The Living School: A Guide for School Leaders

By Jerry A. Rice Ed. D.

At a time when countless educational reforms, mandates, and change programs are being foisted on our public schools, it seems clear that new approaches and solutions are needed. In The Living School, the author details the thinking that brought us to our current educational dilemma and the forces that formed our model of American schools. He explores new ways of thinking about school leadership, organizations, and learning, gently leading the reader to a new viewpoint of schools and the educational process. He puts into perspective recent educational and organizational research and discoveries and demonstrates how they must be applied to our schools in order for true reform to happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465345493

Jerry A. Rice Ed. D.

Jerry A. Rice is a former science teacher, school administrator, and college professor, currently living in New York’s Hudson Valley region. In his more than 40 years in education he has taught, guided, and mentored numerous teachers and educational leaders. He is still active in the field of education as a consultant and advisor to area schools. His only regret is that he wishes he had arrived earlier to the insights and understandings in this first book. It all makes sense now.

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Copyright © 2011 by Jerry A. Rice, Ed. D..

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011913572

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4653-4548-6

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4653-4547-9

ISBN: Ebook 978-1-4653-4549-3

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Front cover photo by Maria Contento. Used by permission.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One The Counterintuitive Solution

Chapter Two How We Got Here

Chapter Three Forces of Change

Chapter Four The Living School

Chapter Five Core Intelligence

Chapter Six Program Coherence

Chapter Seven Teacher Knowledge and Skills

Chapter Eight The Learning Environment

Chapter Nine Resources

Chapter Ten Sustaining Leadership

Chapter Eleven The Vision

Notes

PREFACE

This book is the culmination of many years of working as a teacher, school administrator, and college professor. It was actually conceived on a bright autumn day many years ago and has been gestating for a long time. On that autumn day, I saw a beautiful formation of Canadian geese flying in their regulated and geometric V formation. As I watched and admired the geese making their way south for the winter, I was startled by a chaotic flock of starlings flying across the highway. Birds were everywhere, in and out, up and down, and with no apparent purpose or reason. I also noticed, despite the chaotic movements, none of the birds collided with another and the flock stayed fairly uniform in size while undulating in shape and form.

It was at that moment, as I watched the two flocks of birds, that I realized that although we do all we can to control and direct our schools to be like that beautiful, aligned formation of geese, they are far more like that flock of starlings. I started to appreciate that the frustrations and failures leaders experience might result from relentlessly trying to coerce and control organizational members to line up, follow directions, and form an aesthetically pleasing V formation.

Over the years, this revelation took many turns, forms, and iterations. I struggled to understand the true nature of teaching, learning, organizations, living systems, and complexity. However, as new ideas, innovations, and mandates came into education, I still attempted to force them into my linear viewpoint, and I always ended up being frustrated and unsuccessful. It wasn’t until I became aware of my traditional view of the world that I truly understood how it all fits together. This book is an attempt to put all the pieces together into an understandable picture for myself. In the process, I offer it to others in an effort to end the frustration and confusion they may be having.

My heartfelt appreciation goes, first, to all my students over the years who listened to my suppositions, questioned my hypotheses, and challenged my thinking. I was only able to put these many thoughts on paper by keeping them in the forefront of my thinking.

I am grateful to my friends, Ned Duell and Timothy McCarthy, who first turned me onto Margaret Wheatley’s book, Leadership and the New Science. It was that introduction that began to open my eyes to a new way of thinking and seeing the world. I remember the hours of discussion we had, and I appreciate and miss each minute.

Most of all, I thank my wife, Maria, for her hours of reading, rereading, editing, and discussing the manuscripts; for her patience as I struggled with, refined, readjusted, and recycled my concepts; and for her encouragement when I became completely frustrated with the task.

We are all pebbles dropped in the sea of history, where the splash strikes one way and the big tides run another, and though we feel the splash, the splash takes place only within those tides. In almost every case, the incoming current drowns the splash; once in a while the drop of the pebble changes the way the ocean runs.

—Adam Gopnik, speaking of

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.¹

CHAPTER ONE

The Counterintuitive Solution

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

—Lily Tomlin, actress

People don’t surrender their mental models easily. They may puzzle over contradictory evidence, but succeed in pushing it aside—until they come across a piece of evidence too fascinating to ignore, too clear to misperceive, too painful to deny, which makes vivid still other signals they do not want to see, forcing them to alter and surrender the world view they have so meticulously constructed.

—Diane Vaughn

People only see what they are prepared to see.

—R. W. Emerson

Systematic Systems

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Not long ago, a friend and I were talking about the difficulties of leading and managing a modern business. He is an executive in a local company that has grown over the years into an international enterprise operating in several countries around the world. As we marveled about the growth of the company, my friend said that his biggest problem was not the size of the company, but getting people to do their jobs. He sighed as he reflected on how he was constantly being contacted by supervisors and managers in the various plants to answer questions, solve their problems, and make seemingly simple decisions that should be made at the local site. He lamented that he just didn’t have the capacity and the time for this, and although he had instructed and trained all the employees to solve their own problems, they continue to contact him for every little thing.

Agreeing that it must be very frustrating, I noted that the company had become a much more complex organization over the past few years, and it sounded as if he had a systems problem on his hands. He immediately disagreed with my diagnosis. He explained, in detail, how he had set up clear and formal policies, systematic management processes, and administrative procedures for each of the operations. He had separated each company department into very logical steps of operations, procedures, strategies, and steps.

After he described the organization he had developed for all his managers and supervisors and the many layers and discrete steps he’d created, "All my employees have to do is follow the procedures and steps that I’ve established and then pick a solution. Instead, they continue to call me!"

My friend is a typical business executive who is in charge of running a company, organizing the enterprise, and ensuring that everything is running effectively and efficiently. To do this, he takes command and control of the organization by developing strategies and steps for all the employees. He believes that they do not have the vision and understanding that he has from his vantage point. In fact, he described to me the planning process they use in the company. He and his leadership team annually travel to Las Vegas, or another conference location, to develop the vision and goals for the year and establish timelines and assign responsibilities for meeting the goals. He was puzzled when I suggested that he might include some of the line workers in the annual planning process. His response was they don’t have the motivation for this and they could care less.

Unfortunately, I am afraid that the saga of employee dependence will continue despite his best efforts. His methods and processes for leading the company are opposed to what we now know about people, leadership, and organizations. However, his training, experience, and intuition lead him to see all the problems and issues of the organization as being solved by the application and implementation of a linear, top-down, structure-and-control process. He perceives his employees as pawns to be motivated, directed, and controlled and not as individuals with goals and intentions of their own. The whole process of leadership, directing, controlling, and planning has become natural and intuitive. He simply cannot see or understand a different way of doing things.

Modern organizational theory and practice encourage leaders to be analytical and detail oriented in their problem solving. Business leaders meticulously defend the endless planning, the flawless execution model of problem solving, and the lengthy period of analysis, leading to a plan so perfect that any fool could supposedly carry it out.² The planning and innovation is top-down because it is from this vantage point the leader has greater vision and understanding of the organization, and anyway, the fools that work for them are unmotivated, visionless, and basically lazy. They require management, supervision, and direction to be held accountable.

Once a flawless plan is developed, the leader gets the workers to accept the vision by employing a mixture of pressure, control, and cajoling to assure that they are both motivated and focused on the prescribed goals of the company. Although there is much pretense of collaboration and involvement of the staff, this process usually means numerous memos and communications from the front office to get everyone to buy in and to feel a sense of ownership. The intent is to have the staff adopt and implement the plan as the planning team in the top offices has developed it. If this fails, the leadership reverts to mandates, policies, and requirements. And they grumble about the difficulty of changing people’s minds and behaviors and their lack of initiative, independence, and motivation.

These management practices and procedures are based on the rational-structural³ model of management. It is so pervasive that it dominates our thinking about management and leadership in corporate and governmental organizations around the world. It takes many forms and different names, but the rational-structural model is ingrained in such innovations as Six Sigma, PPBS (program-planning-budgeting system), strategic and long-range planning efforts, and management by objectives.

It is understandable why leaders choose to follow these methodologies. There is a natural and intuitive appeal to the idea that effectiveness and efficiency result from clear objectives, top-down control, substantive policies, and good communication. People in organizations must be supervised, organized, and controlled. Isn’t that the nature of our classrooms and schools?

Yet organizational change, efficiency, and increased productivity seldom result despite the best efforts of our rational and analytical planners. The rational-structural practitioners are skilled in telling us how our organizations ought to work; they are very poor at explaining why we often get unexpected and unintended consequences, bringing with them more problems and anomalies.

Paradigms and Worldviews

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The real problem with the rational-structural approach to management and leadership is not in the methodology or process. The problem is in the way we see the world. It is in the way we see organizations, people, and how the organization works. We are looking at the world and seeing it as a big, controllable, force-driven machine.

Despite how objective we think we are and how clear our perceptions appear to be, we are all influenced by the principles, beliefs, and models we hold in our head. These schemata influence our perceptions and the way we behave, act, and react in our world. We are taught these perceptions and models from the time we are born, and they become part of our lives. They become intuitive and a part of our behavior and assumptions about the world that we all take for granted and accept with little question.

These related assumptions, models, and concepts are known as paradigms or worldviews. They are the result of successful problem solutions, ideas, concepts, theories and principles we have all come to accept as indelibly true.⁴ Even more powerful are the beliefs and values we hold about other people, other cultures, and other religions. We tend to accept our perceptions as truth and move from those perceptions to conduct our lives, solve our problems, and create our organizations upon them.

The more we apply these paradigms and the more successful we are in solving our problems with them, the more these models of the world become part of our lives, our value system, and our view of the way the world works. The concepts and ideas become part of the culture, and the assumptions and principles are passed on to our children and to our children’s children. As the proverbial fish in water, we generally accept our view of the world. It is as it is! It becomes instinctive and natural. It just makes sense! The laws, social customs, and methods of solving problems all derive from the operating system that instructs us on how the world works. They become the tools we turn to in order to solve all our problems.

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Unfortunately, when our norms, conventions, and assumptions about our world become second nature to us, we often become blinded to other possibilities or solutions. This acceptance of reality sets limits and boundaries on our thinking, creativity, and problem solving. In fact, because of the restrictions a paradigm places on our thinking, Thomas Kuhn warns scientists not to become too enamored with the prevailing paradigm and blinded to new data and solutions. As Abraham Maslow observes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you will soon see every problem as a nail. An example of this linear thinking is in our solution to traffic congestion in our cities and suburbs. We attempt to solve the problem of traffic congestion by building more roads, adding more lanes, and paving more of our countryside. Our linear paradigm says that if four lanes worked, then ten lanes will work that much better!

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Our current paradigm, or worldview, depicts the world as a giant machine. We see all aspects of the world and the universe running according to the Newtonian laws of force, reaction, response, power, and control. We have been applying this worldview for several centuries to solve our many problems, to organize and to motivate people, and to produce new products. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when our cultural worldview began to change. Due to the radically new discoveries in physics, astronomy, and mathematics brought about by the analytical processes espoused by Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, we entered the age of reason and scientific analysis and rationality became our watchwords.

The new, scientific worldview is analytical and reductionist, replacing the Aristotelian notion of an organic, living, and spiritual universe. It suggests a mechanical, predictable world run by natural forces and controlled by analysis and reason. Galileo, for example, advocated that feelings and emotion be banned from all scientific endeavors and proposed that scientists restrict their work to the study of those things that can be measured and quantified.

In the same vein, Descartes created a process of analytical thinking and reasoning that consisted of breaking complex phenomena into discrete parts in order to understand the workings of the whole. He based his views of nature on the fundamental division between two independent and separate realms—that of mind and that of matter. The sum total of the material universe, including living organisms, was a machine to Descartes’s thinking. To him, everything in the world could, in principle, be understood completely by analyzing it in terms of its smaller parts.⁵

This way of thinking and looking at our universe worked for us, ushering in the modern scientific age and the Industrial Revolution. Using the Cartesian methods of analysis and problem solving, we attempt to be as objective as possible in our thinking and carefully separate emotion from decision making. From our youngest age, we are diligently taught that to best solve problems, we must (objectively) reduce the problem to its simplest parts, organize and analyze the parts, and rationally solve the problem. We accept the view that the world and all its parts can be completely and rationally understood if only we can break down the phenomena into its component parts.

Our view of the universe leads us to believe that by rationally controlling the many machines in our world, we can improve the world around us. The more efficiently we can get the parts to work, the more effectively the machine is producing. When the machine fails to operate or produce effectively, we analyze the parts and apply a solution to the parts that are broken. We intuitively believe that if the people in our factories, schools, and businesses do the right work in the right way at the right time, the organizational machine will function and