Lightspeed Systems

This is a response to Larry Cuban post from Alan Bain and Mark Weston which I commented on in my last post.

“We want to respond to your critique of the article and specifically your remarks about the tenets or principles described in the latter part of the piece.

The six principles described in the article were the product of a 12-year theory- to-practice project that developed and tested an application of self-organization theory in a school setting. While we agree that many of the claims about what should or did happen in school reforms reside in the realm of the rhetorical, this was not the case in the self-organizing school project which generated over 15,000 pieces of qualitative and quantitative data over five years including 1600 classroom observations and 12,000 student evaluations of teachers in a five year longitudinal evaluation. An eight year study of achievement produced achievement effects of .58 and .70 (for students with learning disabilities) while studies of the use of ICT showed positive effects on teaching practice and student achievement. A five-year longitudinal study of team process and faculty collaboration that compared faculty perspectives in the SOS project school with 42 other schools showed that faculty felt their work environment was more collaborative, and they spent more time engaged in constructive collaborative problem-solving activity. The SOS project school developed and implemented a 1:1 program beginning in 1992. For the most part, the data described above were gathered as part of the ongoing conduct of the school and used for problem-solving the design and process, the professional growth of faculty, evaluating student progress, and reflecting on school performance, as well as developing connections between the fidelity of implementation and the outcomes of the project. We contend, based on an extensive review of evaluations of CSR and other reforms, that the SOS project, with its duly acknowledged limitations, stands in contrast to the weak process evaluation of reforms (Berends et al., 2001) and the consequent difficulty attributing effects to their designs and process.

We also recognize that given the brief of the journal and the topic of the special issue, we did not treat the case for the principles extensively in the ‘techno-critique” piece. That said, we did cite the major source for the principles described in the article which are described in “The Self-Organizing School: Next Generation Comprehensive School Reform.” This book provides a more detailed account of the theory and practice and summarizes the evaluation studies along with their sources in the peer reviewed and professional literature. The book also describes the many honest challenges of creating such a school and details the methods employed and the practical and methodological limitations of the work.

We share this information with you to address the claim that the principles described in the “techno-critique piece” are “rhetorical and rosy” or were developed without due consideration of the current state of reform. Two chapters of the book are devoted to contemporary issues including the challenge of scaling up. With respect to this point we believe that most reforms have rushed to scale in an incomplete state without the kind of full development required to be successful in any single school. There is a strong body of evidence in the CSR literature in support of this assertion. It should come as no surprise that those many reforms would bump into the issues you describe regarding best practice, the use of technology, inequality, and the deployment of resources.

As such, we feel confident that the principles described in the “techno-critique” article are in fact the antithesis of ‘blue sky’ and represent one of the most documented and disciplined effort to understand the theory, process and outcomes of a reform, albeit in one school. We contend that given the difficulties experienced by prematurely scaled larger efforts, a strong argument exists for building more complete approaches and robust process at a smaller scale in individual schools prior to scaling to many schools and systems. This is especially the case with respect to the way reforms consider and address the professional lives of teachers. The SOS project represents just one example of the role of theory as a design metaphor for reform and signals the importance of smaller more complete research practitioner efforts. We believe there should be many.”

Joel

Larry Cuban’s excellent post attacking the belief that technology in general, or 1:1 initiatives in particular, will magically transform schools and learning is outstanding — which is why I reprinted it in it entirety in my last post.

However, I believe his dismissal of the Weston and Bain vision summarized below is only 1/2 right.

“Weston and Bain then lay out their vision of a school that uses technology as “cognitive tools” to transform teaching and learning (p. 11). Such schools have six features (pp.12-13):

1. Agreed upon “simple rules” that the entire school community “believes about teaching and learning.”
2. School community “deliberately and systematically uses its simple rules” to design and implement school tasks and actions.
3. All members of community are “engaged in creating, adapting, and sustaining the … design of the school.”
4. Real-time feedback from all community members “drives bottom-up change,” and makes each member accountable.
5. The interaction of rules, design, collaboration, and feedback lead to a shared conceptual framework for daily classroom and school activities that is self-organized and ever changing.
6. This self-organized, dynamic community “demand(s) systemic and ubiquitous use of technology” (p.13) to use “cognitive tools” everyday in classroom practice.”

The part he has right of course — is that this sort of community does not demand systemic use of technology — and there is no evidence that systemic use of technology by itself produces this type of community.

However, based on 30 years of experience of leadership in public, private, and non-profit organizations — and extensive study of management and organizational literature — I believe organizations that build a culture that follows those first five rules — can in fact produce outstanding results. Those rules are a variation of Demming classic Total Quality Management principals — which I have found can be simplified and adapted to almost any organizational setting effectively.

Thus, Weston and Bain prescription for effective organization is accurate in many ways — and most effective organizations today do heavily use technology to streamline their operations and maximize use of human resources. However, Cuban’s critique that this is not a result of 1:1 initiatives is spot on — and further – his larger critique of attempts to find cookie cutter school reform formulas is also accurate.

Applying the Weston and Bain prescription for effective schools (or any type of organization) is by its very nature a unique, organic, dynamic and unpredicable process. The essence of TQM is clarity of goals, rigorous data collection, then actions to improve performance based on the analysis of that data — actions which cannot be predicted in advance.

In sum, Cuban’s larger point that school improvement is hard — as is improvement in any organization – is true. And at its core it is not about technology – technological tools are used to make the organization more effective – but it is the organization’s skill at defining a shared vision, communicating, collaborating, evaluating, changing, etc. that is the driver of effective outcomes.

Any thoughts from my friends in the K-12 IT trenches?

Joel