All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful, Others Are Confusing: Making the Complex Adaptive System Great Again

• In Event: 36.019 - Chaos and Complexity Theories SIG Business Meeting Including Keynote Address by Patrick McQuillan

Abstract

In the view of many, the complex adaptive system (CAS) heuristic offers educators a powerful analytic framework for understanding schools, schooling, and educational change, or a lack thereof. It seems only logical that in this time of omnipresent and never-ending reforms, that schools would benefit from developing the ability to adapt to these ongoing, changing circumstances. Yet to my experience, there remains a sense that somehow we are not gaining the full benefit that the CAS has to offer. Drawing on relatively unsuccessful efforts to help school administrators appreciate how they might utilize the CAS framework to support change efforts at their schools, this session will first review what occurred during those ineffective professional development efforts and then engage in a collective dialogue aimed at enriching our understandings as to how administrators, teachers, and schools in general might utilize the CAS heuristic to help our educational institutions become more adaptive organizations.

Author

• Patrick J. McQuillan, Boston College