Education - a complex endeavour

This is the third in a series on systems approaches to education.

Complex adaptive systems

Education is best understood as a complex adaptive system: schools, teaching and learning are all

• emergent
• non-linear (Law of Tanobway applies: "There ain't no one best way!!")
• self organising
• co-evolving with their environments
• nested within other systems

As a result it is not possible to accurately predict the outcomes, especially in the longer term. This is true for all complex systems (e.g., the weather). Nor is it easy to replicate outcomes because "best practices" are situated and not readily transferred. 

In complex systems (such as education) knowledge, actions (practices) and arrangements have be continually constructed and reconstructed.

Teaching is largely about discovering and applying what is helpful to the students as they endeavour to learn. That is, teaching is more about the provision of scaffolding that nurtures the emergence of learning. And this works best when teachers and learners work together to customise the student's learning. Notions of "R&D"  are more useful than notions of education as "production". Schools work better as purposeful communities than as "factories".

Improving education

Top-down initiatives can work well in linear systems. However, improving complex adaptive systems such as education is best done by nurturing the emergence of desirable developments. This can be done by

• introducing attractors (activities, purposes, tools, opportunities...)
• enabling people to be self organising 
• basing action and interaction on a small number of simple rules
• learning from small safe-fail experiments - efforts that will not do any significant damage if they fail. 

Learning from success

Learning from successful experiments needs to be done cautiously.  To conclude from a successful experiment that the method can be widely applied is to make the error of retrospective coherence. Being able to give an account of why/how something was achieved does not mean that it can be readily replicated. 

Complex adaptive systems are subject to the starting conditions. In education these including history, culture, environment... Engineering best practices can be readily transferred - with natural physical phenomena cause and effect are consistent over place and time. The same cannot be said for teaching and learning - cause and effect are not universally consistent and may be distant from each other in place and time.

Evidence-based practices

Unfortunately many top-down initiatives are based on mandating the use of evidence-based practices, as if they work like engineering practices. The notion of "evidence-based practices" is usually flawed by retrospective coherence, and frequently leads to the injustice of "They did it, why can't you?"  Education has a history strewn with examples of initiatives that failed despite their origins being based on prior successful examples.