A system of public education inevitably rests on public consensus regarding the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will be needed by future citizens. Today, I believe our traditional consensus regarding the goals and processes of public education leaves us dangerously vulnerable in a world of increasing interdependence. We have all been taught to break apart complex problems and fix the pieces. Our traditional education process — indeed, our theory of knowledge in the West — is based on reductionism, fragmenting complex phenomena into component parts and building up knowledge of the parts. Moreover, our traditional system is based on competition and individual learning.

This process starts in elementary school and continues through the university, getting worse and worse the further one “progresses” in higher education. Literally, to be an expert in our society is to know a lot about a little. Such an educational process can never lay a solid foundation for understanding interdependency and for fostering genuine dialogue that integrates diverse points of view.

Concern today with public education focuses on achievement relative to traditional standards. But the real problem lies with the relevance of the traditional standards themselves. Preparing citizens for the future with the skills of the past has always been the bane of public education. Today, it could be the tragedy of our times.

We are witnessing a massive breakdown of traditional institutions worldwide.

A Leading Edge Of Change

Given the profound changes unfolding around us, it is not surprising that we are witnessing a massive breakdown of traditional institutions worldwide. In a world of increasingly rapid change and growing interdependence, large, centrally controlled organizations have become virtually ungovernable. The Soviet Union, General Motors, and IBM, one-time paragons of power and control, all suffered massive breakdowns in the 1980s.The fundamental problem became the management system itself — the inability to effectively coordinate and adapt in an increasingly dynamic world, to push decision-making to the “front lines,” and to break up power blocks committed to self-interest over common interest.

The breakdown in our traditional system of management is driving extraordinary change in large business enterprises. In fact, no institution has been forced to confront the changes of an interdependent world more rapidly than business. Because businesses compete against one another around the world, if one company or one part of the world makes significant headway in developing new skills and capabilities for a dynamic, interdependent world, it will quickly gain advantage. Others will have to play catch-up or go out of business.

The basic problem is that it takes years to develop the skills and knowledge to understand complex human systems, to learn how to think and learn together across cultural boundaries, to reverse years of conditioning in authoritarian organizations where everyone looks “upward” for direction instead of “sideways” to see the larger systems of which one is a part. Equally challenging, it takes patience, perseverance, and extraordinary commitment to develop these skills and understandings in the context of corporate environments still largely dominated by authoritarian, control-oriented cultures.

A Lagging Edge Of Change

The more one understands the skills, knowledge, and beliefs needed to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world, the more one sees that it is folly to focus exclusively on our “system of management” and ignore our “system of education.” Isn’t it silly to begin developing systems thinking capabilities in 35-year-olds who have spent the preceding 30 years becoming master reductionists? Isn’t it grossly inefficient to begin developing reflectiveness, the ability to recognize and question one’s own mental models, with adults who, in order to be successful in school and work, had to become masters at solving problems rather than thinking about the thinking that generated the problems? Isn’t it naive to think that we can suddenly master collaborative learning as adults, when so much of our lives has been devoted to win-lose competition and proving that we are better than each other? Shouldn’t personal mastery, the discipline of fostering personal vision and working with creative tension, be a cornerstone of schooling? Isn’t it hypocritical to espouse personal vision and self-assessment when so much of traditional schooling is devoted to learning what someone else says we should learn and then convincing them we’ve learned it?

Increasingly, business people are beginning to recognize the tragic neglect of fundamental innovation in public education. And they are moving from financial contributions to action. Electronic Data Systems allows employees to take time off to volunteer in public schools. Intel employees have worked to start new public schools in Arizona and in statewide educational reform movements in Oregon and New Mexico. Ford employees are teaching systems thinking and mental models in community colleges in Detroit. Motorola has started its own summer camp, teaching employees’ children basic science and technology.

But, little is likely to take hold and grow from such isolated experiments until there is a widespread revolution in professional and public thinking about the nature and goals of public education. How will we need to expand the traditional skillset of the industrial era for the knowledge era? How must our traditional ideas about school give way as more and more of the content of traditional education becomes available over the Internet? What will educational institutions in the knowledge era look like?

There are no easy answers to such questions. My guess is that two cornerstones of the new system of education will be recognizing the importance of the learning process in addition to the content of what is learned, and making high-level thinking and learning skills, like systems thinking and collaborative learning, as central as the traditional skills of reductionist thinking and individual problem-solving. These could be two elements of a thought revolution in education.

Who Will Lead The Transformation?

Several years ago, my wife and I attended an awards assembly at our teenage son’s school. Our five-year-old son, Ian, was with us. When the winner of the first award was announced, Ian turned to Diane and asked, “Mommy, is only one child getting an award? What about the others?”

What did a young child see that sophisticated educators overlook?

Why can he see the system as a whole — all the students — and the educators see only the pieces, the “exceptional” kid? Maybe it’s simply that the professional educators have spent their whole lives in school. Maybe, despite their knowledge about learning theory and research, they have a hard time seeing beyond “the way it’s always been done.” Maybe we all need to be leaders for change.

In 1995, I participated in a series of satellite broadcasts on learning organizations sponsored by the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development and the PBS Satellite Network. One of these shows involved three students from the Orange Grove Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, which had been integrating systems thinking and learning-directed learning throughout its curriculum and management practices for over five years. The clarity, articulateness, and composure of these young people impressed the other participants, mostly corporate managers doing the same kind of work within their businesses. As the program went on, many of the most penetrating insights were offered by the young people. When the moderator asked for any closing remarks, Kristi Jipson, an eighth-grade student at Orange Grove, said, “. . . We are really excited about what we are learning now. Before, you only needed to learn the ‘book and ruler’ stuff. But now, as this program shows, businesses are changing and, by the time we get there, this is what will be going on, and we’ll need to know it.”

Interestingly, one of the more forceful voices for innovation in the Catalina Foothills District, where Orange Grove is located, has been a group of senior “citizen champions,” many in their 70s and older. They formed The Ideals Foundation, with a vision of developing entire curricula organized around “demonstrating how the parts relate to the whole.”

These examples demonstrate that the profound rethinking of public education required today cannot be led by any one constituency or professional group. The future is the responsibility of us all. And “all” includes those who have seen the most of the past and those who will see the most of the future. All must participate and all must lead.

Excerpted from the Preface to Envisioning Process as Content, edited by Arthur L. Costa and Rosemarie M. Liebmann. Copyright © 1997 by Corwin Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Corwin Press, Inc.

Peter M. Senge, best-selling author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, is an international leader in the area of creating learning organizations. He is a senior lecturer in the Organizational Learning and Change Group at MIT and chairman of The Society for Organizational Learning (SOL). Peter has lectured through- out the world and written extensively on systems thinking, institutional learning, and leadership.

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I have also observed that the amount of trust that exists within a group of people greatly affects the results they can achieve together. A guest on a recent talk-radio show on financial investments demonstrated the impact of trust within the U. S. economy. A highly respected portfolio manager with 40 years of success in mutual fund investing, he remarked that, despite Alan Greenspan’s testimony before Congress that the economy is moving in a positive direction, the stock market is still slumping. Historically after recessions, markets recover first, followed by the rest of the economy; yet in our current situation, the economy is showing signs of recovery but the markets are still experiencing downward trends. Why? The guest attributed the slow market improvement to human factors. He asserted that, in response to gross misrepresentation of earnings and other mismanagement by top executives from companies such as Enron and Worldcom, many people now distrust large corporations and hesitate to invest in them. In other words, despite signs that our economy is getting back on track, trust — or lack of trust, in this case — appears to be significantly limiting the recovery of the markets and the economy as a whole.

As a result of my observations and conversations with others about this topic, I have been investigating how to build trust in organizations, particularly schools. I’ve looked at numerous studies that have attempted to define trust and explain how it works. While thought provoking, their findings leave me unsatisfied. One of the reasons I am not adequately convinced by many researchers arguments is that their approach to understanding trust tends to be deconstructivist.

They break apart the concept into many different components in order to analyze it, and the more they do, the less I understand and connect with it.

I have come to believe that we can better understand trust by looking at it as a system composed of many independent yet interrelated and interconnected factors, including but not limited to integrity, honesty, character, reliability, and competence. Because the power of trust lies in the synergy of these variables, building it requires us to understand their interplay in our relationships and in our organizations.

In a recent article, Peter Senge touched more deeply on this process when he discussed the importance of “holism,” a way of understanding the world whereby “the whole is enfolded into each element or part” (see “Creating the World Anew,” The Systems Thinker, V13N3). It is a way of seeing not only the interconnections among the parts and the whole, but also how they mutually evolve together. I believe trust is a concept to which holism applies: We cannot adequately understand and nurture its components without looking at the essence of the whole concept. In our attempts to break it into what appears to be its constituent parts, the “spirit” of trust no longer exists.

To illustrate, let’s try to isolate one of trust’s components, honesty. Although honesty is a positive trait for which we should strive, an honest person is not necessarily reliable or dependable, two other components of trust. Would we trust an honest but unreliable person? We might have confidence that that person will tell the truth, but we probably wouldn’t trust him or her to follow through with commitments. As Stephen Covey puts it, would we really trust an honest but incompetent surgeon to perform a major operation on us? This example hints at the complex nature of this seemingly simple characteristic.

Defining Trust

Let’s begin by defining trust. Webster’s Dictionary says trust is “firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing” and “assured resting of the mind on the integrity, veracity, justice, friendship, or other sound principle of another person.” Stephen Covey defines it as “the balance between character and competence.” These definitions focus on a particular state of mind that one needs to be able to trust someone.

But if instead we think of trust as an underlying condition necessary to support all effective human interactions, then it becomes a foundational systemic structure. In this supporting role, trust is not visible in the traditional sense; like the wind, only its effects can be seen. For example, trust is absent if we think a relationship might jeopardize our personal or professional interests and well-being. Similarly, we can comfortably surmise that high levels of trust exist in organizations in which members feel a sense of community and connectedness.

To explore the idea of trust as an actual but intangible structure, let’s consider the iceberg metaphor. When you look at an iceberg, only the tip is visible; the greater mass lies out of sight below the surface. By looking “beneath the surface” of daily events in your organization, you can determine the structures that influence people’s behavior. If we apply this metaphor to understanding trust, the tip is our daily interactions in which we experience varying levels of trust or mistrust (see “The Iceberg Model of Trust” on p. 2). These interactions, a series of seemingly unrelated events, are the concrete results of an organization’s climate of trust, which exists in the patterns and structures “below the waterline.” One unpleasant encounter may not lead us to feel an overall sense of mistrust. But if the behavior continues over time, it’s likely to undermine relationships and erode trust throughout the organization. (Note that certain events, such as layoffs, are significant enough to be “trust busters” the first time they occur.)

Using the Trust Lens

So how do we notice patterns of behavior that support or undermine trust? By looking through a “trust lens.” In almost every interaction between people, a “trust transaction” takes place that transcends the actual event; that is, based on what occurs, levels of trust rise or fall. To determine the degree of trust being transacted during an interaction, you can take the following elements into consideration:

1. The history of interactions between individuals and/or groups (What has happened between them in the past?)
2. The literal meaning conveyed through the interaction (What words are being expressed?)
3. The inferential meaning conveyed through the interaction (What voice tones, facial expressions, and body language are being used?)
4. The result of the interaction (Did one party gain an advantage over or “hurt” the other in some manner?)

If we think of trust as an underlying condition necessary to support all effective human interactions, then it becomes a foundational systemic structure.

Knowing the history between two parties offers us the greatest insight in determining the level of trust transacted in a given encounter. Consider, for instance, how different your conclusions would be if you knew that two individuals you were observing had been best friends their entire lives or that two groups had previously experienced a significant conflict with each other.

Because we don’t always know the history, we can try to “read” the trust transaction at both the literal and inferential levels. At the literal level, we analyze the words and phrases being transmitted between the parties involved. In general, using deceptive, demeaning, and intimidating language diminishes trust, while communicating openly and honestly with what Covey calls “courage and consideration” builds it.

Observing literal transactions has its limits, though. According to numerous studies, the words we use make up only about 10 percent of what we communicate. It is at the inferential level — the voice tone, facial expression, and body language — where we do 90 percent of our communicating. Psychologist Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon says that “language is seen as the primary vehicle” to transmit information and “non-verbal communication is primarily seen to transmit emotional information.” Thus, actively observing all aspects of an interaction and asking, “Do these behaviors convey trust or lack of trust?” is crucial in determining the degree of trust being transacted.

We have to be cautious, though, whenever we try to determine levels of trust, because we each bring to any situation our own set of assumptions about how the world works. Therefore, when we use a “trust lens,” we need to consider how our mental models are influencing our perceptions. A continual comparison between actual data and our assumptions will help us to discern whether we are making accurate judgments or whether we are overgeneralizing based on limited information.

How Trust Becomes a Structure

When a pattern of transactions occurs over a period of time, it creates a structure that becomes the “cultural norm”—a climate of trust or mistrust. In a reinforcing process, our behaviors strengthen the cultural norm, which strengthens the behaviors, and so on. For example, suppose a number of people in an organization behave dishonestly — perhaps by misrepresenting financial data — to help the organization “get ahead.” If the organization’s leaders fail to censure the dishonest conduct, the organization will assume that “this is how we do business.” In this way, isolated behaviors grow into a pattern of dishonesty. Likewise, when trustworthy behaviors, such as honest communication, competence, and integrity, are modeled and reinforced, they eventually become the cultural norm.

Another example is using standardized testing as the sole mechanism for assessing the quality of a school system, which may end up creating a culture steeped in cynicism and deceit. In order to maintain their school’s stature in the community and — in some cases, even it’s funding — some teachers might end up “teaching to the test,” basing their lesson plans on the test questions rather than on sound curriculum. And, in extreme cases, this emphasis on “making the grade” might even influence students to cheat, especially if passing the test is the only way to advance to the next grade or graduate.

The scenario seems like a “chicken and egg” syndrome: Did the structure cause the behaviors, or did the behaviors create the structure? I believe the answer is “yes” to both questions. We may blame lack of trust on the “system,” but we need to remember that, with or without intention, we create and reinforce that system through our behaviors.

LOW TRUST IN AN ORGANIZATION

If the lever is a district’s strategies for reaching its objective — helping every child reach his or her potential — then the position of the fulcrum reflects the level of trust within the organization. In a low-trust environment, the fulcrum is far away from the goal. People end up expending more effort to achieve the objective than they might otherwise in a high-trust environment.

In this sense, we might view trust as an example of what system dynamicists call “dynamic complexity,” because the effects of trustworthy or untrustworthy behaviors in an organization are not always closely related in time or space to when they actually happen. In fact, the impact is often felt much later. So to nurture trust, we need to practice the art of simultaneously “seeing the forest and the trees” — seeing the organizational culture and the individual behaviors within it.

Leveraging Trust

Activities such as mandated standardized testing, which attempt to solve a complex problem in one fell swoop, reflect the prevailing system of management in most organizations today. In a keynote address at the Systems Thinking and Dynamic Modeling Conference in June 2002, Peter Senge described the attributes of this type of organization:

• Culture of compliance
• Management by measurement
• Right and wrong answers
• Managing outcomes versus designing systems
• Uniformity
• Predictability and controllability
• Excessive competitiveness
• Loss of the whole (person, connections to others and to the world)

This management structure creates an environment that undermines trust and produces a, “Trust Death Spiral,” in which mistrust and low performance continually reinforce each other. In this setting, people may feel that they must do whatever necessary to get ahead or even survive in the organization. From a systems thinking perspective, to move away from this kind of management system and toward one that is fundamentally transformational and empowering in nature, we need to understand how an organization’s interrelationships, processes, patterns, and underlying structures influence individual and group behaviors — and how we can leverage trust to change those dynamics.

What does it mean to leverage trust? Archimedes, one of the world’s great mathematicians, claimed that he could transport the globe with a lever, saying, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.” The principle of how a lever and fulcrum work together can help us understand how trust influences an organization’s ability to reach its goals.

A lever is a stiff beam that rotates about a point of support called a “fulcrum”; one end of the beam goes under an object to be moved. The purpose of this simple machine is to lift a heavy load using the minimum possible force. How much force you need depends on the length of the lever and where you place the fulcrum. Since it’s often not possible to change the length of the lever, to get the highest leverage, you need to focus on the position of the fulcrum. To minimize effort, place the fulcrum so that it’s close to the object and push on the other end. This is how a jack raises a car so we can change a tire. If the fulcrum is farther away from the object, you’ll need to apply greater force to the lever to lift it.

Low Trust. Let’s apply the metaphor of a lever and fulcrum to the organizational setting. If the lever is a district’s strategies for reaching its objective — helping every child reach his or her potential — then the position of the fulcrum reflects the level of trust within the organization. In a low-trust environment, the fulcrum is far away from the goal. People end up expending more effort to achieve the objective than they might otherwise in a high-trust environment. For instance, if administrators of a school district and its professional teacher organization mistrust each other, the district may spend more time settling disputes than fulfilling its true mission to educate children (see “Low Trust in an Organization” on p. 4).

High Trust. When the trust fulcrum is in a more advantageous position, most institutional actions can be directed toward fulfilling the organization’s mission. In the example above, if the school district works closely with its professional teacher organization to nurture a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship, it will likely not have to direct so much effort to managing that dynamic and can instead focus on educating children (see “High Trust in an Organization”).

Organizations that build systems and structures that nurture high trust and mutually beneficial relationships can trigger a “Trust Growth Spiral.” In this positive reinforcing process, trust and consequently high levels of performance mutually reinforce one another. Increased trust results in intangibles, such as confidence, pride, and ownership, which lay the psychological foundation for continued success, thereby inspiring even greater levels of trust.

Building Trust

In most organizations, the process of building trust consists of occasional events designed to promote teamwork. Many of us have participated in activities such as “supportive chair trust circles,” in which people simultaneously sit on the lap of the person behind them and support the person in front of them; eventually, the entire group is seated in a circle without the use of any props. In “trust falls,” one partner closes her eyes and falls backward, trusting that her partner will catch her before she hits the floor. While fun (unless your partner doesn’t catch you!), these exercises only tap the surface of what it takes to build trust in an organization.

Creating lasting trust is not a one-shot deal; it is an ongoing process that requires deep, long-term commitment from everyone involved. So how do we begin? Following are some examples of how my organization, the West Des Moines Community School District in Iowa, has sought to understand the systemic nature of trust and then work to create structures and engage in behaviors that enable it.
In 2000, the administrative staff development planning team, part of the Administrative Leadership Team (ALT), began to design a three-year leadership development program. We found that we value what the IABC Research Foundation has identified as five qualities that high-trust cultures generally acknowledge and reward:

• Competence (workers’ effectiveness)
• Openness and honesty (amount, accuracy, and sincerity of information shared)
• Concern for employees (exhibition of empathy, tolerance, and safety)
• Reliability (consistent and dependable actions)
• Identification (sharing of common goals, values, and beliefs)

To evaluate the levels of trust in our organization, the ALT disseminated a 16-question trust survey to all its members. The results revealed that, while the perceived level of trust was generally high, some items scored relatively low on the overall trust barometer. Based on those results, we initiated a four-session in-service training during the 2000-2001 school year. The sessions involved all building and district-level administrators and focused on identifying trustworthy and untrustworthy behaviors and their impact at the interpersonal and organizational levels. Feedback following each session was overwhelmingly positive. Results from a follow-up survey revealed an improvement in perceived levels of trust among ALT members.

HIGH TRUST IN AN ORGANIZATION

When the trust fulcrum is in an advantageous position, most institutional actions can be directed toward fulfilling the organization’s mission rather than dealing with interpersonal issues.

Here are some of the breakthroughs we have achieved through our efforts:

Building a Shared Vision. For several years, the district, with the vision and support of its superintendent, has embarked on building a learning community. One step in this process has been to develop a shared vision statement for the district through a series of collaborative processes with parents, students, staff, board of education members, and interested citizens. Through continued dialogue, the district generated a simple, yet powerful statement: “The West Des Moines Community School District will be a caring community of learners that knows and lifts every child. We will inspire joy in learning. Our schools will excel at preparing each student for his or her life journey.”

This shared vision is now guiding the district’s discussions, decisions, and future plans. It has:

• Provided the foundation for a major reorganization of the high school
• Caused the administration to seek to identify the students who do not feel “known or lifted” and to improve our services to them
• Influenced some conversations to focus on why and how we want students to experience joy in learning
• Brought forth community members who challenge the district to do better

In a nutshell, through a foundation of trust built through the development of our vision statement, avenues of communication are opening up.

Changing Our Mental Models.

In the early 1990s, the district’s school board created a policy that supports and encourages “participatory management.” This policy, which allows greater partnership and ownership in decision-making among all district stakeholders, has strongly influenced our mental models about how decisions should be made. At the event level, this policy demonstrates a belief in actively including those directly impacted by decisions in the process. Below the surface, the message is one of trust in the integrity, character, and competence of those once uninvolved, who now have a greater role in influencing policy.

Developing Personal Mastery.

The year-long trust-building workshop for members of the district’s administrative leadership team has brought trust and trustworthiness to the forefront of our consciousness and conversations. Our understanding of the gap between the current reality of our district’s trust climate and our future vision of a high-trust culture has inspired us to grow and learn as individuals and as a group.

Engaging in Team Learning.

Central office administration regularly conducts “maintenance” meetings with the leaders of our district’s professional and support organizations. These meetings provide opportunities for team learning through honest conversations. The conversations go beyond polite talk to deeper listening, engagement, and feedback. Using reflective skills has helped team members more effectively manage disagreement and resolve conflict.

Building Trust Informally.

Through the development of policies, practices, and cultural norms, an organization can make conscious efforts to build and maintain trust

In addition to formal organizational efforts to build trust, more informal interactions have also contributed to a high-trust climate. For example, recently, a confrontation between a teacher and student required an administrative response. Rather than the principal dictating how the teacher should handle the situation, the principal conducted a dialogue with the teacher based on the spirit of “knowing and lifting every child.” She helped the teacher recognize why the interaction did not align with the shared vision; turned the meeting into a learning opportunity; and indicated that she trusted the teacher to do the right thing. The teacher ultimately resolved the conflict with the student in a way that maintained a positive teacher-student relationship.

Benefits of a High-Trust Culture

When the level of trust in an organization is high, its influence is felt and observed at every level and in every aspect of its operations. High trust allows organization members to focus on their primary mission rather than taking precious time and energy to deal with the numerous crises that prevail in a low-trust environment. They can then focus their resources and energy to reach their goals.

For schools, “profit” is measured by student achievement. A multi-year study completed by University of Chicago professors Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider resulted in the book Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), which links higher student achievement with high levels of trust between teachers and principals and among the teaching staff. Bryk and Schneider go so far as to say that without trusting relationships, school improvement efforts are “doomed to fail.”

For all kinds of enterprises, trust is a high-leverage resource that sustains success and effectiveness. Through the development of policies, practices, and cultural norms, an organization can make conscious efforts to build and maintain trust. As an organization reaps the “profits” of a trusting culture, it simultaneously perpetuates, or sustains, trust as an important commodity unto itself.

Ultimately, trust involves developing and maintaining relationships. Today’s workplace requires effective, skilled, and compassionate transformational leaders — not just managers — who recognize the need for trust and who facilitate organizational change to create high-trust cultures. We can start this process by taking to heart the words of Edward Marshall, who said, “The answer to leading others to trust and high performance may be found by looking in the mirror and asking: Am I trustworthy?” Ensuring the answer to that question is “yes” may be the highest-leverage action we can take as leaders today.

Doug Stilwell has 22 years of experience in education. He is currently the principal of Crestview Elementary in the West Des Moines Community School District in Iowa. Doug is also a doctoral student in Educational Leadership at Drake University.

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Indeed, over the last 25 years, such a new understanding of life has emerged at the forefront of science. I want to illustrate this new understanding by asking the age-old question, what is life? What’s the difference between a rock and a plant, animal, or microorganism? To understand the nature of life, it is not enough to understand DNA, proteins, and the other molecular structures that are the building blocks of living organisms, because these structures also exist in dead organisms, for example, in a dead piece of wood or bone.

The difference between a living organism and a dead organism lies in the basic process of life—in what sages and poets throughout the ages have called the “breath of life.” In modern scientific language, this process of life is called “metabolism.” It is the ceaseless flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical reactions, which enables a living organism to continually generate, repair, and perpetuate itself. In other words, metabolism involves the intake, digestion, and transformation of food.

Metabolism is the central characteristic of biological life. But understanding metabolism is not enough to understand life. When we study the structures, metabolic processes, and evolution of the myriads of species on the planet, we notice that the outstanding characteristic of our biosphere is that it has sustained life for billions of years. How does the Earth do that? How does nature sustain life?

Ecological Literacy

To understand how nature sustains life, we need to move from biology to ecology, because sustained life is a property of an ecosystem rather than a single organism or species. Over billions of years of evolution, the Earth’s ecosystems have evolved certain principles of organization to sustain the web of life. Knowledge of these principles of organization, or principles of ecology, is what we mean by “ecological literacy.”

In the coming decades, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy — our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly. This means that ecoliteracy must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres, and should be the most important part of education at all levels—from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals.

We need to teach our children, our students, and our corporate and political leaders the fundamental facts of life—that one species’ waste is another species’ food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

All these principles of ecology are closely interrelated. They are just different aspects of a single fundamental pattern of organization that has enabled nature to sustain life for billions of years. In a nutshell: Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. No individual organism can exist in isolation. Animals depend on the photosynthesis of plants for their energy needs; plants depend on the carbon dioxide produced by animals, as well as on the nitrogen fixed by bacteria at their roots; and together plants, animals, and microorganisms regulate the entire biosphere and maintain the conditions conducive to life.

Sustainability, then, is not an individual property but a property of an entire web of relationships. It always involves a whole community. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. A sustainable human community interacts with other communities — human and nonhuman — in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their nature. Sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of co-evolution rather than a static state.

Systems Thinking

The fact that ecological sustainability is a property of a web of relationships means that in order to understand it properly, in order to become ecologically literate, we need to learn how to think in terms of relationships, in terms of interconnections, patterns, context. In science, this type of thinking is known as systemic thinking or “systems thinking.” It is crucial for understanding ecology, because ecology derived from the Greek word oikos (“household”) — is the science of relationships among the various members of the Earth Household.

Systems thinking emerged from a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among biologists, psychologists, and ecologists, in the 1920s and ’30s. In all these fields, scientists realized that a living system — organism, ecosystem, or social system — is an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. The “systemic” properties are properties of the whole, which none of its parts have. So, systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. The early systems thinkers coined the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

What exactly does this mean? In what sense is the whole more than the sum of its parts? The answer is: relationships. All the essential properties of a living system depend on the relationships among the system’s components. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of relationships. Understanding life requires a shift of focus from objects to relationships.

For example, each species in an ecosystem helps to sustain the entire food web. If one species is decimated by some natural catastrophe, the ecosystem will still be resilient if there are other species that can fulfill similar functions. In other words, the stability of an ecosystem depends on its biodiversity, on the complexity of its network of relationships. This is how we can understand stability and resilience by understanding the relationships within the ecosystem.

In science, we have been told, things need to be measured and weighed. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; relationships need to be mapped.

Understanding relationships is not easy for us, because it is something that goes counter to the traditional scientific enterprise in Western culture. In science, we have been told, things need to be measured and weighed. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; relationships need to be mapped. So there is another shift: from measuring to mapping.

In biology, a recent dramatic example of this shift happened in the Human Genome Project. Scientists became acutely aware that, in order to understand the functioning of genes, it is not enough to know their sequence on the DNA; we need to be able to also map their mutual relationships and interactions.

Now, when you map relationships, you will find certain configurations that occur repeatedly. This is what we call a pattern. Networks, cycles, feedback loops are examples of patterns of organization that are characteristic of life. Systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from contents to patterns.

I also want to emphasize that mapping relationships and studying patterns is not a quantitative but a qualitative approach. Systems thinking implies a shift from quantity to quality. A pattern is not a list of numbers but a visual image.

The study of relationships concerns not only the relationships among the system’s components, but also those between the system as a whole and surrounding larger systems. Those relationships between the system and its environment are what we mean by context.

For example, the shape of a plant, or the colors of a bird, depend on their environment — on the vegetation, climate, etc. — and also on the evolutionary history of the species, on the historical context. Systems thinking is always contextual thinking. It implies a shift from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge.

Finally, we need to understand that living form is more than a shape, more than a static configuration of components in a whole. There is a continual flow of matter through a living system, while its form is maintained; there is development, and there is evolution. The understanding of living structure is inextricably linked to the understanding of metabolic and developmental processes. So, systems thinking includes a shift of emphasis from structure to process.

All these shifts of emphasis are really just different ways of saying the same thing. Systems thinking means a shift of perception from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life.

Current World Problems

Once we become ecologically literate, once we understand the processes and patterns of relationships that enable ecosystems to sustain life, we will also understand the many ways in which our human civilization, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has ignored these ecological patterns and processes and has interfered with them. And we will realize that these interferences are the fundamental causes of many of our current world problems.

It is now becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent. One of the most detailed and masterful documentations of the fundamental interconnectedness of world problems is the new book by Lester Brown, Plan B (Norton, 2008). Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, demonstrates in this book with impeccable clarity how the vicious circle of demographic pressure and poverty leads to the depletion of resources — falling water tables, wells going dry, shrinking forests, collapsing fisheries, eroding soils, grasslands turning into desert, and so on — and how this resource depletion, exacerbated by climate change, produces failing states whose governments can no longer provide security for their citizens, some of whom in sheer desperation turn to terrorism.

When you read this book, you will understand how virtually all our environmental problems are threats to our food security — falling water tables; increasing conversion of cropland to non-farm uses; more extreme climate events, such as heat waves, droughts, and floods; and, most recently, increasing diversion of grains to biofuel.

A critical factor in all this is the fact that world oil production is reaching its peak. This means that, from now on, oil production will begin to decrease worldwide, extraction of the remaining oil will be more and more costly, and hence the price of oil will continue to rise. Most affected will be the oil-intensive segments of the global economy, in particular the automobile, food, and airline industries.

The search for alternative energy sources has recently led to increased production of ethanol and other biofuels, especially in the United States, Brazil, and China. And since the fuel value of grain is higher on the markets than its food-value, more and more grain is diverted from food to producing fuels. At the same time, the price of grain is moving up toward the oil equivalent value. This is one of the main reasons for the recent sharp rise of food prices. Another reason, of course, is that a petrochemical, mechanized, and centralized system of agriculture is highly dependent on oil and will produce more expensive food as the price of oil increases. Indeed, industrial farming uses 10 times more energy than sustainable, organic farming.

The fact that the price of grain is now keyed to the price of oil is only possible because our global economic system has no ethical dimension. In such a system, the question, “Shall we use grain to fuel cars or to feed people?” has a clear answer. The market says, “Let’s fuel the cars.”

This is even more perverse in view of the fact that 20 percent of our grain harvest will supply less than 4 percent of automotive fuel. Indeed, the entire ethanol production in this country could easily be replaced by raising average fuel efficiency by 20 percent (i.e. from 21 mpg to 25 mpg), which is nothing, given the technologies available today.

The recent sharp increase in grain prices has wreaked havoc in the world’s grain markets, and world hunger is now on the rise again after a long steady decline. In addition, increased fuel consumption accelerates global warming, which results in crop losses in heat waves that make crops wither, and from the loss of glaciers that feed rivers essential to irrigation. When we think systemically and understand how all these processes are interrelated, we realize that the vehicles we drive, and other consumer choices we make, have a major impact on the food supply to large populations in Asia and Africa.

All these problems, ultimately, must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most people in our society, and especially our political and corporate leaders, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.

The main message of Lester Brown’s Plan B, is that there are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican Revolution. Systems thinking and ecological literacy are two key elements of the new paradigm, and very helpful for understanding the interconnections between food, health, and the environment, but also for understanding the profound transformation that is needed globally for humanity to survive.

Fritjof Capra is the bestselling author of The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, and other books. A physicist best known for his work in systems thinking, Capra is also cofounder and chair of the board of the Center for Ecoliteracy.

“The New Facts of Life” by Fritjof Capra was originally published by the Center for Ecoliteracy. © Copyright 2008 Center for Ecoliteracy. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. For more information, visit www.ecoliteracy.org.

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Is that a good thing? Well, it depends on the quality of the meeting. Educational professionals concur that most of the time they spend in “meeting mode” could be better used otherwise. Are we to conclude, then, that meetings should be abolished? On the contrary, an understanding of systems and learning suggests that meetings can and should be powerful vehicles of positive change, leading participants to common understanding that results in authentic engagement and alignment.

A Systems Perspective

The fault is not in the meeting form itself but in our approach to meetings. According to Fred Kofman and Peter Senge (in Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow’s Workplace, edited by Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, Productivity Press, 1995), “the main dysfunctions in today’s organizations are actually by-products of their past success.” As a culture, we have become accustomed to going to meetings that are rarely interesting, much less opportunities for learning and community development. Nevertheless, those poorly constructed gatherings have managed to move us forward as schools. Any hint of doing away with or dramatically changing them is often perceived as heresy, heard as “that’s not the way we do things here.”

As a culture, we have become accustomed to going to meetings that are rarely interesting, much less opportunities for learning and community development.

The solution? Looking at the school district from a systems perspective. In a systems worldview, as we move from the primacy of the pieces to the primacy of the whole, each meeting provides an opportunity for participants to develop a collective understanding of their connectedness and interdependence. As people evolve from focusing on self to focusing on self as a member of a larger community, the purpose of meetings shifts from solving problems to creating, from defending absolute truths of the moment to achieving coherent and collective interpretations of what they want their school to be.

Gone are the gripe sessions, the meetings that take place simply because it is the appointed time for the appointed group to convene, and the gatherings that subtly pull a subsystem (department, grade level, staff sector) off the track of established vision and mission. Participants no longer come to the table with the traditional burning questions: How is my job to be redefined today? or How can I use this meeting to get what I want within the system? Instead, every meeting within the entire school district centers on aligning people’s efforts to help achieve the system’s vision and mission.

This new meeting paradigm enables leaders to steward the system rather than control it. Instead of poking around in unfolding educational and administrative processes, the facilitator clarifies and aligns the action of the group. Time is redirected from typical “administrivia” and ritual actions to the development of shared meaning, as each participant experiences personal learning through conversation. This shift enables meeting leaders to “identify problems that can best be addressed through collective action and then involve others in finding solutions” (Liebman and Friedrich, “Teachers, Writers, Leaders” in Educational Leadership, 65(1) September 2007). The leader of such a meeting is now a community agent helping to align his or her group with the system’s goals and facilitating the design of methods for achieving those goals.

A FOCUS on Conversational Leadership

To make this shift, in school systems across the country, district and school-level leaders regularly engage people in results-oriented, focused meetings based on a communication model called “conversational leadership,” a phrase to my knowledge coined by Carolyn Baldwin, an elementary principal from Winter Haven, Florida. Conversational leadership (CL) uses multiple learning tools to develop a common understanding and aligned action in an organization. The philosophical foundations of this approach lie in Malcolm Knowles’s adult learning models, the total quality work of W. Edwards Deming, Peter Senge’s learning organizations, Edward Schein’s ideas of process consulting, leadership philosopher Robert K. Greenleaf’s servant-leadership, and effective communication theory.

Using the conversational leadership model, the designer and steward of each meeting is responsible for helping to achieve the organization’s desired outcomes through learning. The successful meeting, then, will have as its particular outcome some type of personal or team structural change — i.e.,a change in thinking, acting, or interacting. As this change occurs, the group becomes realigned with the system’s goals, identifying and committing to methods it can adopt to help achieve those goals. As each and every meeting is focused on supporting the success of the system as a whole, the meeting leader — whether teacher, principal, PTO president, or curriculum supervisor—crafts and stewards the meeting in alignment with the system’s mission and goals.

Each meeting begins with ground rules, which can be posted and referenced as needed. We recommend FOCUS (each of these items is defined and explained below):

F: Follow the learning conversation guidelines (see “Five Guidelines for Learning Conversations”)

O: Open with Check-in and CPO (Context, Purpose, Outcome)

C: Clarify each agenda item with CPO

U: Use Closing-the-Learning-Loop protocols

S: Support safe space

Begin with a simple check-in procedure, inviting each participant to make a short statement that bridges the gap from their previous task/experience to the one at hand, ending with “I’m in.” Once participants have been reminded of the ground rules and have centered themselves, the leader provides a quick but essential overview to put the meeting in the context of the larger picture: How does today’s meeting fit into our larger, ongoing efforts and vision? He or she then states the purpose of the meeting (which should never be “because it’s the day of the month we always meet”) and tells participants exactly what outcome they can expect.

Context: How this meeting/agenda item fits into the overall mission/vision

Purpose: What common understanding or shared meaning we intend to develop

Outcome: What we will each know or be able to do when the meeting concludes

Some examples of context might be:

• An incident involving student rights has occurred that needs our attention.
• We are three months out from our ten year accreditation filing deadline.
• The Board has requested our input on a matter of policy at its next meeting.

Using those three examples, a purpose statement might be:

• I want to share the details of the incident and build consensus for a response.
• Today we’ll look at our timeline and make course corrections.
• I want your opinions on this matter to help me make a recommendation that represents your interests.

Finally, with those purposes in mind, the outcome might be stated in one of these three ways:

• At the close of this meeting, each of us will know the Board’s position and how we can support it.
• By the end of the meeting, we’ll have identified a handful of target areas and the steps we’ll take, collectively and individually, to bring them up to speed.
• I hope to have a rough draft of my recommendation, with your help, before we adjourn.

Once the CPO is clear, the leader can engage the participants through conversational learning techniques, clarifying for understanding as needed. Some organizations devote numerous meetings and retreats to truly mastering the concept of “learning conversation.” The leader’s efforts to confirm for common understanding are critical in developing shared meaning that leads to purposeful action. She does so by closing the learning loop — inviting participants to share their understanding about the information presented thus far. And, through it all, the facilitator must work to create a safe space, a team setting that promotes forthright sharing and discussion because participants feel comfortable and trusting.

Groups often apply three steps of this four-step process over and over throughout the meeting, bringing each topic of interest through the stages of learning conversation, clarity, and confirmation. When all business has been concluded, it is important to invite participants to assess the meeting’s effectiveness for the purpose of improving on the process at the next meeting. Such a protocol, in partnership with a new understanding and appreciation of the meeting as a valid way for a system to learn and grow, can turn your gatherings into meetings that matter.

One Voice

Once all the leaders at all levels within the system are able and willing to use conversational leadership to facilitate meetings that move the system toward its goals, the system begins to speak with one voice. That does not preclude disagreement. Vigorous disagreement among leaders using learning protocols does not damage effective communication. Conversely, disagreement allows for learning and enhances understanding, which leads to shared meaning. Sincere disagreement should not be construed as disloyalty or as a threat to the system’s unity. Difference of opinion marks an opportunity to deepen understanding, enhance the quality of working relationships, and accomplish alignment. Disciplined meeting conversation is one of the answers: “If we cannot talk together, we cannot work together” (William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Doubleday, 1999).

Through conversational leadership, participants are gradually able to recognize the interdependence of the varying subsystems and appreciate the value of constructive interaction with others. The steady stream of documents for approval disappears from the regular agenda as the “approval” syndrome becomes inconsistent with proper delegation. Everyone does his or her own work instead of pretending that endlessly supervising the day-to-day action of others is a meaningful contribution.

Meetings no longer aim at managing individuals or incessantly redefining operational details. The executive team learns that what it previously thought was “monitoring” was merely wandering around in the presence of data. Meetings no longer focus on complaints. Problems are expected to be resolved locally; if not, the issue is viewed as symptomatic of a system flaw. All players get to “have their say,” but they maintain the priority of the school’s performance outcomes and common mission.

More meetings are spent learning diverse points of view regarding the heart of the school’s responsibility —  supporting and nurturing the student body by projecting future needs and garnering wisdom for long-term decision making about performance results and structures. On a daily basis, teachers learn from one another through conversation with their peers; this becomes the predominant meeting structure. Gone is the preoccupation with what schools do in favor of clearly defining what schools are for. Finally, leadership becomes visionary, focusing on the shared dreams of the community, because it is no longer forged in a flurry of trivia, micromanagement, and administrative detail.

Successful meetings in schools and school systems, at all levels and for all purposes, can become significantly more effective and productive if they follow a carefully tested protocol. A good meeting is highly structured in its core processes, but fluid in nature, welcoming and encouraging participation. Ironically, the more carefully structured the meeting, the easier it is to invite dialogue and allow meaningful conversations to take their course. Following the format outlined above, meetings will achieve clear communication and common understanding — something vitally important in today’s educational institutions.

Raymond D. Jorgensen, Ph. D., consults, facilitates, and conducts workshops for public and private school systems, city and county governments, hospitals, banks, branches of the military, physicians’ offices, and a variety of private businesses. He spent 30 years in private and public schools as a teacher, coach, department head, collegiate faculty member, and school administrator. Ray holds an M. S. in Teaching and wrote a doctoral dissertation on learning organizations and organizational change.

For Additional Reading

Brown, Juanita. TheWorld Café: Shaping Our FuturesThrough ConversationsThat Matter (Berrett-Koehler, 2005)

Caine, Renate Nummela, and Geoffrey Caine. Education on the Edge of Possibility (ASCD, 1997)

de Geus, Arie. The Living Company: Habits for Survival in aTurbulent Business Environment (Harvard Business School Press, 1997)

Gardner, Howard. Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2006)

Schein, Edgar., “Dialogue and culture,” Organizational Dynamics (1993, autumn)

Senge, Peter, et al. Schools That Learn: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Currency Doubleday, 2000)

Sergiovanni, Thomas J. Building Community in Schools. (Jossey-Bass, 1994)

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You are a hiker, drinking in the September air along the trails of the Cockaponset State Forest with a friend. Deciduous yellows, browns, and reds punctuate the still-green woodland. Late summer asters glow along the sides of the path. As you cross a bridge spanning a rivulet, your companion pauses to sip

from her water bottle. You wait, and your gaze drifts downward. You are startled to see, scarlet against the dark peat, a set of concentric hearts. Some of the bright berries have drifted in the slight current, blurring the edges, a gentle dance between the direction of a knowing hand and the swamp’s hidden currents.

In September 2009, a group of global environmental leaders gathered at the Trinity Conference Center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, for a five-day workshop. Arriving from locales as distant as Brazil and Indonesia and as close as nearby New England states, the 14 participants were alumni of the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program, run by the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute.

Donella (Dana) Meadows was the lead author of the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, which rocked readers with its exploration of the pending collision between a rapidly growing population and a world with finite resources. An important early voice of insight and innovation on the environment, Dana went on to found the Sustainability Institute; teach generations of students at Dartmouth College; receive a MacArthur “Genius” award; and write a weekly newspaper column, “The Global Citizen.” She also founded Cobb Hill, now a thriving cohousing community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont. The Fellows Program was founded after Meadows’ untimely death in 2001 with the goal of ratcheting up the environmental movement by increasing the effectiveness of its up-and-coming leaders.

The Fellows — by design, mainly women — work in NGOs, government agencies, philanthropic institutions, and businesses around the globe. They represent organizations that range from large multinational corporations to social and environmental justice start-ups in developing countries; their areas of focus run the gamut of the pressing issues of our times — forestry, energy, food production and farming, economic development, ocean conservation, pollution prevention, health and safety.

Three Skill Sets

Over the course of the two-year program, Sustainability Institute staff and outside instructors train and coach Fellows in three skill sets: systems thinking, reflective conversation, and visioning. All of Dana Meadows’work was grounded in systems thinking — the perspective that we can better understand something by looking at it in the context of its relationships rather than in isolation. When people try to solve problems without considering the larger implications of our actions, we can end up creating unintended consequences in other parts of the system — and make the original problem even worse. Valuing synthesis over analysis and holism over reductionism, systems thinking takes literally the well-known Aristotelian edict, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

By balancing attentive listening to others with effective advocacy of one’s own position, the practice of reflective conversation serves to gather knowledge from all parts of a system. The goal is to surface insights from those with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives instead of relying on the limited knowledge of a few.

Visioning involves identifying a desired future and using the gap between that vision and current reality to motivate action. By practicing these tools, Fellows gain the ability to tackle seemingly intractable problems and design radical — from the “root” — solutions rather than short-term quick fixes. Now, almost a decade after its launch, the program has 54 alumni. Every two years, a new cohort of 18 to 20 participants gathers at Sustainability Institute for a series of four week-long workshops, with ongoing homework and personal coaching between sessions. During the onsite meetings, Fellows stay with families in the Cobb House co-housing community. To experience living with lower environmental impact and higher levels of mutual dependence, they do chores such as stacking wood for the common furnace and maintaining the community’s hilly paths. In the process, the participants form close bonds that result in joint projects, crossover learning from different sectors and industries, and a support net for when the road feels impossibly long.

Because, as the less-than promising outcomes of the U. N. Climate Conference Copenhagen showed, the barriers to success for those combating climate change still remain sky high. For the Fellows, these struggles are far from abstract. Each day involves a Sophie’s Choice of tradeoffs, of balancing one group’s vital needs against another’s, of making tough compromises between what is right and what is possible. It can be lonely, wearing work. The alumni workshop in September sought, among other things, to strengthen the ties among people from all of the cohorts, to break through the isolation, to celebrate what has been achieved, and to plant the seeds for future success.

Leadership Earth Art Project

Knowing the renewing quality of the arts and their possibilities for stimulating new ways of thinking and being, the event’s conveners consciously wove visual arts, music, and dance into the program. On the first afternoon, Vermont artist Jay Mead led the group in an activity designed to “help participants experience systems in nature, observe patterns, and work from a creative influence to balance the intellectual.” A painter, sculptor, puppeteer, and performance artist, Mead has created environmental art for more than 30 years. He has worked with Bread and Puppet, Cristo, the Puppet Tree, and Wise Fool Puppet Interventions, and has led workshops for learners of all ages.

Mead called the three-hour experience the “Leadership Earth Art Project,” or LEAP! As a catalyst for the activity, he introduced the work of British artist Andrew Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy uses natural material, including snow, ice, leaves, bark, rock, clay, stones, feathers, petals, and twigs, to create outdoor sculptures. Some of these are ephemeral—like a glittery star formed from icicles secured in the center by the artist’s saliva — while others are more enduring, such as a continuous crack in the courtyard pavers at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco. According to Goldsworthy, “I stop at a place or pick up a material because I feel that there is something to be discovered. Here is where I can learn.”

Jay encouraged participants to follow Goldsworthy’s lead and learn from the natural landscape by creating their own in situ pieces. By working with the right brain rather than just the left, hands and not merely the head, they would practice a mode of thinking and sensing that is different from how we generally interact with the environment. Through this “playful meditation,” the goal was for the alumni to discover patterns in nature that reveal larger systems and suggest metaphors for their own life experience, work, and vision.

Mead led the group around their canvas: the Trinity Conference Center’s grounds, with its labyrinth and hiking trail through the Cockaponset State Forest and along the bank of the Housotonic River. He showed the group a sample he had created: a set of vertebrae made from stones, white against the crisp fall leaves. This simple artifact echoed the shape and direction of the nearby train track, emphasized the parallels between natural and human-made design solutions.

The Fellows then dispersed, naturally falling into pairs, with a few preferred the reverie of working alone. Their voices joined the soundtrack of rustling leaves, flowing water, and bird songs, set against the Indian-summer sky.

One team created what they called “a spectrum of energy,” a wheel of stones and a gradation of fall leaves, moving from green to yellow to red and then to brown. Another pair made crowns, woven from ferns and adorned with flowers, transforming the group into a tribe of protective wood nymphs. Rolling up their pant legs, two participants waded into the river to construct a sturdy question mark out of river rocks, a dam around which the water eddied and flowed. Some of the installations were kinetic, using the wind and the water for movement; others captured the coiled energy of the spiral; still others reflected the cyclical autumnal shift from abundance to harvest — and the promise of renewal.

After three hours, Jay reeled in the groups for a “gallery walk” of the installations. As they described their work, the artists recounted the pleasure of slowing down, of being in the process rather than focusing on the product, of working with their hands. By using found materials and accentuating what was already there, they moved from viewing nature as an object to considering it a co-conspirator and guide.

The Ultimate Systems Teacher

As a culture, we spend so much of our effort on combating the forces of nature. We use nails and metals extracted from the earth to erect structures that defy the laws of gravity. We paint and seal to stave off rot and decay. We disregard natural laws like “waste = food” and “there is no away.” We treat Earth’s rhythms as an obstacle to be surmounted or a problem to be solved.

But what if, even for an afternoon, we could create in accordance with, not in defiance of, the natural systems that we are a part of? What if we were to accept the inevitability that our artifacts will ultimately revert to where they came from, to feed the next cycle, with or without our approval? What if we slowed ourselves to the pace of the river and the forest and the fields? Could we learn to learn from nature, which is, according to Jay Mead, “the ultimate systems teacher”? Would we have the courage to do so?

For at least one group of leaders in the trenches of the sustainability resolution, the answer is decidedly “yes.”

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Anticipating System Behavior

School districts are made up of many components, including district staff, individual schools, teachers and administrators within those schools, parent councils, and students. The sheer number and variety of these actors make it difficult to see their interdependence and to notice how an action in one part of the system affects the others. Add to this complexity policies originating from agencies outside the district, such as state education departments and the U. S. Department of Education, and the task of assessing how best to direct resources to meet students’ needs becomes almost hopelessly confusing.

Systems thinking and system dynamics tools, including casual loop diagrams, stocks and flows, and computer simulation, can shed light on the interrelationships among components and, perhaps more important, illustrate how outcomes may result from feedback loops rather than from simple, linear chains of cause and effect. These tools also make explicit the delays that often occur between a change in one component of a system and its effect on others. The interplay of feedback and delays can produce unanticipated system behavior, as shown by the mandating of smaller class sizes in California. When the legislature passed the new law, schools had to increase the number of classes they offered at each grade level to accommodate the same number of students. To do so, they needed to hire more teachers. Because becoming a teacher through traditional means requires at least four years of pre-service training, the number of teachers available fell short of meeting the needs of all schools. Suburban districts with greater resources filled their spots by recruiting teachers from urban districts, leaving those schools woefully understaffed. Proponents of the new law had failed to anticipate this unfortunate outcome of the change in class size.

By showing the potential behavior over time of multiple scenarios based on specific inputs, computer modeling offers policymakers and administrators the ability to visualize the long-term effects of specific decisions before those decisions are implemented. We can also use models to identify unexpected interactions between system components; ask “what if questions about changes in system parameters; run no-cost experiments that compress time and space; and reflect on, expose, test, and improve the mental models upon which we rely to make decisions about difficult problems. Thus, computer modeling could allow school-system leaders to make more effective decisions by building their understanding of long-term consequences of resource decisions in a complex environment.

Evaluating Professional Development Programs

To illustrate how a district can use computer modeling to analyze its options, I have created a simulation that explores the impact of professional development programs for teachers. Many school districts have responded to the call for better educational performance by implementing a standards-based curriculum. They offer professional development workshops to increase teachers’ ability to communicate this new curriculum to their students. The workshops are often formatted as multi-week summer programs.

Research has shown that teachers can learn to communicate the new curriculum through professional development training, so the question for a district is not whether summer workshops can build capacity, but whether they can do so for a critical mass of teachers in a reasonable time period. What factors play a role in this issue? Which workshops are most effective? What are the costs associated with this form of professional development? These questions are amenable to modeling because we can determine quantitative values for most of the important variables — such as the number of teachers in training and the turnover rate of teachers — and reasonable estimates for the qualitative variables — such as the effectiveness of the workshops and the relationship between the length of the workshop and the willingness of teachers to enroll in it.

I followed these steps to build the model:

1. Define the teacher stocks. All the teachers in the district fall into three stocks: Those who are not familiar with the standards; those who are attending a workshop to learn about the standards; and those who are familiar with the standards.

2. Establish the flow between stocks. Teachers who aren’t familiar with the standards can take a workshop to gain familiarity; teachers in the workshop may become familiar with the standards and move into the “familiar” stock or may not gain much from the workshop and return to the “unfamiliar” stock; and both “familiar” and “unfamiliar” teachers may leave the system each year.

3. Identify and assign values to the important system parameters and variables.

4. Incorporate funding components.

The model is based on the following assumptions:

• The number of teachers in the system remains constant at 10,000, and at the starting point, 10 percent of the teachers are already familiar with the standards-based curriculum. Workshops vary in length from one day to five weeks.
• Ten percent of the teachers leave and are replaced each year (with 10 percent of new teachers entering in the “familiar” stage), and the rate at which teachers leave the system is higher for teachers in the “unfamiliar” pool than in the “familiar” pool.
• In the baseline simulation, 1,000 teachers participate in the three-week workshop; this number can vary up or down by a factor of three.
• Fewer teachers participate in longer workshops, more in shorter ones. However, longer workshops are more effective. The initial success rate for teachers reaching the “familiar-with-standards” stage in a three-week workshop is 30 percent. This base rate increases linearly over time as more and more teachers (those for whom training was not effective the first time) retake the workshop.
• There are 25 teachers in each workshop. The cost of the workshop includes a stipend of $300/week/ teacher for each of 25 participating teachers and an additional cost of $2,500/week for the instructor, supplies, and space.

“Modeling Professional Development” illustrates the model’s basic features.

Analyzing Results

The simulation yields several non-intuitive results, the most important being that these workshops alone cannot adequately deal with the problem of building the necessary capacity in the teacher workforce. Even after 10 years of providing three-week workshops, only 52 percent of the teachers are skilled in presenting a standards-based curriculum — and this number includes teachers who were capable before they enrolled in the workshops. The results clearly show that the workshops do not produce a critical mass of teachers with the desired capabilities in a reasonable amount of time.

Another unexpected result of this analysis is that the five-week workshops result in the largest number of trained teachers over a 10-year period, even though the smallest number of teachers enrolls in them. Holding all else constant, approximately 5,200 teachers achieve the desired level of ability after participating in a five-week workshop, while only about 2,800 teachers reach this stage through one week workshops. The longer workshop is also the most cost-effective per teacher trained: $2,300 per teacher for a five-week workshop; $2,635 for a three-week workshop; and $3,100 for a one-week workshop.

We can generalize this kind of model to other areas of professional development, because the results are independent of the workshop content. Administrators have access to the quantitative data for their district (such as number of teachers in the system, distribution by length of service, teacher leaving rate, funding available for workshops) and can reasonably estimate values for the qualitative variables (such as percent of teachers who require specific professional development, workshop effectiveness, relationship of workshop length to teacher resistance and workshop effectiveness) from prior experience. Plugging these numbers into a computer simulation would give them a general tool for predicting the impact of a summer workshop on professional development in any content area.

Similar models could let stakeholders examine other questions, such as the impact of rationing workshop participation depending on teachers’ average time of service in the system.

Should administrators concentrate on those who will remain in the system longest, that is, younger teachers? Or is there value in offering training opportunities to experienced teachers, who can serve as opinion leaders in changing the system’s culture? This analysis could also be incorporated into an expanded model to include the use of mentors and school and web-based professional development. By exploring these variables as well, districts might come upon a formula for producing a multi-component professional development system with the capacity to bring a critical mass of teachers up to speed on new curriculum requirements in an acceptable time period.

As I hope I’ve shown here, computer modeling offers a valuable planning and decision-support tool for school districts. This approach permits “no-risk” analysis of competing policy choices and resource allocations and, while it does not offer definitive answers, it can help school-system leaders understand the impact of their decisions and guide them toward making better-informed allocations of scarce resources.

Daniel D. Burke, Ph. D., has a broad understanding of K-graduate educational systems. As deputy director for education, the CNA Corporation (CNAC), he leads the research and analysis activities of CNAC’s public education group. Before joining CNAC, Dan was a researcher in molecular biology and produced an extensive record of curriculum innovations. He also played an important role in the National Science Foundation’s K-12 education reform programs.

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Acclaimed educator and writer Deborah Meier has spent more than 30 years thinking about these questions and about what it means to be an educated person in today’s society. As the founder and principal of several inner-city public elementary and secondary schools in New York and Massachusetts, she has made her career helping children in underprivileged communities build productive, meaningful lives.

To Deborah, the core mission of schools in a democracy is producing critical, thoughtful, interesting citizens and workers. From her experience, the current emphasis in the U. S. on standardized testing, as required by the 2001 “No Child Left Behind” Act, stands in the way of achieving that goal., “If Americans had an edge in the world, it was that they were presumably more ingenious, more self-initiating,” she says., “The special American genius was our inventiveness. That spirit of inventiveness is what schools don’t currently reward. It’s not what you’re supposed to be thinking of when you’re taking tests; you’re supposed to be thinking of the rules of the game, not how to break the rules or how to invent new rules.”

Dynamic Learning Communities

Deborah knows about inventing new rules. She became an educator in the 1950s, starting as a part-time substitute teacher in the Chicago public schools while her children were young. During that experience, she found that school was “for many kids irrelevant, and the extent to which it was relevant, didn’t produce lively minds. The same was true for teachers — the environment was barren and sterile. I thought it was amazing that they came to school each day.”

“If Americans had an edge in the world, it was that they were presumably more ingenious, more self-initiating. The special American genius was our inventiveness. That spirit of inventiveness is what schools don’t currently reward.”

While teaching kindergarten in Harlem in the early 1960s, Deborah began to work with education professor Lillian Weber of the City College of New York, who developed the “Open Corridor” concept. In it, three or four teachers work together to turn their hallway into a shared children’s space. By collaborating in this way, the instructors demonstrate cooperation and create an engaging and dynamic learning community.

In 1974, Deborah was recruited to apply these progressive ideas in launching the Central Park Elementary School in East Harlem, one of the poorest areas in the city. The school and three others she spearheaded became highly successful, with more than 90 percent of the students who entered the Central Park East Secondary School going on to college. More than two decades later, Deborah moved to Massachusetts to found the Mission Hill School.

Habits of Mind

The schools that Deborah has launched all share certain characteristics. They are relatively small; the Mission Hill School, with around 180 students, is about one-third the size of the average school in Boston for that age group. Classrooms look like a combination of art room, science laboratory, and library. Children from kindergarten through 8th grade study a common set of themes — American history in the first trimester, ancient history in the second, and science in the third — so that the older students can model certain “habits of mind” for the younger ones.

According to Deborah and her colleagues, these habits are crucial for exercising judgment on complicated matters. At Mission Hill School, developing such intellectual skills is a core part the educational process. They include:

1. Evidence: How do we know what’s true and false? What evidence counts? How sure can we be? What makes it credible to us?
2. Viewpoint: How else might this look if we stepped into other shoes? If we were looking at it from a different direction? If we had a different history or expectations?
3. Connections/Cause and Effect: Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before? What are the possible consequences?
4. Conjecture: Could it have been otherwise? Supposing that? What if?
5. Relevance: Does it matter? Who cares?

The habits of mind are supplemented by habits of work: meeting deadlines, being on time, sticking to a task, not getting frustrated quickly, listening to what others say, and more.

Because kids learn by seeing adults practice these habits as part of a democratic community, the school operates as a staff collective, with input from a board of directors composed of five teachers, five parents, five people from outside the school, and two students. Most meetings are open to all, including students, who are encouraged to submit proposals. Children then apply these skills to making decisions within their classrooms.

Mission Hill School also brings the classroom into the larger community and the larger community into the classroom. The school has close ties with local museums, a farm, and several sports programs. Older kids participate in a “school to community” initiative, in which they spend one morning a week for 12 weeks working at a nonprofit or business. “The main point,” Deborah says, “is that it’s a place where we know there are some interesting adults doing interesting things who love what they’re doing.” In a similar way, if the students are studying ancient Greece, “we try to find people who have ancient Greek expertise, either as hobbies or professions, so our kids see that there are people who study this all the time and to whom it is a life love.”

For inner-city kids in particular, finding and cultivating a passion can be a lifesaver. According to Deborah, “Over the years, we have gathered a lot of evidence that this approach has had an impact on kids: fewer of them drop out, get in trouble, or despair of their lives. The vast majority go on to post K–12 education; they come to think that having interesting occupations is a possibility for themselves, not just for other people; they are likely to have strong hobbies; they want their kids to have an education like this too.” She adds, “The other exciting thing is how many teachers come see our schools, hear our stories, and want to start schools like it. We started with just one in NYC and now there are hundreds. The same is true with parents. It speaks to something that we’re longing for in our lives.”

Real-Life Achievement

By law, students at Mission Hill School must take standardized tests, and overall scores exceed those of many other schools in Boston. Nevertheless, the staff doesn’t let test preparation alter the curriculum or the process for evaluating student performance. As a requirement for graduating from eighth grade, pupils present portfolios of their work in different fields of study to committees of five people, including external reviewers, a member of their family, and two members of the faculty. A younger student also sits in as a learning opportunity. The centerpiece of each portfolio is a single, extended piece of work. The committees question presenters and rate the depth and breadth of their understanding of the material. “We are pushing kids to look at themselves as learners,” comments Deborah.

Deborah sees the portfolio process as a better, if somewhat more time-consuming, way of assessing kids’ competence than standardized testing. She says, “Higher test scores are supposed to be a measure of some real-life achievement and yet we have isolated them from real-life achievement.” As an example of this discrepancy, Deborah points out, “Young people who started as students in the seventies — the period in which we started concentrating on testing — are reading precipitously less well than the students who started reading in the forties, fifties, and sixties. If you ask kids, they’ll tell you, ‘When testing is over, we stop reading.’”

Awakening to the Future

So what can we do as a society to ensure that students gain the skills and knowledge they need to be the leaders of tomorrow? According to Deborah, “I think we start off by deciding what’s important to us and how we would know whether we’re achieving what we had in mind.” Another step is to create ways for parents and teachers to get to know each other, through maintaining smaller classes, keeping kids with the same teachers for several years, and scheduling additional time for them to meet. Public policy could support this process by requiring employers to give employees time for visiting their children’s schools., “We could maybe make it a duty of citizenship, like jury duty is,” Deborah comments.

With many educators, parents, and politicians beginning to raise the alarm about the downside of high-stakes testing, Deborah hopes that we’re on the cusp of an awakening that “whoops, this is not what we’ve meant to be doing to children for 20 years, this has nothing to do with what we dream about, this is not what the American future is supposed to be, this is not how to lead a competitive race with the rest of the world.” The fact that the choices we make now will affect our ability to muster an effective workforce and an engaged and thoughtful citizenry well into the 21st century is something that everyone can agree on.

Janice Molloy is content director at Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter.

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The good news, according to Tony Wagner, former co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is that the key qualities necessary for innovation—curiosity, collaboration, associative or integrative thinking, and a bias toward action and experimentation—are skills that can be learned rather than being strictly innate. Nevertheless, in his latest book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (Scribner, 2012), he makes the case that most of our schools, at all levels, are failing to provide students with the hands-on, collaborative learning that fosters creative, critical thinking. Instead, they continue to prepare students in traditional ways for a career path that no longer exists.

Breaking the Mold

To illustrate that a different way of teaching and learning is possible, Wagner introduces several educational programs that are striving to break the existing mold, including the High Tech High network of K–12 schools in San Diego, California, Olin College in Needhaam, MA, the MIT Media Lab, and Stanford’s d. school. The essential difference between these programs and other, more conventional ones is that these schools promote:

• Collaboration versus individual achievement
• Multidisciplinary learning versus specialization
• Trial and error versus risk avoidance Creating versus consuming
• Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation

Wagner quotes Richard Miller, president of Olin College, on the college’s goal, one that is largely shared by the other leading-edge institutions Wagner studied:

We’ve trying to teach students to take initiative—to transmit attitudes, motivations, and behaviors versus mere knowledge. Today, it’s not what you know, it’s having the right questions. I see three stages in the evolution of learning: The first is the memorization-based, multiple-choice approach, which is still widely prevalent; then there’s project-based learning where the problem is already determined; finally, there’s design-based learning where you have to define the problem. That way of learning is part of every class here. We are trying to teach students how to frame problems versus repeat the answers.

To achieve this objective, schools require a new kind of educator, one who serves more as a coach and co-learner than as an authority in an academic subject. Wagner highlights two graduate schools of education that have developed new teaching models: the High Tech High Graduate School of Education and the Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon, NH. In both of these programs, novice teachers spend most of their time working with a mentor in a school setting rather than sitting in lectures learning about education theory. In this way, these programs resemble the approach to teacher education used in Finland, a country that has produced outstanding results on international assessments. Interestingly—but maybe not surprisingly, give how entrenched traditional educational philosophies have proven to be—neither the High Tech High Graduate School of Education nor the Upper Valley Educators Institute has received accreditation from its respective regional accreditation agency.

Finding a Path

Given the scant attention paid to fostering creativity, it’s no shock that the young innovators whom Wagner features in the book worked hard to create their own opportunities. Kirk Phelps left Phillips Exeter Academy and Stanford University without graduating, yet at 29 has already had successful careers at Apple working on the iPhone and SunRun, a leading home solar power company. Zander Srodes became an advocate for sea turtle conservancy, authoring a book, leading ecological tours, and earning numerous youth achievement awards and grants—all while struggling in the classroom. Syreeta Gates, who founded SWT Life, which provides New York City teens with entrepreneurial coaching and personal development training, dropped out of City Technical College of New York before finding a sense of purpose through volunteer work.

Virtually all of Wagner’s interview subjects benefited from the guidance of a mentor and participation in unconventional learning experiences. In many cases, the mentor’s efforts weren’t recognized or well compensated by mainstream institutions but instead were done as labor of love. Such is the case of Amanda Alonzo, who works as a science teacher and science fair faculty advisor. She spends as many as four hours a day after school mentoring 40 students a year on their science fair projects. For her efforts, she receives only a $1,800 stipend on top of her teacher’s salary.

Encouraging Creative Work

So where do we go from here? Wagner is aware that schools alone can’t shoulder the burden for developing innovators—parents and employers have a role to play as well. Based on his interviews with innovators and their families, he identified ways in which parents can encourage the “spirit of play, passion, and purpose that are the wellsprings for creative work.” Some of these include allowing plenty of time for play and discovery; encouraging reading; providing toys that encourage imagination and invention; limiting screen time; and allowing kids to make and learn from mistakes.

Wagner also interviewed business leaders, including Tom Kelley from IDEO and Annmarie Neal from Cisco Systems, about how management practices need to change for young innovators to thrive in corporations. Many of the characteristics they described as being vital—such as the free flow of information up and down the organization and trust— are reminiscent of the characteristics of a learning organization as described by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline more than two decades ago.

The US Army is also aware of the need for a new organizational model. According to the report, “The Army Learning Concept for 2015,” “[T]he Army cannot risk failure through complacency, lack of imagination, or resistance to change.” The report recommends three steps for establishing a more effective learning model, including converting classroom experiences to collaborative problem-solving events; tailoring learning to the individual learner’s experience and competence level; and using a blended learning approach that incorporate simulations, gaming technology, and other technology-based instruction.

Staying the Course

Recognizing that change can take time, Wagner concludes the book with a letter to today’s young innovators, who may have to persevere in less-than optimal circumstances. To encourage them to stay the course, he quotes dancer and choreographer Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you will block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

The rest of us have an obligation, too, to give members of the next generation the tools they need to flourish. If we don’t, they will pay the price for our failure of imagination and foresight.

Janice Molloy is content director at Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.

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Metaphors for Change

American schools are under intense scrutiny and pressure to improve. Superintendents face enormous and unrelenting demands, but also have many opportunities to effect change and benefit kids. The Fieldbook offers superintendents a welcome chance to stop and think, understand their roles as leaders of learning, frame their views, and plan their actions in the face of rising crises. Two sets of metaphors in the book are particularly helpful.

First are the seven “commonplaces,” or stakes in the ground, of school leadership. The authors caution that “you cannot be a fully effective superintendent unless you master them,” so they devote a chapter to each.

• Superintendents must skillfully lead their schools in addressing seemingly intractable problems; this means much more than just managing school operations.
• Superintendents must effectively lead within a governance structure that includes diverse participants from school boards to unions.

Superintendents face enormous and unrelenting demands, but also have many opportunities to effect change and benefit kids.

• They must understand standards and assessments inside and out, period.
• They must move into the sensitive arena of race and class, bringing people and resources together to close achievement gaps.
• They must actively develop competent principals and constantly remind themselves that the most important work in schools happens with kids in the classroom.
• Superintendents must learn to collaborate with other agencies beyond the school walls that also serve kids.
• Finally, superintendents must engage their communities in their schools with an outreach philosophy that is more partnership than public relations.

Each of these items is a huge challenge; none can be ignored. Fortunately, the authors give readers a chance to think about them and learn from the experience and straightforward suggestions of others. They outline the skills that every superintendent must master and at the same time put the demands of the job into perspective.

Another set of metaphors describes school districts. Every organization has an implicit image of itself that has developed over time. These mental models shape how the school district functions, views its responsibilities, and responds to change. The authors describe eight distinct school district metaphors. For example, some school districts function as machines, with traditional hierarchical structures and expectations. Others are emerging learning organizations, with an emphasis on interdependence, collaboration, and adaptation to change.

Readers will recognize their home district in these descriptions, but this is much more than an academic exercise. Superintendents must understand these unspoken images in order to know how issues arise and, more importantly, how to craft solutions that will be accepted and work in their particular context. Each kind of district has its own patterns for dealing with the seven commonplaces of leadership, and each has different expectations for the role of the superintendent. Thus, it behooves the savvy superintendent to understand the playing field.

Learning to Improve Schools

The Fieldbook is a practical reference, designed to be kept handy and consulted as needed. The book’s format makes the new ideas it offers accessible and appealing to different learning styles. Each chapter balances theory and research with first-hand stories and tried-and-true suggestions from superintendents in the field. There are tables and charts for quick review, as well as many pertinent sidebars with references for further information. The authors include cautions about common pitfalls and controversies, along with specific tools and strategies for managing conflict and keeping a personal balance in a difficult job. Each chapter concludes with probing questions for reflective practice.

An early chapter on leadership includes a section on creating a learning organization. Through this process, a district embraces a common language and develops a collective intelligence to create its own future. The Fieldbook briefly describes Senge’s five disciplines of organizational learning—personal mastery, shared vision, mental models, team learning, and systems thinking— as they apply to improving learning in schools. It provides brief descriptions of the tools, ready to use: systems thinking to look beyond events to the patterns, structures, and mental models driving behavior; the “ladder of inference” to surface underlying assumptions; and dialogue to enhance learning conversations. Each concept is illustrated by a story told by a different practitioner.

Systems thinking tools come up again in the chapter on standards and assessment. Readers glimpse the underlying problems in improving student performance through the lens of the “shifting the burden” systems archetype. The “quick fix” of focusing on improving test scores undermines the longer-term goal of sustaining learning improvement. Here, systems thinking tools lend a richness to the discussion and a refreshing new approach to an old problem.

Superintendents who use the Fieldbook as a guide can become effective leaders of learning. Although many of the thornier issues discussed may have a higher profile and greater urgency in large urban districts, there is sound advice and affirmation for forward-thinking leaders everywhere.

Davida Fox-Melanson is the retired superintendent of the Carlisle Public Schools in Carlisle, MA. She is now an education consultant who also supervises interns in school administration certification programs at the university level.

Debra Lyneis served on the school board in Carlisle. She is now at the Creative Learning Exchange, helping teachers develop and publish K-12 curriculum materials using systems thinking and system dynamics, available online at www.clexchange.org.

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