Seeing your school as an ecosystem
Why is it important to see your school as an eco-system?
Systems thinking is about understanding the whole of an organization, as opposed to viewing it through the lens of its constituent parts. Associated terms used by the IB are 'eco-system', 'sense-making' and 'adaptive organizations' (see endnote). A simple analogy is to see the system as the completed jigsaw.
"I consider it impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, or to know the whole without knowing the parts." (Pascal - cited in E.Morrin, 1999, Organization and complexity)
"The systems concept cannot be over-stated. A school community/system is truly one where plucking a string in one area reverberates across a variety of other locations. It is critically important then that the school guiding documents truly guide, are not merely wall decorations and are brought to life. Turning these two-dimensional documents into three-dimensional success requires creation of a compelling vision, well-articulated goals, carefully defined evidence to chart success towards goals, differentiated support and a recognition that less is often more – clear out the old stuff before topping up with the new." (Jason Crook, IB Coordinator in an IB workshop on Leading the learning).
“I have come to recognise that schools are complex, interconnected systems where a decision in one area can have unexpected effects elsewhere. For example, a change intended to improve teaching and learning can also affect teacher workload, student confidence, parent expectations and the use of school resources. Effective leadership is therefore not simply about finding a solution, but about listening to different perspectives, questioning assumptions, looking carefully at the evidence and being prepared to adapt as the situation develops. I now see sense-making as an ongoing part of leadership – helping people understand what is happening, why it is happening and what we might need to do differently. Complexity is not simply something to manage; it can also provide valuable opportunities for learning and improvement.” (Participants in Leading an IB learning organisation workshop)
Systems thinking is about seeing the whole together.
System thinking is a management discipline. It concerns itself with understanding the complexity of the whole system of the school and how the various parts are related and affect each other. "There is something in all of us that loves to put together a puzzle, that loves to see the image of the whole emerge...Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes." (Peter Senge, Fifth Discipline 1990:68).
A systems thinker sees how the various parts of a school - human resources, learning environment, policies and operational procedures - interact and how effectively the different parts work together. This form of expanded thinking allows us to recognize and imagine ways of solving problems by grasping entire processes and systems. Such thinking also reinforces the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
When leaders have a better understanding of the school system, they are better able to identify the leverage points to bring about positive outcomes.
The educational ecosystem
American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner viewed child development as a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment. His ecological system theory is made up of a number of elements:
- The Microsystem = the immediate environment (e.g., the actions and interactions of school leaders, teachers, staff, parents, governors and students- what they are doing).
- The Mesosystem = interactions of microsystems (e.g. the child’s parents and the school).
- The Exosystem = the external environment (e.g., national policies, external agencies – for accreditation and validation, restraints on spending; parental demands etc.)
- The Macrosystem = attitudes, values and beliefs of the culture
- The Chronosystem = the influence of time
"In biology, an ecosystem is one that is formed by a community of living and abiotic organisms that interact with each other. Each of these living beings fulfils processes that allow in some way that another living being can exist. Each of the elements of this ecosystem must adequately fulfil its function so that another component of it can exist.
If we take it to an energy transfer pyramid within an ecosystem, each of the pedagogical leaders must start from their role, impact on another element of the system so that it can fulfil its purpose and thus allow the entire system to function. Pedagogical leaders and directors are a vital part of this ecosystem.
In an ecosystem we have living and non-living things, and in the school, we have teachers, students parents who are the living things, and all the resources, learning environment, materials are non-living and they all interact with each other’s." (IB Workshop Leader, Alfonso Perendones)
Example of an educational ecosystem – across a city
Each year the Moscow Global Forum "City for Education" brings together scientists and businessmen, teachers and parents, school children and students - all who are interested in modern education, unique practices, and the latest educational technology.
Manifesto of the Forum: The city is an educational ecosystem: all its elements are connected with each other and actively interact. Everyone who lives in the city can develop new skills, share experiences, teach, and learn. At the forum, we will recreate the current model of the city's ecosystem with all participants in the educational process: from school principals, founders of specialized start-ups, and representatives of government agencies to students and their parents.
Their professional inquiries include:
- What is there to teach? What is there to learn?
- How should we teach? How should we learn?
- How can we promote education of the future?
- Organisation of educational ecosystems.
- For whom is education of the future being developed?
- What is a ‘global education ecosystem’?
Work through a leadership challenge/problem by using the following questions in each of the steps. On chart paper, “curate the thinking” of the group in a way that can be explained to others.
The Microsystem = the immediate environment (e.g., the actions and interactions of school leaders, teachers, staff, parents, governors and students).
- What has happened?
- Why is it a problem?
- How have you and others responded?
- How have you tried to solve it?
The Mesosystem = interactions of microsystems (e.g., the child’s parents and the school).
- How do elements within the system influence each other?
- Who’s involved?
- Whose interests need to be considered?
- What have those in the microsystems already done/said?
The Exosystem = the external environment (e.g., local context and culture, national/local policies, external agencies – for accreditation and validation, restraints on spending; parental demands etc.)
- Are there any political influences creating an impact (local, regional, national, international)?
- Which policies/guidelines/regulations do we need to try and meet?
- Which educational innovations could we consider?
The Macrosystem = attitudes, values and beliefs of the culture
- What is contributing to these patterns and trends?
- What makes them see the problem as they do?
- What about the way they think allows this situation to continue?
- How do they need to change their thinking to get a solution?
- What aspects of the school need to be changed if these patterns are to change?
The Chronosystem = the influence of time
- Have we been here or someplace similar before?
- Has this problem/ challenge occurred in the past?
- If so, how has this changed over time or has it?
NEW Diploma Programme course on systems thinking
IB Systems Transformation: Leadership for Change is a pioneering double standard level pilot course in the IBDP, co-developed by UWCSEA and the IB. Designed for students seeking deeper challenge and real-world engagement, it emphasizes project-based, authentic learning. In response to rapid global change—technological, social, political, and environmental—the course develops leadership, systems thinking, and transformative action. This course positions students to lead change in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.
The UWCSEA are one of several schools piloting the course. Read about their introduction to the course HERE.
How do I make sense of my context? Sense-making
School leaders need to make sense of complexity and ambiguity
"Sensemaking is a cognitive process associated with gaining a deeper understanding of diverse and complex contexts achieved though continuous and systematic reflection and analysis with the purpose of facilitating effective action.
Maitliss and Christianson argue that sense making is “a central activity in organizations, and one that lies at the very core of organizing”. Klein et al. define sensemaking as “a continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively”. Hill and Levenhagen perceives it to be how people “develop a ‘vision’ or mental model of how the environment works” Ancona argues sense making enables leaders “to have a better grasp of what is going on in their environments” Dervin describes it “as a methodology disciplining the cacophony of diversity and complexity without homogenizing it”. Ganon-Shilon and Schechter conceive it as an “active process of constructing meaning from present stimuli, mediated by prior knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and values that is embedded in the social construct within which people work”. Maitliss and Christianson suggest it is the process that enables people to unravel the “issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations”.
An organizational focus on learning must however also embrace a commitment to sensemaking and understanding the implications of institutional and environmental complexity. When joining new schools leaders must treat them as uniquely complex, dynamic and diverse environments that must be understood and accommodated.
Schools are increasingly being conceived as complex networked systems consisting of interconnected and interdependent individuals and groups of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and governors with conflicting expectations and aspirations that work together to achieve goals. Unsurprisingly, given this interdependence and these multiple perspectives and competing demands the ability of leaders to exert influence on school systems can be a challenging endeavour.
Fertig and James conceive schools to be complex evolving loosely linked systems. Such systems are conceived by Stacey as “webs of non-linear feedback loops that are capable of operating in states of both stable and unstable equilibrium- in bounded instability at the edge of chaos”. Such conceptualisations draw upon complexity theory in highlighting the interdependent and dynamic nature of school organisations." (Mark Waterson, International school leadership, complexity and sensemaking, IB 2020)
Each school needs to make sense of what it means to be an IB World School within their own specific context. There is no one model of being an IB World School–instead it is about a symbiotic relationship between the IB and its schools focused on organisational growth. The Programme standards and practices offers both an aspirational (the standards and practices) and baseline (the requirements and specifications) framework of what it means to be an IB World School.
The use of sense-making supports schools adopting a professional inquiry stance in all that they do. This will come to the fore in the revised Guide to School Evaluation which includes a piece on carrying out your own professional inquiry within your school context.
The theory of sensemaking is applicable to teachers and leaders in IB schools: they are expected to design their own content from our frameworks. They must make sense of the framework through IB documentation. They need to immerse themselves into the problem, think, ask, plan, and reflect. Marcel Proust said: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Reference:
Deborah Ancona, SENSEMAKING Framing and Acting in the Unknown
Scenario: Leading in a complex school system
A school introduces a new approach to teaching and learning designed to strengthen student inquiry and better reflect its IB philosophy. Initially, the change appears straightforward, but its effects quickly ripple across the school: some teachers welcome the greater professional autonomy, while others feel their workload has increased; students respond differently depending on their previous educational experiences; some parents welcome the focus on skills and inquiry, while others worry that academic standards are being diluted. Senior and newer staff hold different perspectives, and local cultural expectations and compliance requirements add further pressures. As leaders respond to these reactions, each decision creates new responses elsewhere in the system. Rather than simply trying to “fix” emerging problems, leaders need to pause, listen to different perspectives, examine evidence and identify patterns and feedback loops. The challenge is to operate at the edge of chaos—providing sufficient direction and stability while remaining flexible enough to adapt—and to turn the resulting complexity into a shared understanding and coherent vision centred on student learning and wellbeing.
PS: How do understand sense making on a personal level?
'Sensemaking' can sometimes be difficult to understand. You may like to work with this TedTalk as a way into the subejct - it gives a personal stance.
How do you make sense of the world? In his TedTalk Alan Arnett explores how individuals can make sense of the situation they in. This is a useful video for leaders to bear in mind since sensemaking is connected to how to make change happen. He talks of sensemaking as a way of making connections between yourself, the situation you are in and the other people you are with. He goes on to provide three questions that can make a big difference to how we make progress and engage more people:
- What are we solving? Where about are we? What is the question we are trying to answer?
- Where are we heading? How will we know when we get there? Is it close or far away?
- How might we get there?
What is sensemaking in an organisation?
In Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage Publications, 1995), Karl E. Weick explores seven properties of organizational sensemaking: identity, retrospect, enactment, social contact, ongoing events, cues, and plausibility. I’ve italicized the key terms that Weick uses to represent his heuristics:
- Sensemaking is matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world around us.
- Sensemaking is retrospective: we shape experience into meaningful patterns according to our memory of experience.
- How and what becomes sensible depends on our socialization: where we grew up in the world, how we were taught to be in the world, where we are located now in the world, the people with whom we are currently interacting.
- Sensemaking is a continuous flow; it is ongoing, because the world, our interactions with the world, and our understandings of the world are constantly changing. You might also think of sensemaking as perpetually emergent meaning and awareness.
- Sensemaking builds on extracted cues that we apprehend from sense and perception. Cognition is the meaningful internal embellishment of these cues. We articulate these embellishments through speaking and writing – the “what I say” part of Weick’s recipe. In doing so, we reify and reinforce cues and their meaning, and add to our repertoire of retrospective experience.
- Sensemaking is less a matter of accuracy and completeness than plausibility and sufficiency. We simply have neither the perceptual nor cognitive resources to know everything exhaustively, so we have to move forward as best as we can. Plausibility and sufficiency enable action-in-context.
Each of these seven aspects interact and intertwine as individuals interpret events. Their interpretations become evident through narratives – written and spoken – which convey the sense they have made of events.
A note on Activity Theory
Activity theory has informed the structure of the revised IB Standards and Practices. But what is it? It is about seeing the whole and how the parts of the system connect together.
The following humorous video provides an example of activity theory in action.
In summary:
- Schools are systems consisting of artifacts, rules and labour that influence outcomes.
- Schools systems learn through relationships: people, activities, rules and tools interact together to expand learning and creative opportunities for it.
- School systems assume that collaboration is the ideal action in or between systems.
“Activity systems are systems where people engage in solving problems or making or designing something. They are “dynamic, open, semiotic system(s) of meaningful actions and meaning-making processes” (Lemke, 1990, p. 191). An activity system can be as small as an individual working with a computer, or as large as an organization having hundreds of employees.” (Rantavuori et. al. 2016, 4)
How does this relate to practice?
Activity theory strongly suggests that the parts that make up a school community work together, and that evaluating the relationships between parts is more important than evaluating any individual part. As part of IB evaluation schools are asked to select an area of the programme they have been developing (i.e. what have you been working on?) and then to choose at least four practices from at least two of the four categories in the PSP framework (Purpose | Environment | Culture | Learning):
- A practice that sets conditions ~ that is, what needs to be in place for this to be successful
- What practices identify the people who are responsible for the work? (e.g. teachers, students, leadership)
- What practices show how the work will be done. That is, what actions will be taken?
- What practices indicates why the school is undertaking the work. That is, what is the reason for this focus?
Reference: Introduction to Activity Theory, Warwick Institute of Employment Research.
A school's ecosystem
IB World Schools aim to develop an ecosystem that encompasses all elements of the IB programme standards and practices framework - purpose, culture, environment, learning. There is always tension (positive and challenging) between the IB framework and a school's context and culture. School's, as all ecosystems, are living organisms, that continue to grow and develop.
Consider your school’s ecosystem in light of the IB programme standards and practices. Describe what your own school ecosystem looks like, sounds like and feels like in terms of what you believe is the purpose/culture/environment/learning. Turn your description into an "elevator pitch" for a new staff member of no more than 60 seconds in length. Be sure your "elevator pitch" includes:
- purpose/mission—what are we trying to achieve
- values—what’s most important
- culture—as defined by the five mandated IB policies
- local/regional/national context and how learning fits into the mix.
Here is an example from a school in South Africa:
Redhill School’s main purpose is to build leaders for their time. We strive to build a community in which students and educators are fully able to actualise their unique potential. We strive to achieve personal and collective excellence. Our logo is that of a mason’s tool, called a trowel, accompanied with a slogan ‘free to build’. This captures our culture of agency, growth and excellence. Symbolically teachers and students are free to build their own structures of learning, using a trowel, which I see as the resources, together with mortar which I see as character, attitude and contribution, to actualise their unique potential. The school thrives on an inclusive energetic vibe, which is a thread which runs through our whole learning community. To thrive in the south African context poses various challenges for our teachers and learners and we embrace these challenges with courage and creativity. (Lulu Burger, Head of Educational Technology)
What is our context?
As a school journey's towards IB authorisation they are, with the revised Programme Standards and Practices (PSPs) to make sense of what it will mean to become an IB school within their context and to the be part of the IB ecosystem.
In the following graphic Kirsten Durward, a workshop leader, has created a visual of this.
An IB school is part of the IB ecosystem. In the following graphic Martin McCurrach visualises what this means. Martin drew this graphic to bring to life the new Head of School (Category 1) workshop which will be mandatory for all Heads of School with effect September 2020. This workshop introduces school leaders to the IB ecosystem as described by the four elements of the revised programme standards and practices{PSPs} (purpose | environment | culture | learning) and provides them with the IB leadership intelligences as a lens through which to plan the journey towards IB authorization and beyond. Schools need to make sense of how the PSPs relate to their own culture and context and how they can develop as a school and learning organisation by becoming an IB world school.
IB World Schools are considered an ecosystem and each school within that ecosystem a micro-climate made up of its own context and culture.
Side-note: Research supports the importance of systems thinking
Pearson researched into the skills required in 2030 and found a strong emphasis on interpersonal skills,higher-order cognitive skills and systems skills. The top 10 skills were:
- fluency of ideas
- system thinking — the ability to recognize, understand and act on interconnections and feedback loops in socio-technical systems
- judgment and decision making
- systems analysis and systems evaluation
- active learning
- complex problem-solving
Their website can be found HERE.
How can we as an organisation learn?
Peter Senge defined learning organizations as “…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.”
Here are a number of tools that you can use in order to develop learning in your school | district. I am indebted to The Academy of Systems Change for these suggestions.
- U Process | Theory U: a method of how to approach difficult problems. It is often used as a change management process.
- Biomimicry: how to use natural forms, materials, and processes as models to drive human innovation. Click HERE for the Biomimicry Institute.
- Double loop learning is a learning process that goes beyond surface level goals, techniques, and responses to target the assumptions and values underlying the system in order to enable solutions to problems that are complex and ill-structured. ”Double-loop learning occurs when error is detected and corrected in ways that involve the modification of an organization’s underlying norms, policies and objectives.” (Argyris and Schön). For a TED talkexample of double loop learning click HERE.
- The iceberg model helps you contextualize an issue as part of a whole system. “By asking you to connect an event–a single incident or occurrence–to patterns of behavior, systems structures, and mental models, the iceberg allows you to see the structures underlying the event.” (Academy of Systems Change). Clixck HERE to download the model.
World Cafe is a tool that facilitates dialogue amongst large groups. Listen Together for Patterns and Insights
- Graphic Facilitation is a way of communicating complex ideas, allowing all to see and internalize the big picture of a discussion or presentation.