We are confronted by the complicated/complex division everyday in education. Do I want to know if a medical students has remembered the nine steps of a process of inquiry to work with a patient or do I want to know if they built a good raport? How often do we choose the thing that is easier to measure… simply because we can verify that our grading is ‘fair’. How often do we get caught in conversations around how ‘rigourous’ an assessment is when what we really mean is ‘how easy is it to defend to a parent who’s going to complain about a child’s grade’.
📑 Making Change in Education II – Complexity vs. Lean Six Sigma (learning isn’t like money)
dave (davecormier.com)We can’t talk about improved learning without considering the impact on teacher wellness.
Dave Cormier discusses the work of David Snowden around complicated and complex distinction. A complicated problem is one which can eventually be broken down into achievable parts and solutions, whereas a complex problem is one that cannot actually be solved. The danger of lean methodology is that there is a tendency to focus on the measurable over the meaningful.
TY for sharing Aaron, I hope all is well with you and your family. So much to consider, just reading about complex/complicated and have been through Improvement Science training with Carnegie. I also think a lot about technical problems vs adaptive challenges.(1/2)
There’s no perfect process, program, framework. But there are parts that can add to our work in positive ways & parts that are meaningless or negative to our work. It’s understanding those well enough to take what is good, and then finding ways to blend the various parts. (2/2)
Teaching for Complex Systems Thinking sounds like an important read Richard. It reminds me of a series of posts by Dave Cormier on complexity verses complicated in education.
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