The Fractal Nature of Schools

I've yet to see a school where the learning curves of the youngsters are off the chart upward while the learning curves of the adults are off the chart downward, or a school where the learning curves of the adults were steep upward and those of the students were not. Teachers and students go hand in hand as learners-or they don't go at all

-Roland Barth, Learning by Heart

Barth’s observation is a keen one but school improvement efforts often miss this essential link between adult learning and student learning. We are not going to improve our schools for our students, if we do not support the learning of the adults. Educators need to continuously adapt and tinker with their pedagogical and curricular strategies in order to improve their effectiveness with students . At Teachers21, we describe this vital connection between adult learning and student learning as the fractal nature of schools.[1] A fractal is a term developed by mathematicians that refers to a self-similar pattern; that is, individual or small segments of the entire design resemble the whole. Nature abounds with fractals. Broccoli’s shape is a fractal. If one breaks off a small floret from a broccoli plant it looks like a miniature version of the entire edible portion of the plant.

We see the fractal nature of schools emerge by observing how each segment of a school system -the classroom, the school, and the district – address these four common core challenges:

1. How does the culture or climate shape learning?
2. How consistently do our strategic goals influence our day-to-day work?
3. How do we respond to the gap between what we hoped to achieve and what we really achieved?
4. How consistently do we engage in ongoing development (practice) in order to improve our results?

 The classroom teacher, the building principal, and the district superintendent, while having unique responsibilities, share a common focus on these four challenges in order to accomplish their work and move learning forward. For example, how a teacher shapes a classroom culture either encourages or discourages students to leave their comfort zone, practice and learn new skills and try out important ideas. If that culture is harsh and shaped more by fear than encouragement, the quality of student engagement in learning will diminish.   Similarly (in a fractal manner), the adult educators in effective schools must constantly experiment with new approaches in order to improve results. How enthusiastically and effectively educators will embrace leaving their comfort zones in order to try new approaches is linked to the culture and climate established by the principal. If the culture is threatening and intimidating, educators will shy away from robust attempts to discover new strategies and approaches to teaching within their classrooms. Principals in turn are impacted by the culture established by the superintendent and district administrators. Central office leaders who effectively develop and manage principals also understand that they must encourage and support a principal’s learning and provide encouragement for thoughtful experimentation with leadership strategies, if the district schools are going to improve.

If district leaders wanted to improve student engagement in their teachers’ classrooms, they could leverage the power of the fractal nature of schools by realizing that for student engagement to improve, educator engagement in professional learning must also improve. Too many leaders miss this linkage. Building leaders, for example may want teachers to differentiate their instruction but too often provide a one size fits all form of professional development. The fractal nature of schools means that meetings facilitated by administrators could be a powerful means to model how we want teachers to conduct their lessons. Leaders can model effective instruction at meetings by posing an essential question linked to a problem that needs to be solved and engaging participants in research and dialogue in order to deepen their understanding of an issue and propose creative solutions. In many ways, this is precisely what we want our classroom teachers to do with their students. If meetings involving educators are unengaging and aimed at passing on information, we miss an opportunity to model the authentic problem solving we want our teachers to foster with their students.

 The fractal nature of schools also implies that negative effects can also be distributed throughout the system. In a district where the superintendent blames the principal for low-test scores, that pattern of blame will often replicate itself in the way a principal addresses weak scores within the classrooms of the teachers that principal supervises. Moreover, the pattern of a principal blaming the teachers may too often lead to teachers blaming students or colleagues or parents for their students’ lack of progress. Because of the fractal nature of schools, the pattern of blaming others for the gaps will be reinforced within the system and momentum and energy will be lost, thus slowing down improvement efforts.  

 While no system will be perfectly aligned all the time, the way each segment influences the whole system is a dynamic that needs to be monitored regularly. Missing the connection between adult learning and student learning diminishes the number of levers that leaders can utilize to influence improvement.  

[1] Ash, P, D’Auria, J, Schools Systems That Learn, Corwin Press, 2012