The Self Organizing School

The Self-Organizing School provides ground-breaking insights and guidance about how schools can fulfill their aspirations for quality and productivity in learning and teaching. The book describes a comprehensive decade long school design process and effort that improves teaching quality and student outcomes. The practical guidance and examples employed throughout the book are supported by one of the most extensive longitudinal studies of a school reform process, including data from over 1600 classroom observations, 12,000 student evaluations and research studies of school change, technology use, student achievement, collaboration, and teacher effectiveness.

"The Self-Organizing School identifies nine next-generation reform targets and articulates theory and practice for achieving these goals. In doing so, a self-organized school sets a new benchmark for evaluating site-based data and examples of a process that turns theory into practice. This includes better ways to begin a reform process and understand the roles of technology and feedback in the teaching profession. The theory and practice described in the book are backed by more than 1,600 direct classroom observations, an 8-year study of student achievement, more than 12,000 student evaluations, and a 5-year study of teacher perspectives."--BOOK JACKET.

The Self-Organizing Economy In the last few years the concept of self-organizing systems—complex systems in which randomness and chaos seem spontaneously to evolve into unexpected order—has linked together researchers in many fields, from artificial intelligence to chemistry, from evolution to geology. Now leading economist Paul Krugman shows how principles that explain the growth of hurricanes and embryos can also explain the formation of cities and business cycles; how the same principles of “order from random growth” can explain the strangely simple rules that describe the sizes of earthquakes, meteorites, and metropolitan areas. Weaving together strands from many disciplines, from location theory to biology, The Self-Organizing Economy offers a surprising new view of how the economy structures itself in space and time.

Self-Organised Schools: Educational Leadership and Innovative Learning Environments describes the results of the research we carried out at fourteen Italian schools that highlight how there is a positive correlation between the capabilities of school self-organization and the innovativeness of learning environments: in other words, the more self-organized schools are, the more innovative learning environments are. The results of this work are part of the strand of research of bottom-up emergency and self-organization, an extremely fruitful trend as shown by Sugata Mitra, the founder of the Self-Organized Learning Environments, according to whom, education is a self-organized system where learning is an emerging phenomenon. This book gives new insights on self-organization studies, and most of all, to the idea that change - organizational and educational innovation - sparks from the bottom. This book is aimed specifically at school principals of all levels, scholastic reformers, educational scholars, organisation and management consultants who want to innovate learning and management of learning. These actors will benefit drawing useful examples from more than thirty different learning environments worldwide, fourteen examples of schools that self-organize, two frameworks - and two ready-to-use questionnaires - measuring the innovativeness of a learning environment, and the capability of a school to self-organize. Self-organization is the most fascinating future of innovative principals

This book challenges the orthodoxy of learning and teaching in higher education with an original change approach entitled the Self-Organizing University (SOU). It assists universities build a comprehensive model of learning and teaching at whole-of-organization scale. The chapters demonstrate how a Self-Organizing University can create: • measurable learning and teaching standards; • student centered program development; • enhanced faculty professional growth and career trajectory; • more efficient and effective organizational design; • better feedback; • powerful use of technologies; • a legitimate connection between quality and productivity. Each chapter includes case examples derived from practical experience that situate the key ideas and concepts in the real day-to-day work of universities. The role of leadership in creating and sustaining a self-organizing university is also a key focus. The chapters target leadership practices that improve learning and teaching quality and productivity and assist universities realize their goals and aspirations for maximizing student learning.

Founded by Bik van der Pol, the Dutch collaborative art duo of Liesbeth Bik (b. 1959) and Jos van der Pol (b. 1961), the School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as a collective made-up of artists and architects who recognized the missing as a matter of urgency in public space and how cultural education was so close yet so far removed from cultural production. They investigated what cultures laid the foundations for the loss that we are experiencing from modernization, and how we can learn from this loss. Their project was recreated for programming at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. It also became the subject of the Sandberg Institutes first publication in this new cultural series. The School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise, to trust that seeing, and to set our own pedagogical terms. essays by Liz Allan, Bik van der Pol, Charles esche, e. C. feiss, Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Sarah Pierce, eloise Sweetman, Paulo Tavares, and nato Thompson.

Interest in complexity theory, a relation of chaos theory, has become well established in the business community in recent years. Complexity theory argues that systems are complex interactions of many parts which cannot be predicted by accepted linear equations. In this book, Keith Morrison introduces complexity theory to the world of education, drawing out its implications for school leadership. He suggests that schools are complex, nonlinear and unpredictable systems, and that this impacts significantly within them. As schools race to keep up with change and innovation, he suggests that it is possible to find order without control and to lead without coercion. Key areas: * schools and self-organisation * leadership for self-organisation * supporting emergence through the learning organisation * schools and their environments * communication * fitness landscapes This book will be of interest to headteachers and middle managers, and those on higher level courses in educational leadership and management.

For centuries, humankind has believed that the world with all its form and structure was created by supernatural forces. In recent decades science has shaken these beliefs with the discovery of the exciting possibility of a self-created and self-creating world — of self-organization. Synergetics endeavours to reveal the intimate mechanisms of self-organization. The transitions from chaos to order, the nature of self-organization, the various approaches to it and certain philosophical inferences are outlined. Synergetics thus represents a remarkable confluence of many strands of thought, and has become a paradigm in modern culture. This book exposes the reader to striking new vistas in physics and mathematics, chemistry and biology, social sciences and philosophy — all interlocked around the concept of self-organization.