Viewing Education as a System II

Note: The aim of this nine-part series is to define and describe the basic structure and components of a system. This is the ninth and final post in the series, which is excerpted from Chapter 4 of my recently published book, Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools.

W. Edwards Deming’s teachings are most widely known in industry and government. However, his teachings and principles apply to educational institutions, which of course, is the very point of Win-Win. He taught the Japanese, and later American companies that would listen, to adopt a systems thinking perspective.

The final insight from the systems view is the role of feedback within the system. A deep and technical dive into feedback loops goes beyond the scope of this post; I’d encourage readers to check out Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer for anyone interested in an accessible introduction to learning more about this critically important concept. However, it is worth touching on a few important points as we wrap up this series. 

Feedback loops are continuous. As a result, there is no such thing as an “optimum curriculum” or an “optimum school design.” Ongoing research into child development and the science of learning as well as feedback from customers about their needs (e.g., changes in skills that are important to industry) drive never-ending efforts to improve teaching and learning processes. At the classroom level, this means that teachers are continually improving their lessons based on what is learned each school year, or even within the year, based on informal and formal assessments of learning. 

In addition to the feedback that comes from customers of the K-12 education system (e.g., families, higher education, industry, etc.), there should also be feedback mechanisms within the school system itself. In the case of United Schools, the westside middle school is a customer of the westside elementary school. Each year, the elementary school supplies fifth grade students to the middle school as those fifth graders matriculate to sixth grade. One important loop involves having the elementary school collect feedback from the middle school to ensure that the K-5 curriculum is aligned to and adequately prepares its students for middle school.

The example of collecting feedback from alumni five and ten years after high school graduation (from earlier in the series), as well as the example of the fifth graders matriculating to middle school, introduces an important consideration with the use of feedback loops. That is, what makes understanding the behavior of complex systems like schools so challenging is the existence of delays in the feedback. Feedback delays can be imperceptibly short, as when you are the lead car at a stop light, the light turns green, and the car behind you honks to prompt you to accelerate through the intersection. Other times, the feedback we need about our system is far from immediate, as in the case of students matriculating to middle school. Still longer yet is the feedback we need from alumni five to ten years after graduation from the K-12 system to understand if we have adequately prepared them for success in society

Delays in feedback are not inherently good or bad, but we do need to understand that they exist and that they are important to regularly analyze. In our sector, we operate with a sense of urgency, especially when we know the students in our care are not performing well. We must be careful here though as we tend to underestimate the true feedback delays in the system and/or ignore them. Systems often behave in counterintuitive ways; attempts to fix problems often just make them worse, and we often don’t understand why. The answers may be elusive but recognizing that delays exist is an important first step. Additionally, having clearly defined system roles and adopting whole system thinking are part of the formula for overcoming challenges such as feedback delays. Both of these items are beyond the scope of this series, but are touched on in Chapter 5 of Win-Win.

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John A. Dues is the Chief Learning Officer for United Schools, a nonprofit charter management organization that supports four public charter school campuses in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of the newly released book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Send feedback to jdues@unitedschools.org.