Retraining the Brain: Transformative Communications as Ongoing Learning Through Professional Development

• In Event: Back to Basics: Using Complexity Theory as a Theoretical Framework for Educational Spaces

Abstract

Teacher Education professionals, school leaders, principals, and teachers are all part of a larger structure whose individual roles and actions alone do not create a total of equal parts that impact, change, or “fix” the system as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of internal diversity, internal redundancy and positive and negative feedback loops as key conditions to the development of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of two school-university leaders (Davis & Sumara, 2009).

Theoretical Framework. Teaching is a dynamic field that is very complex in its nature. Complexity theory can be defined as a collection of essential questions about systems and how stems change, develop, learn, and evolve (Cochran-Smith, Ell, Ludlow, Grudnoff, & Aitken, 2014). This paper will draw on the concepts of internal redundancy (Davis & Sumara, 2009), nested systems of knowledge and knowing (Davis, 2008), and complexity in communications (Rasmussen, 2005) to explain the ways in which teacher-learning activity and internal redundancy interacted in a three phrase professional development series that aimed to improve low SES student performance.

Modes of inquiry. By examining the collaboration of the university- school Social Studies leaders’ through the lens of complexity we develop an understanding of how the leaders’ utilize feedback loops from teacher participants to establish redundancy which allowed for small changes to effect proportional changes (Cochran-Smith et al, 2014).

Data sources. This paper examines the agents and elements responsible for patterns and phenomena that will guide the progression of knowledge, skills, and attitudes throughout the Teaching Literacy through Historical Inquiry professional development project. Collecting positive and negative feedback became an essential strategy to help us produce richer and deeper interactions for the teachers’ to ultimately be able to develop and implement their own historical inquiry units. Which in the development of planning and implementing this project would be influenced by complex systems within the learning and teaching systems that include personal and social systems such as abilities, knowledge, identities, attitudes, and culture/ language (Martin & Dismuke, 2018).
Arguments. I am arguing that by using a system of complexity in the process of planning and implementing the Historical Inquiry Unit Professional Development series for high school teachers internal redundancies became one of the key components that helped prepare the leaders (agents in this case) to compensate for each other’s failings (Davis & Sumara, 2009).
Significance. The field of education continues to investigate ways to produce systematic positive impacts on teaching and learning which for the original purpose was intended. The researchers sought to investigate various components of an operative system, but quickly discovered the system was more than complicated, it was complex with limited predictability and recursive shifts in understanding of the purpose and position of the project within the larger scope of educational research.

Author

• Arine Lowery, North Carolina State University