Tag: science

The Science of Feedback Loops

Posted on | by Sam

Our world is made of circles: 

Living and dying. Energy and entropy. Cause and effect. 

Why, then, do we so often see straight lines?

According to systems theorist Peter Senge, “one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.” And Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. 

“If we want to see systemwide interrelationships,” says Senge, “we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles.”

This is the language, and the science, of feedback loops.

Most commonly, we use the word feedback to describe the process of gathering opinions about ourselves — all too often, unidirectionally (“How did I do?”). In systems thinking, however, feedback is a broader concept that means a reciprocal flow of influence. 

We are always a part of the process, in other words, and never an impartial observer. 

Everyone shares responsibility for the problems created by the systems they inhabit. 

And every influence is both cause and effect.  

This represents a profound shift in awareness, one that requires us to acknowledge that we are both influenced by and influencing our reality (and one another’s) all the time. 

Feedback loops provide a language to map and explain that activity, biologically.  

There are two types of loops, the first of which is called regulatory or negative feedback. The balancing feedback these loops provide exist whenever and wherever there’s a goal-oriented behavior required.  The work of a thermostat is an easy example — but so is the myopia of a school district oriented around its test scores. 

In these sorts of systems, if the goal is one you like, you’ll be happy — and if it isn’t, you’ll be thwarted at every effort to change things until you either change the goal or weaken its influence. 

Negative feedback loops, therefore, keep systems on track once the course has been established, and use information to help the system achieve its predetermined outcomes — even if those outcomes are not explicitly named or understood. 

This sort of system is great for machines — and lousy for human beings.

But there is a second type of feedback loop, positive or amplifying. These loops use information differently — not to maintain the status quo, but to notice something new and amplify it into messages that signal a larger need to change.

Positive loops do not promote order, but disequilibrium, which is the hallmark of a true living system — to continuously import energy from the environment and export entropy in order to constantly change and grow. Our understanding of them grows out of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s work on thermodynamics, which demonstrated that, prior to the conventional wisdom up to that point, disequilibrium is in fact the necessary condition for growth in a living system. 

As he explained, they’re called dissipative structures because of their paradoxical nature — they give up their previous form(s) in order to become something new, over and over. This is why they’re called self-organizing systems. As Margaret Wheatley puts it, “The viability and resiliency of a self-organizing system comes from its great capacity to adapt as needed, to create structures that fit the moment. Neither form nor function alone dictates how the system is organized. Instead, they are process structures, reorganizing into different forms in order to maintain their identity.”

They are, in other words, precisely what our human systems are not — and need to be. 

Adaptive, not rigid. 

Resilient, not stable.

In sum, if stability is the goal, runaway amplification can be very threatening — think of a shrieking microphone — and we may be wise to quell it before our eardrums burst. But if what we seek is something more emergent in its response to new information, positive feedback is essential to life’s ability to adapt and change, whether it’s your own backyard, a healthy workplace culture, or the Twitter storm that helped fuel the Arab Spring. 

It is, quite simply, nature’s way of saying that the system needs to change.

 

The Science of a Murmuration of Starlings

Posted on | by Sam

What words can do justice to the magic of a million birds, flying and weaving as one? Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?

There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what starlings do and how they make us feel when we see them.  Yet the flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior,  and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember.

Starlings are native to several continents, although North America is not one of them.  Back in 1890, however, a Shakespeare enthusiast decided that all birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays should be brought to North America (the starling makes its star turn in Henry IV, Part 1). His idea worked — a little too well. From an initial group of 100 birds, the starling population in North America now tops 200 million. And it is the behavior of each bird in those massive, undulating flocks that makes the starling so notable — and, for some, so magical. 

Almost a century ago, the British ornithologist Edmund Selous asserted that these “handsome, lively, vivacious birds” were telepathic. Today, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake suggests that starling behavior is an example of his hypothesis of morphic resonance, or the notion that the laws of nature are “more like habits, ones in which each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.” And yet beyond these appreciations and speculations, we have lacked the ability to concretely explain how a murmuration works — how one million individual creatures can dart and soar in self-organizing synchrony . . . until now.

Thanks to the work of two separate studies from 2013, we now know that individual starlings all obey the same few flight rules:

Watch your seven nearest neighbors.

Fly toward each other, but don’t crowd.

And if any of your neighbors turn, turn with them.

Why do they do this? According to one of the studies, “when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” 

By following this rule of seven, the birds become part of a dynamic system in which each individual part combines to make a whole with emergent properties. This collective behavior allows the birds to gather information on their surroundings and self-organize toward an ideal density, one in which optimal patterns of light and dark are produced that can deliver information to the entire flock (and protect them from predators). The closer each bird pays attention, the safer — and more cohesive — the entire flock becomes.

Of course, this sort of swarming behavior is not unique to starlings. Many different animals, from birds and insects to fish and mammals, have been observed in their own form of a swarm. So what can this behavior teach us about ourselves, our organizations, and our ability to change the story of the way we work and learn?

According to Andreas Weber, author of The Biology of Wonder, “the spirit of poetic ecology is the spirit of swarms. To understand the individual, we need to understand its environment, and each through the other. We have to think of beings always as interbeings.

“We are a swarm ourselves,” Weber writes, “and we form swarms. A swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence. In this respect, a swarm (or a murmuration) is an intensified counterpart of ourselves. It is what we are and what we try to imagine with our conscious thinking. Swarms are solidified feeling. The swarm is — and in its being living dynamics and their expression are welded together in one single gesture.”

In other words, a murmuration is more than just a pretty metaphor for thinking differently about organizational behavior; it’s a reminder, in physical form, that our own bodies, cultures and classrooms are governed by the same rules. As Weber puts it, “we see gestalts of the living that behave according to simple organic laws mirroring the great constellation that every living being has to cope with: to persist, to be close to the other, but not so close as to collide with him. These are the principles of poetic forms that are so thorough we can even teach them to a computer. They are the primary shapes of a poetics of living things.”

The Science of Honeybee Democracy

Posted on | by Sam

There may be no creature on earth more vital to our own well-being than the honeybee — the primary pollinator for fifty different fruit and vegetable crops that make up the most nutritious portion of our daily diet.

Less debatable, however, is whether this same bee is also the ideal model for our ongoing efforts to craft a more perfect union — or at least Shakespeare thought so, when he described honeybees as the “creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”  

But why? And how?

According to the American biologist Thomas Seeley, it’s because of the ways honeybees relate to one another — clearly, constructively, and collaboratively. “The process of evolution operating over millions of years,” he explains, “has shaped the behavior of bees so that they coalesce into a single collective intelligence. Just as a human body functions as a single integrated unit even though it is a multitude of cells, the superorganism of a honeybee colony operates as a single coherent whole even though it is a multitude of bees.”

Although there are many examples of this in honeybee behavior, the most illustrative occurs every year in late spring and early summer, when a beehive is most likely to get overpopulated. When this occurs, roughly one-third of the hive’s bees promptly elect to stay and rear a new queen — who will ultimately be chosen, no holds barred, from the current queen’s few surviving daughters — while the remaining two-thirds politely accept their eviction notices and leave with the old queen to set out into the great unknown and create a new colony.

When they depart, as many as 10,000 honeybees can form a swarm cloud as large as 60 feet across. Yet within minutes, the bees will quickly reassemble somewhere into a beard-shaped cluster, and then hang that way for the next several hours or days, awaiting word, while several hundred of the swarm’s oldest citizens spring into action as nest-site scouts and begin exploring a swath of the surrounding countryside — as large as 30 square miles — for a suitable new home. 

This is, to be clear, a life or death decision. 

To survive in winter, a hive must be able to contract itself into a tight, well-insulated cluster — about the size of a basketball. They must find a home that is high enough to avoid detection by hungry predators. And they must have space for the copious amounts of provisions — i.e., honey, as much as 44 pounds of it — that will have to sustain them until Spring. 

Despite these stakes, the swarm will make this decision within hours, and from as many as 30 different possible nest sites.  And they will do all of this democratically, without any central leader. Indeed, despite her name, the Queen Bee is not the boss of anyone, and a honeybee hive is governed collectively — a harmonious society of hexagonal cells wherein thousands of worker bees, “through enlightened self-interest, cooperate to serve a colony’s common good.” 

In a swarm, this happens when the nest scouts all set out in different directions in search of the perfect new home. When they think they’ve found one, they return to the group and offer a sort of “waggle dance,” a series of movements that outline the central characteristics of the proposed site, and invite other bees who agree on its merits to join them in waggle-dancing.

This continues as more and more scouts return, and gradually, a face-to-face, consensus-seeking assembly takes place in which an eventual winner is democratically determined. “One way to think of a honeybee colony, then, is as a society of many thousands of individuals,” Seeley explains. “But to understand the distinctive biology of this species of bee, it is often helpful to think of a colony in a slightly different way, not just as thousands of separate bees but also as a single living entity that functions as a unified whole.”

In that sense, the collective decision making of a bee swarm resembles an archetypal New England town meeting, one in which each decision reflects the freely given contributions of several hundred individuals; is informed by multiple sources simultaneously, even ones that are widely scattered; and is made by staging an open competition among the proposed alternatives. “In this way, Seeley continues, “the roughly three pounds of bees in a swarm, just like the three pounds of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions.”

(Y)our move, homo sapiens . . .

The Science of Spirals

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Science of Spirals

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes!”

— Carl Jung

A Nautilus shell and a Chameleon’s tail. 

The Milky Way and the Double Helix.

A hurricane and a human finger. 

The Parthenon and the Pyramids. 

Or the dive path of a peregrine falcon and the propulsive power of the human heart. 

All are naturally occurring designs, from the macrocosm to the microcosm. And all are based on the same universal form and formula — the ratio of 1.618 — that has been called everything from the Golden Section to Nature’s Secret Code to the language of God itself.

This is the pattern of the spiral — and it is equal parts science and spirituality, and a reminder of the inherent numinosity of the natural world.

Our awareness of the spiral goes back as far as human history can record, from its ubiquity in Stone Age art to its place in Shiva’s hand as a symbol of the instrument of creation. It is the emblem of geomancy, and the path by which we describe either upward or downward growth.

The word itself is a reminder of its deep roots in our collective memory.  In Latin, the word volute, or “spiral movement,” lives on in current words we use to describe the change process itself, from evolution to revolution. In ancient Greek, the word spirare  means “to breathe.” And in Sanskrit, the word for spiral is also the name of a form of yoga that relies on breath to harness the upward, circular path of tantric energy through the body and towards a higher state of consciousness: kundalini.

Despite its mystical origins, however (not to mention its ubiquitous recurrence in nature), the spiral’s spiritual significance has become somewhat lost in our modern world. But it was not lost to past generations — and if the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung is to be believed, its significance still swirls through our collective unconscious. 

The rules for a spiral’s universal design are simple enough: divide a line into two parts, with one of the two parts longer than the other, such that the ratio of the whole line to the longer section is the same as the ratio between the two sections — a number that is almost two-thirds, but not quite. 

.618. 

Also known as phi, this number was integral to the geometry of antiquity. It was used as a basis for the construction of the world’s most sacred buildings. It provided Leonardo da Vinci with the symmetrical structure of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and inspired Vincent Van Gogh’s brushstroke patterns in Starry, Starry Night. 

Da Vinci also saw in the spiral’s form and function an unmatched design for the transmission of energy, as demonstrated in his hydraulic devices and Archimedean screws. And after learning from ancient Sanskrit texts about a different form for its expression — one in which the last two integers of a sequence are added together to make the next number, such that the ratio of each term to the previous one gradually converges to a limit of  . . . you guessed it . . . 1.618 — the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci helped it achieve a wider application.

Indeed, plants, animals, human beings, and the galaxies of the universe all possess dimensional properties that adhere to the ratio of phi to 1. 

Why?

Its beauty and mystery comes from the fact that no one can say for sure. But close observers feel its upward circular path traces a definable pattern of movement that helps govern the one universal constant: change.

As American astronomer Lloyd Motz put it, “The stellar constellations themselves, and the almost mathematical symmetry of the spiral nebulae, are examples of forms and structures that recur time after time throughout the universe, as though there were identical moulds through space into which the matter of the universe has been poured.” 

The great Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler agreed. “There are many turns of the spiral,” he wrote, “from the slime-mould upwards, but at each turn we are confronted with the same polarity, the same Janus-faced holons, one face of which says I am the centre of the world, the other, I am a part in search of the whole.”

 

A Year of Wonder: The Neuroscience of Empathy

Posted on | by Sam

By announcing last month that I wanted 2016 to be a year of wonder, I put friendly pressure on myself to pursue on all the big questions that occurred to me. We’ll see how well I’m able to sustain the energy over the course of the rest of the year, but my first riddle was this: ‘If empathy is what makes us distinctly human, what do we know about the neuroscience of empathy itself?’

If a person wishes to wonder deeply about the world, which ingredient is more important – the person, or the world?

Until recently, our answer was clearly the latter.

For the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which together make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death.

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – and to find an equally endless source of awe and wonder as we do.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to wonder is more than just a desire to daydream; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“What do we human beings do all day long?” asks neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni. “We read the world, especially the people we encounter.”  And according to Iacoboni and his colleagues, we do so by relying on “mirror neurons” – a special subset of the more than 100 billion neurons that are busily and ever at work in the most complex structure in the known universe: the human brain.

They’re called mirror neurons to describe the ways that observing the behavior of someone else – from eating a peanut, to yawning, to experiencing sudden pain – can trigger the same brain activity in the observer as in the observed. “Our brains are capable of mirroring the deepest aspects of the minds of others at the fine-grained level of a single brain cell,” Iacoboni explains. “This is utterly remarkable. Equally remarkable is the effortlessness of this simulation. We do not have to draw complex inferences or run complicated algorithms.

“When we look at others, we find both them and ourselves.”

Similarly, a growing chorus of researchers has begun to suggest empathy is a foundational building block in our process of developing social cognition. “The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

And yet, as far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: strictly speaking, it is not the world that makes us wonder; it is our wondering that makes the world. Or, even more specifically, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana point out, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to realize, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

The downside of all this navel-gazing? A heightened risk of narcissism, consumerism, and reality television.

The upside? A steadily increasing empathic capacity, anchored in our development of a shared sense of vulnerability, and a paradoxical desire to seek “universal intimacy” with the world.

“We are learning,” Rifkin writes, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy – to become an island to oneself – but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. We have been sending out radio communications to the far reaches of the cosmos in the hope of finding some form of intelligent and caring life, only to discover that what we were desperately seeking already exists among us here on Earth.”

 

 

Is the Scientific Method Becoming Less . . . Scientific?

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Is the Scientific Method Becoming Less . . . Scientific?

In my ongoing search to better understand how we reconcile the creative tension between subjective and objective measures of the world — including our ongoing (and thus far) elusive search for a better way of tracking how people learn — I took note of a recent New Yorker article that cast light on some emerging problems with the ostensible foundation of all objective research — the scientific method.

In the article, author Jonah Lehrer highlights a score of multiyear studies — ranging from the pharmaceutical to the psychological — in which core data changed dramatically over time. Drugs that were once hailed as breakthroughs demonstrated a dramatic decrease in effectiveness. Groundbreaking insights about memory and language ended up not being so replicable after all. And the emergence of a new truth in modern science — the “decline effect” — cast doubt on the purely objective foundation of modern science itself.

Without recounting the article in entire, there are several insights that have great relevance to those of us seeking to find a better way of helping children learn:

  • In the scientific community, publication bias has been revealed as a very real danger (in one study, 97% of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, meaning either they were extraordinarily lucky or only publishing outcomes of successful experiments). The lesson seems clear: if we’re not careful, our well-intentioned search for the answers we seek may lead us to overvalue the data that tell us what we want to hear. In the education community, how does this insight impact our own efforts, which place great emphasis on greater accountability and measurement, and yet do so by glossing over a core issue — the individual learning process — that is notoriously mercurial, nonlinear, and discrete?
  • In the scientific community, a growing chorus of voices is worried about the current obsession with “replicability”, which, as one scientist put it, “distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.” In the education community, are we doing something similar — is our obsession with replicability leading us to embrace “miracle cures” long before we have even fully diagnosed the problem we are trying to address?
  • In the scientific community, Lehrer writes, the “decline effect” is so gnawing “because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything.” If these sorts of challenges are confronting the scientific community, how will we in the education community respond? To what extent are we willing to acknowledge that weights and measures are both important — and insufficient? And to what extent are we willing to admit that when the reports are finished and the PowerPoint presentations conclude, we still have to choose what we believe?

The Science of School Renewal

Posted on | by Sam

(NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

There’s a revolution underway in the scientific community, and it’s changing the way we understand both the structure and the inner workings of the universe. These insights have far-reaching implications for all of us – and none of them are being heeded by the leading voices of our current efforts of transform America’s antediluvian public education system.

This is a serious problem.  Here are three examples of what I mean:

1. The Relativity of Learning – Almost everyone is familiar with Albert Einstein’s game-changing theory of relativity – an insight that, overnight, overturned an idea that had governed human thought for more than 200 years. Fewer among us can explain the theory in any depth, but we know this much: Einstein demonstrated that time itself is not, as had been assumed by Isaac Newton and others, a fixed construct that is experienced uniformly, but rather a malleable construct that is experienced relative to something and/or someone else. This seismic development in human thought moved us away from the Newtonian notion of absolutes, and toward a deeper understanding of just how fully we experience the world in particular ways.

The lesson to be learned from this seems clear enough: we should be wary of absolutist thinking in our own lives (and, certainly, in our organizations). Yet contrast this insight with the K-12 education landscape, which is still working in absolutes, and still basing its biggest decisions on a single, standardized measure of success: basic-skills reading and math scores. This doesn’t mean our interest in these subjects is unimportant – literacy and numeracy matter greatly – but it does mean we’ve failed to learn something essential about the nature of things. Otherwise, we’d be asking a different question when it comes to school accountability: If learning, like time, is relative, how can we develop less standardized (and more customized) assessments that will help us know if we’re being successful at helping children learn to use their minds well?

2. The Quantum Mechanics of Motivation – As you may know, although our general rules for understanding the workings of the universe on a macro scale – a.k.a. classical physics – work quite predictably and neatly, those same rules mean absolutely nothing at the messier micro level – a.k.a. quantum mechanics. What quantum mechanics reveal is that relationships are the key determiner of everything. Subatomic particles cannot exist without the presence of another, and the more we try to observe and codify their nonlinear behavior into a series of linear “if/then” statements, the less relevant our insights become. It’s just too complicated – even for quantum scientists.

Similarly, we humans are nonlinear beings, and the relationships we form (or don’t form) are the key determinants of everything in our personal and professional lives. Yet contrast this insight with the K-12 education landscape, in which both elected officials and philanthropic leaders are pursuing if/then incentive programs based on the belief that pay for performance will be the missing tonic our educators need. It’s the difference between a Newtonian view of the world – which views things in straightforward terms of cause and effect – and a Quantum Mechanics view of the world – which recognizes the inherent unpredictability of the entities it is observing.

The good news is we don’t need to be so abstract. Check out these insights from three different studies of human behavior and the human responses to programs, like performance pay, that are based on extrinsic rewards:

  • “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose interest for the activity.” (Deci 1971)
  • “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.” (Amabile 1996)
  • “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation towards the activity.” (Reeve 2004)

Why aren’t we paying attention to this? Or, more to the point, why aren’t we asking a different question when it comes to issues of motivation in the workplace: How can we move from a culture of extrinsic compliance to a culture of intrinsic commitment?

3. The Ecology of Organizational Culture – Finally, there’s the changing way scientists describe the principles of ecology, a word that literally means “the study of the house.” What’s becoming apparent is that order and balance in our house (whether it’s Earth or a country or an elementary school) are not achieved by complex, overly prescribed controls, but by a few clearly delineated simple structures, and with a healthy dose of freedom for individual entities to pursue what they feel is significant. As physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra puts it: “In recent years, biologists and ecologists have begun to shift their metaphors from hierarchies to networks, and have come to realize that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, cooperate, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Apply these insights once again to the K-12 education landscape and you see what to do immediately: move away from the Newtonian change model of “critical mass,” and toward a more modern model of “critical connections.” Educational scholar John Goodlad urged as much following his massive comprehensive study of schooling in America in the 1970s and 1980s: “Schools will improve slowly, if at all,” he wrote, “if reforms are thrust upon them. Rather, the approach having most promise is one that will seek to cultivate the capacity of schools to deal with their own problems, to become largely self-renewing.”

These insights have profound implications for how we structure the science of school renewal – as opposed to the business of school reform – in the years and decades ahead. Instead of a push toward greater standardization and absolute constructs, we should sharpen our assessment tools to become more finely attuned to the relativistic learning needs of children. We should create organizational conditions that nurture intrinsic motivation in adults and children.  And we should be more mindful of the networks and people we will need in order to do the difficult work of systems change, and begin asking ourselves the only question that really matters: Of all the things we can do together, what must we do?