{"id":1,"date":"2008-11-10T07:47:28","date_gmt":"2008-11-10T15:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sabusense.com\/?p=1"},"modified":"2009-05-14T11:38:18","modified_gmt":"2009-05-14T19:38:18","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/?p=1","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Alice!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Alice<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Possibly forgotten by many who only know Alice from her “Adventures in Wonderland” is that her learning adventures didn’t end there.<\/p>\n

\"Through<\/a><\/p>\n

Lewis Carroll in 1871 wrote a sequel — Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This time, instead of falling through a rabbit hole to find a world where many of the truths of the real world took on different forms, Carroll used a mirror as a portal through which he could present a different view of reality \u2013 one that also could expose truths that weren’t obvious before.<\/p>\n

Carroll wasn\u2019t the only one to recognize that the way we see profoundly influences the way we think<\/em> because it directly shapes what we believe<\/em>.\u00a0 Others have addressed the same thinking problem\u2026 in the same way.<\/p>\n

“To raise new questions, new possibilities,
\nto regard old problems from a new angle
\n\u2026 marks real advances in science.” –<\/em>Albert Einstein<\/p>\n

“One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”<\/em> – Henry Miller<\/p>\n

“Opportunities to do new exciting, rewarding things are all around us
\n\u2026 but if we don’t look for them we don’t see them
\n\u2026and if we don’t see them then its as if they never existed.
\nThey only come into being when we see them.”<\/em>
\n– David Gurteen, Knowledge Educator<\/p>\n

“\u2026America already knows enough to fundamentally change the ways schools function.
\nThe problem, instead, \u2026 is that our society needs to look at its schools through a different lens.\u00a0 \u2026Without a sense of the whole, we end up with what has become a familiar cycle of patchwork improvement and disappointmen<\/em>t.”
\nUsing What We Have to Get the Schools We Need:
\nA Productivity Focus for American Education,
\nThe Consortium on Productivity in the Schools, 1996.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“And today that “familiar cycle of patchwork improvement and disappointment” seems to have become part of the accepted culture.\u00a0 Even President Obama’s principal education advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond,\u00a0 sees it as
\n <\/em><\/p>\n

“a kind of Alice in Wonderland world in which people ultimately begin to nod blithely at the inevitability of incompatible events — a world in which educators cease to try to make sense of their environment for themselves as professionals or for their students.
\nThey have to explain the procedures and policies that students encounter only in terms of what some faceless, external, and presumably non-rational “they” say we have to do.”<\/em><\/p>\n

This is why this site is purposefully structured around a different portal or window (referred to here as a \u201clens\u201d) that, like Alice\u2019s Looking Glass, surfaces and reveals a level of system-connectedness that can raise different questions and then point to potential answers already \u201cin the room.\u201d<\/p>\n

In particular, it will be used to observe a specific \u201croom\u201d \u2013 a 140,000-student school district \u2013 producing systemic \u201cresults\u201d that researchers and foundations can \u201csee\u201d, and continue to label \u201cunexpected\u201d and \u201cmiracles.\u201d\u00a0 Through it you may see unfold a story of how the learning community that is today producing those results required first a way to deal with another reality \u2014 they already were a community of learners.\u00a0 Individuals, at all levels, whose work had lacked ways to continually, feed and tap into that natural process.<\/p>\n

The context, nature and scientific grounding of that lens can be found embedded beneath the \u201cbuttons\u201d on the Home page. For shorthand purposes in future blog postings, the specific tool at\u2013 Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens — we will just call \u201cAlice\u2019s Looking Glass.<\/em><\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Surgeon General’s Warning<\/a> semi-humorously suggests, thinking about what we may not usually think about isn’t always easy\u2026 and may make one’s “head hurt.”\u00a0 Because the nature of this website’s content may appear to challenge prevailing assumptions and beliefs, we’ve addressed that condition in two ways:\u00a0 through use of metaphors and analogies<\/em>, and application of the principle of “simplicity on the other side of complexity<\/em>.” (See Making Sense through Metaphors<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the information included at this site is based on two beliefs:<\/p>\n

(1) That it is at this level where we’ll find the already embedded roots of natural<\/em> “dot-connecting” answers to the complex problems that schools face today.[2] and<\/p>\n

(2) Our belief is that the “answers” that grow from those natural roots will be the products of asking different questions.<\/p>\n

In structuring this website’s question-asking purpose and approach <\/em>we’ve chosen a Blog format to support the mutual learning interactions required to make this a true thinking partnership.<\/p>\n

\u2026and we look forward to your participation.<\/p>\n

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”<\/em> Einstein<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

END NOTES<\/p>\n

[1] \u00a0 Actually I had described it in a US Dept. of Education report \u2013 The Communication of Experience: A Guidebook for the Management of Information<\/strong> in the 1980’s and used it as part of training for the Teacher Corps.<\/p>\n

[2] And while this may seem to be a helpful way to address a perceptual condition, its scientific base can be found in the biology of cognition as articulated by Humberto Maturana.\u00a0 To better understand its value, see: “An Introduction to Maturana’s Biology” by Lloyd Fell and David Russell and “Maturana’s Biology and Some Possible Implications for Education” by Joy Murray. Both in Seized by Agreement, Swamped by Understanding<\/strong>, Lloyd Fell, David Russell & Alan Stewart (eds)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Possibly forgotten by many who only know Alice from her “Adventures in Wonderland” is that her learning adventures didn’t end there. Lewis Carroll in 1871 wrote a sequel — Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. This time, instead of falling through a rabbit hole to find a world where many of the truths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}