary stages in networked organisations that we found in schools, albeit using different labels to describe the industry wide evolutionary pattern (Bar et al, 2000).

Those organisational evolution studies need to be read in conjunction with Pascale, Milleman and Gioja’s work on Surfing at the Edge of Chaos (2000). The following quote from that work provides a revealing an insight into what is happening with both the pathfinding ever more complex schools and those lagging.

‘The science of complexity has yielded four bedrock principles relevant to the new strategic work:

  1. Complex adaptive systems are at risk when in equilibrium. Equilibrium is a precursor to death.4

  2. Complex adaptive systems exhibit the capacity of self-organization and emergent complexity.5 Self-organization arises from intelligence in the remote clusters (or “nodes”) within a network. Emergent complexity is generated by the propensity of simple structures to generate novel patterns, infinite variety, and often, a sum that is greater than the parts. (Again, the escalating complexity of life on earth is an example.)

  3. Complex adaptive systems tend to move toward the edge of chaos when provoked by a complex task.6 Bounded instability is more conducive to evolution than either stable equilibrium or explosive instability. (For example, fire has been found to be a critical factor in regenerating healthy forests and prairies.) One important corollary to this principle is that a complex adaptive system, once having reached a temporary “peak” in its fitness landscape (e.g., a company during a golden era), must then “go down to go up” (i.e., moving from one peak to a still higher peak requires it to traverse the valleys of the fitness landscape). In cybernetic terms, the organism must be pulled by competitive pressures far enough out of its usual arrangements before it can create substantially different forms and arrive at a more evolved basin of attraction.

  4. One cannot direct a living system, only disturb it.7 Complex adaptive systems are characterized by weak cause-and-effect linkages. Phase transitions occur in the realm where one relatively small and isolated variation can produce huge effects. Alternatively, large changes may have little effect. (This phenomenon is common in the information industry. Massive efforts to promote a superior operating system may come to naught, whereas a series of serendipitous events may establish an inferior operating system —such as MS-DOS — as the industry standard.) (Pascale, Milleman and Gioja, 2000, p6).’

We’d suggest all four of the principles are evident in bucket loads in the schools evolutionary continuum.   The recent presentation by Helbing (2014) that examines the likely profound impact on the world of the rapidly increasing processing power and computer systems and which notes the increasingly pertinence of complexity science to all organizations posits that only the individual operational units – be it a school or hospital – has the wherewithal to shape desired way forward for the organisation. His contention is that the speed and complexity of the change occurring cannot be handled – as now – from on high and ought be handled at the unit level by bureaucracies, he noting

….complexity theory tell us that it is actually feasible to create resilient social and economic order by means of self-organisation, self-regulation, and self-governance. The work of Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom and others has demonstrated this. By “guided self-organisation” we can let things happen in a way that produces desirable outcomes in a flexible and efficient way. One should imagine this embedded in the framework of today’s institutions and stakeholders, which will eventually learn to interfere in minimally invasive ways (Helbing, 2014).

Interestingly all the pathfinder schools in their evolutionary journey have taken control of their own growth and it is why today those schools are so well positioned to accommodate the continuing and likely escalating change organizational evolution.   Bibliography

  • Bar, F, Kane, N, and Simard, C (2000) Digital networks and Organisational Change. The Evolutionary deployment of Corporate Information Infrastructure Vancouver 2000 Retrieved 19 June 2014 – http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~fbar/Publications/sunbelt-2000.PDF
  • Pascale, R.T, Millemann, M, Gioja, L (2000) Surfing at the Edge of Chaos NY Three Rivers Press

 

Schools as Ever Evolving Ecologies

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

We’ve found it helpful in considering the distinct nature of digital schools to view them as ever evolving, evermore tightly integrated ecologies where all the parts are increasingly linked.

They stand in marked contrast to the traditional paper based schools, and in particular the secondary schools that have long been viewed as largely constant, loosely coupled organisations where silo like units within the school operate largely independently. Indeed Karl Weick’s thinking on schools as loosely coupled organisations, that was penned in 1976 still holds true with most high schools today.

However view the attributes displayed by the pathfinder schools as they moved along the evolutionary continuum and you’ll see, as noted in the earlier posts the traditional loosely coupled school becoming evermore integrated and tightly coupled, with all the operations being increasingly linked to the realisation of the school’s shaping educational vision.

As the natural growth impacted, as the staff and client expectations rose, as new opportunities were identified so the schools evolved with all the parts becoming increasingly intertwined. The schools became increasingly distinct, ever-evolving ecologies addressing the particular needs of their situation by ensuring all facets of their operations, in and outside the school walls were linked and the silos were more closely integrated or dispensed with.

Moreover the digital convergence and the associated integration also saw the schools – often unwittingly – make ever-greater use of the facility the digital operational base provided to have the one facility serve multiple purposes with no extra effort by the staff.

Lee and Ward (2013) cite the example of school blogs where those blogs simultaneously and without any extra effort provided

  • an insight into the school’s daily activities to parents, grandparents, 
the local community and the students, and what they can do to 
complement that work
  • advice to parents on the school’s program, its calendar of events and 
the home study
  • a window into the workings of the school to all interested professionals, 
school or system executives or politicians
  • an important indicator as to where the school is at in its evolution
  • instant, ongoing accountability
  • the facility for instant teacher ‘evaluation’ and an insight into who is 
adding value
  • very powerful marketing of the school
  • an appreciation of how well the school operations are integrated (Lee and Ward, 2013, p89).

Factor in that all the schools were moreover increasingly marrying the teaching of the homes with that of the schools, and creating an increasingly integrated and tightly coupled 24/7/365 school ecology.

The challenge for the school leadership, and in particular the principal in the digital and networked school is to daily ensure not only are all the parts in the evolving ecology appropriately are apposite and can be integrated but that the total school ecology is shaped in a way that will best provide the desired educational benefits.

The challenge for researchers in or outside the school becomes ever greater. Thus far educational research has in the main been silo like looking primarily at linear connections within a part of the school’s operations. In integrated, ever-more complex, ever changing ecologies where the impact might come from synergies that are greater than the sum of the parts, and where much of the change is non-linear the difficulty of ascertaining what impacts student attainment will be challenging to say the least.

That said by recognizing that one is working with evolving, ever higher order ecologies – and not static loosely coupled entities – helps all associated with the school, be they the staff, the clients, community or the authorities, better understand the school’s nature and what is required for its on-going enhancement.

It is most assuredly not ‘one size fits all schools’ silver bullet solutions handed down from high.

The idea of a living, ever evolving complex ecology, which will forever experience significant natural growth and where all the parts will increasingly be intertwined, in and outside the school walls helps the school community, and in particular the school staff better understand their very different teaching and learning environment.

 

Lee, M and Ward, L (2013) Collaboration in learning: transcending the school walls Melbourne ACER Press

Weick, K, (1976) “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems” Administrative Science Quarterly 21 1976