Humility in the face of dynamical and chaotic forces

Published by in leadership, schoolreform, science on June 29th, 2007

Today is the 17th straight day of rain here in Edmond, just north of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Our area has not seen rainfall this frequent since the late 1930s. According to today’s AP article, “More Rain Forecast for Texas, Oklahoma:”

The National Weather Service on Thursday recorded rainfall in Oklahoma City for the 16th straight day, two days longer than the previous record, set from May 29 to June 11 in 1937. Forecasters predicted the rain could continue for several more days.

If we receive rain on Saturday and Sunday, we’ll set yet another record. It feels like we’re living in the Pacific northwest, but without the nearby mountains and ocean to enjoy!

Unpredictable weather patterns like this bring a smile to my face, because they remind me how important it is to remain humble about what we “know” and what we can predict.” Weather is now regarded by most meteorologists I’ve talked to on this subject as a nonlinear, dynamical and chaotic system. This means the system is highly responsive to initial conditions, resulting in the impossibility of precisely predicting the future the local level, even a few days or hours “down the road.” Long term and large scale predictions of weather are possible: summer will come, winter will come, broadly speaking temperatures and precipitation levels will change according to patterns– but at the local level, at my house, in my county, it becomes virtually impossible to be sure what the EXACT weather will be even a day in advance. Meteorologists can predict expected temperature ranges and likely precipitation, but not EXACT figures. Where will a tornado strike? The uncertainly of tornadoes dramatically reflects the reality of nonlinear, chaotic weather systems.

I find this responsiveness to initial conditions and inputs to be quite empowering as an individual. Classroom culture, just like weather systems, seem to be nonlinear, dynamical and chaotic. According to the current Wikipedia entry for chaos theory:

In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under specific conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, because of an exponential growth of errors in the initial conditions. This happens even though these systems are deterministic in the sense that their future dynamics are well defined by their initial conditions, and there are no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

When we think of chaos in the context of school, an image of a completely disordered cafeteria food fight may come to mind. Using a scientific term, that image might come closer to “entropy” defined in the second law of thermodynamics, which states:

…the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value; and so, by implication, the entropy of the universe (i.e. the system and its surroundings), assumed as an isolated system, tends to increase.

Of course, school contexts including classrooms and cafeterias are not “isolated systems.” Like weather systems, they are highly connected to other inputs and variables. This makes them resemble chaotic systems, which are both dynamic and non-linear, meaning future states cannot be predicted with complete accuracy. We can make reasonably accurate predictions about outcomes in the short term, but long term predictions are much more difficult to make.

Maybe all of this sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, but although I am not formally “a scientist” I consider myself to operationally be one. I love to learn and study things like chaos theory, and I like making connections from the scientific domain to the learning domain of the classroom.

Rainy days, and a record-breaking series of rainy days like we are experiencing now, make me smile. We DO possess a remarkable amount of scientific knowledge today, but even more knowledge cannot and will not make the future, of weather systems or our educational system, entirely predictable. Both systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Practically speaking for schools, this means the choices we make matter. The ideas we listen do, refine and share have an impact on our behavior and the behavior of others. Through our ideas and our actions, we change the world.

On a broad scale, we can view our educational system as a complex adaptive system. Change within this context can be described and informed by Diffusion of innovations theory. Within that theory, I’d guess most readers of this blog post are innovators, defined as:

venturesome, educated, [accessing] multiple info sources, [having a] greater propensity to take risk[s]

Most of the teachers we work with in schools are NOT innovators. They fall into one of the other groups in the diffusion of innovations theory, either early adopters, early majority, late majority, or laggards. (The laggards may be the digital refugees!)

It takes different inputs and influences to change the perceptions and therefore behavior of people who fall into different categories under the diffusion of innovations theory. I find these theories to be both thought-provoking and instructive as I work to support the cause of constructive, broad-based changes in the instructional practices of individual teachers as well as entire school systems.

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On this day..

6 Comments »
  • http://blog.genyes.com sylvia martinez

    Hi Wes,
    The diffusion of innovations theory suggests that what attracts early adopters is the exact opposite of what attracts people who come along later. So things like the “new-ness” and wild frontier aspect of blogging and other web 2.0 tools (which is what attracts a lot of us to take notice and experiment) is the very thing that creates barriers for the next wave of potential users. “Crossing the Chasm” is a great book about how to bridge this gap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

    What this means for education is that what (and how) we tell teachers about these technologies may actually be a disincentive for many. Students, however, I think would be a better, more responsive audience.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    Excellent insights, Sylvia, thanks! I think I have heard you mention the “Crossing the Chasm” book before in this context but I had failed to write it down, so I’ll now add that to my near-term future reading list! The implications of this for technology integration are very important and not often considered in professional development. I’ll be glad to learn more about this from a theoretical as well as practical standpoint.

  • http://heroesnotzombies.wordpress.com Bob Leckridge

    This is a really interesting post Wesley. I do enjoy your blog. Weather is such a great example of how unpredictable life is in the detail. I’m a doctor and my main interest is health though I also do a lot of teaching (medical students and doctors mainly). There’s a book by the US Institute of Medicine which you might like too – its called “Crossing the Quality Chasm” ISBN 0-309-07280-8. That’s where I first read about Complex Adaptive Systems. And it’s still the best introduction to the concept in my opinion.
    Check out my blog too for articles on this subject from a health perspective if you like. I have a wee summary there of the main characteristics of Complex Adaptive Systems.
    It’s this concept that lead me to re-think what I’m trying to do as a doctor. In summary, I think a healthy organism (which is complex adaptive systems) has three main characteristics – it adapts (responds to change and copes with change), it creates (novel behaviours, known as emerging behaviours appear and the system doesn’t just change it grows, matures and develops, and, thirdly, it is engaged. We can’t understand anyone without seeing how the fit into the complex web of their environments – physical, social and semantic.
    I’d be interested to hear your view on how such a model applies in education
    Thanks again for your great blog

  • lajones

    I enjoy reading your thoughts, but find the “humility…” title of this post inconsistent with some of the thoughts expressed. Humble people that I have met do not attempt to classify other people for any reason…not even under the guise of serving them better.

    I don’t intend to be offensive to you personally, but these types of classifications have been around for years and have done little to further educational progress.

    All people are life-long learners. If we can’t observe and/or appreciate their knowledge, we still should accept that it exists. (yeah, I know, that’s a “scientific” debate for another day :)

    I prefer to think about each person’s knowledge or wisdom base as a bounded, but limitless region. We are bounded by physicalities, but unlimited cognitively.

    This is something that all of us have in common, no matter where we may be at present on the spectrum introduced. Changing our focus to connect may introduce some tension, but tension can be good…as long as it pulls us in the right direction…towards educational progress, equity, and mutual respect.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    The humility reference may not have been as fully developed as I intended it to be when I titled the post, so your initial point is well taken. The unpredictability of weather seems to fly in the face of much technocratic and scientific certainty in which many people seem to put faith. Not being able to predict the weather reminds me that we have come great strides in our scientific understanding of the world, but we still have much to learn, and even when we learn more we are unlikely to ever be able to predict the future with certainty. I find that humbling.

    In terms of labeling people, I do agree we are all “learners” and should strive to be lifelong learners. I am now in the habit of using the word “learners” to describe everyone in school contexts, rather than more traditional terms of “teachers” and “students.” I agree with those who have observed we all move between roles of “expert learner” and “novice learner” depending on the context.

    I do find, however, big differences in the ways people look at innovations, with educational technology as well as other things. That is what Everett Rogers noticed and wrote about in 1962 in the context of agricultural innovations in technology, and I think those ideas have value in the context of educational change and specifically adoption of new technologies and pedagogies.

    In terms of bounds, I think we all have both physical as well as cognitive boundaries. It may be romantic to think of the human brain as being unlimited in its potential, and I certainly can agree that our potentials are generally far beyond what others expect of us, but as humans I see us as finite beings. That implies limits.

    I agree we want to move toward educational progress and mutual respect. Equity is a tougher goal– we want to support equal treatment of human beings certainly. Equality of treatment and opportunities is different than equality of outcomes, which would imply some sort of centralized authority redistributing resources, I think. I’m not supportive of that type of political regime, although I suppose it can be argued that all the social programs we see in the U.S. really amount to wealth distribution in a less extreme version than what a totalitarian communist state like the USSR strove to accomplish.

    Thanks for the challenges, I certainly didn’t take any of your comments to be personally offensive. Thinking about and questioning ideas is what this blogspace is all about, and I appreciate your reflective and thought-provoking contributions.

  • lajones

    Thank you for you thoughtful response. I don’t think of myself as a romantic at all, especially when I’m mowing the lawn, or cleaning my house. I feel very grounded in reality, but also very hopeful in general.

    Regarding educational progress, suppose that establishing equity in providing opportunities where considered to be the “inputs” in your initial post. As you note, “systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Practically speaking for schools, this means the choices we make matter. The ideas we listen do, refine and share have an impact on our behavior and the behavior of others. Through our ideas and our actions, we change the world.”

    I believe this statement holds true for everyone involved in education. Now, in striving for this common goal that we’ll call “educational progress”, our the initial conditions or inputs (the way we treat people) are that much more important considered within this chaotic design. (The chaotic analogy may not fit so well, but suppose it did)

    Imagine what a mess we would have if we have differing inputs influencing many different entities within this system. The possible outcome presents a risk that I would not be willing to take with my students, and I believe that many other educators would agree.

    Is that considered to be “NOT innovative” or simply reasonable?

    I really appreciate your enthusiasm and creativeness. These attributes are very important to effective leadership and technological advances. I just intend to point out that other perspectives need to be valued and incorporated. I believe that reaching our goal may take all of us, or as many as wish to take part.

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