The Lens of Complexity

Complexity science seeks to understand how nonlinear learning systems self-organize, sustain, and co-adapt to and within their environment (Bloch, 2005; Davis & Simmt, 2006; Levin, 2002). Complex adaptive systems have many parts cooperating and competing. All the systems and agents working together, coadapting and coevolving, actually account for what is happing on local and global scales (Stacey, 1996). Structure cannot be permanent because agents reorganize themselves in response to internal and external stimuli so that renewal is continual (Fels, 2004). Complex adaptive systems are defined by a critical point between high and low order parameters where strange attractors emerge that are paradoxically stable and unstable at the same time (Heylighen, 2002; Stacey, 1996). Complex adaptive systems contain both order and disorder resulting in energy crossing boundaries with the external environment where negotiation can cause a split, a bifurcation point, making renewal or emergence to a more complex level possible. In other words, complex systems hold the potential for transformation (Gilstrap, 2005). In complex adaptive systems such as education, the organism or entity continually evolves becoming increasingly more complex, or “ratcheting up” its complexity based on previous states in which it has existed to make successive generations a better fit with the environment. Complex adaptive systems involve so many interacting entities prediction is rendered impossible in the long-term (Goldstein, 2005; Waldrop, 1992).

Current researchers in the field of education continue to reiterate a basic premise similar to the science of complexity’s theorizing that complex adaptive systems involve so many interacting entities prediction is rendered impossible in the long-term. For example, Kuh and colleagues (2007) state, “No single view is comprehensive enough to account for the complicated set of factors that interact to influence students and institutional performance” (p. 13). Contrast this idea with traditional aspects of school culture that seem to run counter to notions of complexity: low connection density, no attractors such as a shared vision and mission, reductionist in nature, change is chaotic, and a belief that agents cannot improve teaching practice because good teachers are born not made (Dean, Galvin, & Parsley, 2005).

I propose that a new paradigm rooted in complexity has been emerging from recent literature and research although such a paradigm has yet to be recognized on a widespread scale due to the specialized language of complexity science. Stinson (2006) wonders how schools are supposed to facilitate development of HP2 characteristics. Kayti Haycock writes, “Real improvement never follows from just one new program…the educators in [high-performing, high-poverty (HP2)] schools think differently about almost everything” (Barr & Parrett, 2007, p. xx). The U. S. Department of Education (1998) recognizes, “There are many ways to improve low-performing schools but not simple solutions” (p. 49). Lareau (2000) admonishes, “Just as there is no one best way to teach, nor one best way to learn, there is no one best way for parents to be involved in schooling and to promote children’s success” (p. 192). Chu Clewell and Campbell (2007) have reminded us that effective schools research is not intended as sets of instructions to follow, but resources for improvement flexibly applied within context. Brady’s report for the Fordham Foundation (2003) declares, “The specific strategy [to intervene in a failing school] is not important. What’s important is having the right mix of people, energy, timing, and other elements—particularly school leadership—that together contribute to success” (p. 2 of Conclusions) in a specific situation and context.

The “right mix” needs to be dynamic, synergistic, increasingly powerful agents in the right combination. Change and connection are bridged when teachers work collectively and collaboratively forming relationships with and between students to meet common goals while having compassion for each other without sacrificing assessment and learning (Bloch, 2004; DuFour & Eaker, 1998). Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom (2004) feel education needs “to be developing leaders with large repertoires of practices and capacity to choose from that repertoire as needed, not leaders trained in the delivery of one ‘ideal’ set of practices” (p. 10). High-performing, high-poverty (HP2) components “occur in no common sequence, yet they consistently appear in successful schools…What works in your school or district will be as unique as the population you serve” (Barr & Parrett, 2007, p. 58). Complexity seems to be catching on. Education is beginning to see a new paradigm, an archetype for emergence and renewal instead of merely recipes that are not sustainable in the end.