I have recently read Chaos by J. Gleik and it has got me thinking about how chaos theory might be applicable to education.  Now this does remind me of a professional development session some years back delivered by Roy Leighton where he referred to chaos and the butterfly effect, although I cant quite remember the context in which Roy  raised the topic.

Now before I go any further let me just point out I am no expert of chaos theory, the maths behind it or how it might apply to living world, physics, etc so what I present here are my thoughts based on the limited amount I have read and how I have came to understand it.

Chaos theory and entropy

One of key words I use with my technology services team is that of entropy, or the 2^nd law of thermodynamics.   For me this is the need for us to constantly expend energy and effort in order to create a stable state and maintain order, where the world around us seeks chaos and disorder.   I make this point to highlight that things can go wrong and inevitably will go wrong, plus that things will change, often at short notice.    We therefore need to be constantly exerting energy, changing our approach and adjusting to try and maintain the stable state we wish.   This stable state might be a great service provided to teachers, a reliable IT infrastructure or excellent teaching and learning.   Either way we are going to have to be constantly putting in effort to achieve the state we wish to achieve and keep things there.

For me this links a little to chaos, and maybe is extended by the concept of chaos, in that even a stable system can show some unpredictability and variation leading to a constant need to exert effort to address these variations and try and keep the system, education, teaching and learning and technology services, stable.    It also highlights for me that no matter how stable the system is, for example this years autumn term when compared to last years autumn term, there will also be a degree of variability and chaos having an impact.

Education and data

It is the use of data in education which is where I think chaos is particularly appropriate.   We seek to us very simplistic models to allow us to compare students, to compare schools and even to compare whole national education systems.    Is their pass rate higher than ours, and is this years pass rate higher than last years rate?     Is the value added calculation for this years set of students greater or lesser than last years, or greater or lesser than other local or competing schools?     The issue with this is that it implies that education is so very simple that it can be so easily measured and compared.    It doesn’t take much thinking to realise the almost infinite number of variables which might have an impact on results, including results for a given school.    Socio-economic factors, local events, school leadership focus, the culture of the school and of the surrounding community, and much, much more all go to impact on results.   Now if we ignore chaos theory we might simply say that the impact of these things might be minor when factored across a whole cohort of students, however the reality is that these factors can grossly change the outcomes.   Chaos theory, or my interpretation of it, shows that small variations can have overall impact rather than being negligible and able to be disregarded.    It may even be that a single event can nudge results significantly positive or negative, with the event itself barely remembered when the results come out.    Basically, our approach to data and to measuring educational outcomes is simple, which is great in terms of people understanding the facts and figures, but is wholly lacking in any real appreciation of the complexity of education, and therefore quite significantly flawed.

What matters is what we measure?

And then to make things worse, we have the issue that we often focus on what is easy to measure, so on these simplistic measures, with that then becoming central to our efforts.    So is student exam grades provide a simplistic but easily measurable indicator of learning, we focus on achieving better exam grades when maybe we should be focussing on better ways to measure learning.     Technology for me is having a key impact here as surely we need to ask why it is so important to memorise facts, as students are required to do for exams, when in the real world you can simple Google the information.   As for coursework, the recent growth in generative AI must surely force us to question our approach to coursework.    So, do we need to reconsider what we measure and also how we measure it?

For me this may be a large part of the issue in that education has changed little in over a century, being still largely built on classroom of students sat in front of a teacher, tests, coursework and homework, while the world has changed significantly over the same period and even over shorter periods.   Just consider technology and the impact social media has had over 20 years, or the impact of generative AI which has happened in the last 3 years, post ChatGPTs public release.   The world is moving fast, the world is inherently chaotic, and if we look specifically at education, it involves groups of human beings in the students and teachers, which add yet many more variables to the mix.

Concluison

As humans we like simple narratives such as “GCSE grades have fallen again”.    But this fails to capture the complexities and variables which feed into education, into teaching and learning, and eventually into the simple measure, exam results, which are often used to measure the success, or failure, or education systems, schools and even individual students.   The world however isn’t simple and is subject to entropy and a bit of chaos.   I remember reading something on statistics which suggested as we add further variables our ability to measure and predict goes exponentially downwards.    So, if we consider education and the variables as they relate to individual students, teachers, school contexts, parents, and much more, our ability to accurately measure must be very small indeed. 

So, the question is, how do we better deal with chaos and the pace of change within the world when looking at education?      I suspect the answer lies in decentralising to allow for local needs to be addressed, on trust and on transparency to reduce the importance of centralised measures, and on a move to a more individualised rather than industrialised education system.   Easy said, although am not so sure its as easy to implement and achieve.