SabuSense

Twelve years ago, at the beginning of my unique relationship with the Montgomery County, MD Public Schools (described in “Catching Them Doing Something Right”) I started a diary. Later, as I began to note the nature of the insights being recorded I went back and renamed the computer file “Learning Log.”

Now, some 900 pages later, in order to better reflect the product of all those aggregated learnings, I’ve again re-titled it — How I Stopped Hating… and Learned to Love a School System.”

Since, like many others, my needs for autonomy and freedom to make a difference usually seem to generate automatic pushback against the “systems” around me that appear to constrain it (home, schools, work), what could produce such a major transformation in the worldview that frames my way-of-thinking?

Buckminster Fuller had suggested the answer:

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them.
Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

My tool was the lens through which I was observing the “system” (described in “Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens”).

It enabled me to “get into the heads” of those who are the system to “see” what they were seeing and feeling and ask “why?” And then to use the common answers to develop a capability that Copernicus never had to leverage the natural strengths and relationships that appear. (see The One Thing! …a simple proposal.]

This site’s content is largely the product of applying that way-of-thinking to the actual work of an “organization of learners” attempting to become a “learning organization.” And because they were “doing it” – and as outside observers began to note “very effectively” – it added urgency to the site’s purpose that was captured in the concluding paragraphs of The One Thing! …a simple proposal.

“So our task is not only simple, its clear. At a time when schools have neither the capacity, nor the societal support, to “fix” themselves, we have to develop and initiate processes that support capacity development as a practically simultaneous, inside-out, knowledge-development process.

We have to change everyone’s mental model of schooling, but fortunately, we now can use the “simple rules” imposed by what we already know about how the human mind works as it processes information to solve problems that get in the way of making a difference.

•            First individuals must have a compelling reason to change the way they look at, and understand, learning, teaching and schooling.

•            Then driven by the motivating power of understanding why new alternatives may be necessary, they need to have the means and support to work within that new paradigm.

•            Finally, they need processes to derive from that work experience the necessary knowledge and culture to sustain that way of functioning for all students.”

So… now I’ve outed myself.

As an embedded co-learner I’ve developed an appreciation, respect, (and “love”) for those whose thinking is driven by a personal need to make a difference, but find themselves in a “system” based on assumptions that they can somehow do it alone. And who have been able to learn – together – how to continually challenge those assumptions.

But, today as I look at most proposals for “systemic” reform, I realize how strongly most of them are based on unquestioned assumptions that the “system” is the hated enemy. Not until it can be “flattened,” “swept away,” “disempowered” will each child be able to learn, and all teachers be able to teach.

No wonder major foundations — unable to figure out the key to “systemic reform” –eventually downshift to disconnected building- and classroom-based changes that lack the systemic connective tissue to sustain them over time.

I wish I knew how to spread the “love” I’ve experienced. Might it help them understand school systems as the positive factors they can be, and not the negative ones they unquestionably assume they are?

I don’t know if this website can help, but we’ll keep on trying…