Episode 55: Systems Thinking for School Leadership and Educational Reform with Luke Roberts

Luke Roberts Brings a Tons of Experience to FocusED ListenersDr. Luke Roberts has worked in education in the UK for over 20 years to address issues of conflict, bullying, and educational opportunities. He worked on the national evaluation of restorative justice in schools before becoming a practitioner and trainer.He became increasingly concerned that the whole school approach was not working and did an MBA, M.Ed., before completing his Ph.D. exploring schools as complex adaptive systems. This reframing of schools is central to his book and seeks to address the challenge of why innovation does not last in educational settings.He has also worked in communities and prison settings to promote conflict resolution. He joined Highfive in the USA to promote sustainable solutions to educational challenges as Chief Innovation Officer.He also advises government departments on system approaches and is a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Arts. His recent book is called Leading Schools and Sustaining Innovation. You can follow Dr. Luke Roberts on X: @LukeshRoberts. _________________________________________ FocusED Show Notes with Luke RobertsFollowing his PhD, Luke wrote this book to make sure leaders can understand complexity without being too challenged by academic literature.Luke wants leaders to have a usable framework for sustaining innovation.Luke says schools are much more like beehives than machines. In machines, you can take parts out, but beehives are much more interconnected.He talked about the hub and spoke model of school leadership whereby all of the spokes are centered on the leader. Then, when the leader leaves, the innovations die. Dr. Roberts tells a real story about this happening.One problem that we discuss is that humans like power and actually like the fact that the system revolves around them.Listen to what he says about being in a production-mind versus being a gardener. This requires an identity shift for the school leader.The conversation about the network effect in schools is fascinating, especially since it deviates from the traditional hub and spoke model.Joe asked about the next steps that leaders can make to work toward the networked model.No one perspective is going to solve the problem.Don’t miss what he says about zooming out and validating history before moving forward.Systems thinking is much different than change theory, which Luke says is part of the problem. Change theory is often linear and “beehives” are not linear organizations.Luke calls for a greater focus on young peoples’ futures and schools that spend time on students’ sense of identity and how they will interface with society in the future.Joe underscores the fact school is often something that is done to students rather than for them.Dr. Roberts talks about injecting creativity into the system so that more educators are working in a safe space where they can be creative in the way they think about changing their school.We need the ability to play with boundaries, including time and the way the day unfolds. The structures of the day can limit the ability for people to think creatively and change the future of the environment.Luke says that once you start to see systems, it’s so hard to unsee them. He references Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a systems thinker.Luke asks the audience to ponder how we think about change, not reduce but increase what we should do.