SabuSense

The 2nd Root Cause: The X-Factor

(see Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens.)

Paradoxes — those puzzling, seemingly illogical, conundrums have become a regular part of today’s educational environment. (For a full discussion see Paradoxes in the Present Paradigm (pdf)) Two things we know about these puzzles:

[1] They appear when we can’t make sense of what we experience in our lives.  It doesn’t fit the beliefs that shape our mental models/paradigms/worldviews.  By labeling it a “paradox” we can work around it as a “just-the-way-it-is” part of the work.

[2] Their solutions usually involve finding something within the situation that isn’t being accounted for — an unknown logical X-factor.  And according to Marilyn Furguson, this can become the organizing principle for a new sense-making paradigm.

“A new paradigm involves a principle that was present all along but unknown to us.  It includes the old as a partial truth, one aspect of How Things Work, while allowing for things to work in other ways as well.”

Can this be our problem?  Can there be “a principle …present all along” that we’ve been missing, and which could serve as the center point of a “paradigm”/ a way-of-thinking that could resolve the paradoxes?

This site is predicated on the belief that there is… (see Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens)

It’s based on a “simple” principle from cognitive biology.  Stated metaphorically:

• Everyone comes pre-wired for trial and error learning with a brain-embedded “OS” (Operating System) that initially manages information-seeking and -gathering interactions with the environment, and then sends the products off for “processing” in the “software” of the mind.
• This is the driving core of an individual child’s or adult’s difference-making, meaning-seeking continual exchanges with the surrounding world.
• Moreover, it is the asset that teachers and schools have struggled for centuries to engage (through concepts such as “motivation”) and develop as a sustained capacity so that students would leave their care in charge of their own learning for life.

For me, I’ve found that understanding this X-factor can be a paradox- and paradigm-buster because it explains the perceptual learning disability that has limited the understanding of intelligent, well-meaning educators, policymakers, foundation officials, and business persons who, over the past 40 years, have failed to make sustainable improvements in the common work of schools.

And that’s another paradox. They deeply believe they know the scope and nature of that “Work” from life-long personal experiences. But apparently they don’t… or else why would we hear words like these from those who try to make sense of that work?

(from Seymour Sarason) “When you read the myriad of recommendations these commission reports contain, it becomes clear that they are not informed by any conception of a system.  That is a charitable assessment. . .  those outside the system with responsibility for articulating a program for reform have nothing resembling a holistic conception of the system they seek to influence.” –

How can that be?

(from Kenneth G. Wilson, Nobel Prize winner in physics, and later co-author of Redesigning Education [1994,] who was asked by the State of Ohio to study its educational problems.)

“The research that I studied paints a far grimmer picture of United States education than I was aware of.  Firstly, it showed that money alone cannot solve our problems.  …some of the deep problems which afflict financially-strapped inner city schools are also found in Ivy League science departments, as well as in private schools educating the sons and daughters of billionaires. …

But the real shock, for me, was to learn that the problems of educational reform have no known solution, for any price, despite centuries of thought.

…Fortunately, I find the situation in current education can be characterized not as a hopeless mess, but rather as an outdated paradigm of schooling and school reform, just as Copernicus found that the earth-centered Ptolemaic model of the solar system was inadequate.”

How can that be?

(Or from Peter Senge) “… Many confronting the deeper nature of our problems cry out that the solution lies in “fixing education.”  But you cannot “fix” a structure that was never designed for learning in the first place.”

Never designed for learning in the first place…how can that be?

As counter-intuitive as that may seem, Senge’s right.  Viewing these structures through Alice’s Looking Glass reveals their actual nature as ways to manage the work of teaching, not the work of learning.

What we’ve been creating over the years — from the one-room school house to the “factory model” schools of today — have been work settings to efficiently and effectively manage the human, time, and material instructional resources that we believed could produce the “results” or “products” society expected.  And we’ve labeled that resulting mix of information, skills, and feelings — “learning.”

This seems to be the model reformers continually try to fix by developing ways to quantify and measure that “learning” as a “product,” and then to hold the managers of the workplace accountable for producing it.  Yet they still haven’t been able to find ways to make that model work for all children.

So what if Senge’s right….

….and the work structures in this model weren’t designed for “learning in the first place?”

What might be different if the work of a school system was designed to support “learning?”  The school district story on this site offers clues.

First, we would notice that there has been another manageable and measurable product there all along that seems to meet the X-Factor criterion —  “…present all along but unknown to us.  It includes the old as a partial truth, one aspect of ‘How Things Work’, while allowing for things to work in other ways as well.”

This is the Learning Process.  As viewed through Alice’s Looking Glass it can be understood as a developable individual capacity – a process — not just the products of that process alone.

Moreover, it’s an information-using and information-creating process fed by manageable interchanges created by the adults accountable for its development as a sustainable individual capacity.

The key values of a paradigm with the Learning Process as its center point seem to be:

1) It is an individual process in which the student plays a primary management role. This  can be seen when the same lens was used to view MCPS’ 10-year systemic journey. Many of their successes have at their core the tapping of students’ intrinsic nature as learners, and then engaging and supporting them as co-managers of that learning with teachers and others. (You’ll find examples of this by linking to the site’s Catch Them Doing Something Right.)

This understanding of a usually untapped role for the learner makes available, in a manageable way, one of schooling’s most scarce resources – time.  Not the teacher’s time for teaching, but the time for learning that the student controls.  As can be observed in these classrooms, it offers an organizational Way that can be driven by individual Will.

(See Monte Roberts and Natural Learning (pdf) and New Understanding: The X-factor at work)

2) School systems are the primary sustainable work setting that can be, and must be, held accountable for the development of that capacity, not just its products. As can be seen in aspects of the school system’s journey presented on this site, district processes and practices that support that individual growth in each classroom can be developed, aligned and supported.

3) Most significantly, with this X-Factor at it’s center, this way-of-thinking offers a coherent model for understanding a school system’s work as the development of an Integrated Learning Management System — A system “designed for learning in the first place.’

But first, there’s another “painful” mind-stretching problem…

The clue to unraveling these two core roots was concealed between them.

But there was “gain” in the “pain.”  The good news was that it turned out to be a third factor that potentially offered a hands-on way to untwist and free up the natural power inherent in each “root.” (See Part IV: Sharing the Pain)