Systems Thinkers in Action: A Field Guide for Effective Change Leadership in Education

by Blane Després (Editor)

Overview

As a unique contribution to education, organizational dynamics, and systemic thinking, this field guide presents a grand opportunity to forefront systems thinking and to hold up to the world examples of current systemic thinking and action relating to education in a broader social and global context. Systems Thinkers in Action provides an insightful look into education in relation to a concept that has already been abuzz for a few decades in science and nearly two decades in business and therapy. This book will encourage and educate readers within the field and excite them about systemic thinking through examples and challenging ideas pertinent to education and its reform.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578866595
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/14/2007
Series:	Leading Systemic School Improvement , #10
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Blane Després is assistant professor of education at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan.

Table of Contents

1 Foreword
2 Introduction
3 Open Systems Theory and System Dynamics: The Twin Pillars of Transformational Change in School Districts
4 Chaos Theory and the Sciences of Complexity: Foundations for Transforming Education
5 Using Systems Thinking to Improve Twenty-First Century Schools
6 School Improvement: A Systemic View of What's Missing and What to Do about It
7 The Crucible of Reform: The Search for Systemic Leadership
8 Leadership and the Self-Organizing School
9 Strange Attractors in School Leadership
10 Shared Accountability: An Organic Approach
11 Exploring the Shape of Change: Utilizing the Power of System Dynamics in K-12 Education
12 Culture, Chaos and Complexity: Catalysts for Change in Indigenous Education
13 Expanding the Space of the Possible: Understanding Knowledge, Learning, and Teaching as Nested and Recursively Elaborative Processes
14 Conclusions and Continued Beginnings: Application of the Systemic Factors Inventory Analysis Matrix

Editorial Reviews

This family of theories-systems, chaos, and complexity-has so much to contribute to our thinking about and practice of education. At base, they embrace and empower the individual human spirit. Systems Thinking in Action will help place these ideas where they deserve to be in our teaching and scholarship-at dead center.

Marc Cutright

Blane Després has assembled a forceful, instructive and imaginative collection. It is given to the skilled and productive identification of systematic elements at work within what otherwise seems to be the blooming buzz of factors that affect school reform. Within this approach lies much hope for realizing and sustaining better schools.

John Willinsky

At the outset of my career in university education we were but a few pockets of systemic thinkers scattered thinly across the globe. A transformation in paradigm in the latter 1900s saw systemic thinking enter the mindsets of both mainstream academia and everyday working life. That this revolution has brought systemic thinking back on itself to critically evaluate the educational fabric from which it was spawned is the ultimate exemplar of systemic thinking. This volume explores an exciting variety of systemic investigations into the educational process and is to be recommended as both insightful into systemic thinking and instructive about applied systemic thinking within education.

Robert L. Flood