Schoolhouse as Learning Organism: Making Education Research Part of a K12 Girls' School's Systems Thinking

Introduction

Before the Covid 19 pandemic, K12 schools largely remained rooted in hierarchical modes of operation, in-person and high-touch learning models, and cultures of learning that largely met those in the middle and mainstream, keeping systems oriented to the status quo. However, the signs of a burgeoning crisis in American schools were evident for their reliance on a profession that is historically feminized and underpaid, subject to political crosswinds, and frequently over-burdened and under-resourced. Indeed, teacher education programs with once highly competitive admissions were struggling to find applicants. The Covid-19 pandemic, the black@school racial reckoning, and the polarizing political discourse around teachers and curricula laid bare and exacerbated the cracks in the fragile ecosystems of schools (May, 2021; Mitchell, 2022; Roegman, et al, 2022). Teachers quit in record numbers, and according to a June 2022 Gallup poll, teachers are the most burned out group of professionals in the United States (even compared to healthcare professionals). A national conversation about “teacher burnout,” gaps in student knowledge, and, indeed, the very purpose of K-12 education in a post-information age is driving the latest version of a crisis narrative for American schooling. Through the course of this chapter, we will describe how we thought about leaning more heavily into our mission of educating girls to be gamechangers and ethical leaders who forge an equitable, joyous future by using data and research to inform a feminist approach to leading our school and educating our students.

In order to navigate these competing priorities and contested histories to best meet the needs of students and faculty today, we argue that schools must shift to more flexible organizational models with dynamic feedback loops. Through a framework of systems thinking, a commitment to the improvement science method, and an approach rooted in feminist praxis, we argue that schools can move toward more inclusive models for students, faculty, and families that allows for diverse voices and lived experiences to shape the curriculum and pedagogy in the context of an ever-changing world and the dynamic challenges we face as local communities and global interdependencies.

At the start of the pandemic, our K-12 school for girls and young women embarked on a path to redesign the traditional “schoolhouse” as a learning organism. If a schoolhouse is a learning organization, structured hierarchically, a traditional model might place students at the base of the pyramid, with the principal, superintendent, or head of school at the top. Institutional hierarchies determine who learns what, from whom, and when. The larger the system is, the more complex the hierarchy. School systems, large and small, range from districts to single schools, from accrediting organizations to standardized tests and the college application process. If these kinds of systems tend to be largely static and regulatory, relying on the hierarchy to manage the daily operations but also to minimize disruptive change, we should ask ourselves: Why? Because those living and working within the system utilize mental models that shape not only how we see the world but how we decide to take action (or not take action) (Senge, 1990). How we see the world drives how we act, and most schools are fundamentally organizations for children that are shaped by the ways that adults see the world. The adult-centered and hierarchical model for schooling closes off essential pathways for feedback necessary to continuously evolve in ways that ensure voice and belonging for everyone in the community, especially children and faculty (Apple, 1979).