Designing Communities of Learning - Introduction

Scenic View in Western Afghanistan, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

By Clarence Thompson

We now consist of two large teaching teams: one in North Portland, and one in inner Southeast Portland.  In addition, one of our teachers runs a SUN after-school math program in North-Central Portland once a week after her regular job.  And we are working on starting at least one, and possibly two new teaching initiatives in East Portland within the next month.  Lastly, we have a growing textbook writers' team which has published three books and is about to start on a fourth.

None of us who teach does so as a profession - this isn't our day job.  Yet we are aware of the obvious failures of the public school system in general, and particularly the public school districts in the Portland Metro area.  These failures can be captured in three summary statements: 

• Schools no longer effectually teach mathematics (or other subjects like grammar).
• Instead, schools waste the time of kids.
• And the schools inflict educational trauma on kids who have to attend them.

These failures fall particularly hard on children of color.  Therefore we work to correct these failures by working outside the school system.  Our focus and mission is teaching basic arithmetic, algebra and college-prep math to children of color who would otherwise be failed by the public school system.  But learning takes place in a particular physical and relational setting.  If a teacher (or better yet, a collective of teachers) is to maximize their effectiveness, they must design the learning setting for maximal effectiveness.  And because so much learning takes place in social settings, this requires the design of an optimal learning community.

But where do teachers start in designing optimal learning communities?  What constraints do they face, and how should an intelligent recognition of these constraints guide them in the design of the community and its strategies of learning?  These are challenging questions, and I do not claim to have all the answers.  But I will tell you some of what we are trying in the North Portland large team.

My wrestlings with these questions led me to a lot of online research over the last three months, and in the course of that research I stumbled across a rather obscure book titled The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon.  I also discovered a relatively obscure concept denoted by the German word Auftragstaktik.  The concepts captured in reflective practice and Auftragstaktik are related.  

The premise of The Reflective Practitioner is that practicing professionals (even those who are doing things they are not getting paid for, like volunteering free time to teach kids after working hours) fall into a trap when they blindly take theories based on a narrow, scholastically-generated definition of "scientific research" and try to apply them to situations whose elements fall far outside the boundaries of the neatly defined experimental settings of the modern university.  To paraphrase a quote in the book, professionals don't solve problems - instead, they manage messes.  The goal of reflective practice is to help professionals impose the order of a desired outcome or set of outcomes on a situation that seems initially to be chaotic, a situation that is very much "non-textbook."  This requires the practitioner to be in a constant dialogue with the situation he is working with, as he tries various moves and listens to or observes the situation's countermoves in response to his moves.  He then refines or modifies his moves in response to the countermoves of the situation.  An example of this is the way in which a community of people might plan a living situation in a certain geographical area - for instance, how a group of people might work together to found a village in a place subject to certain geographical constraints (like a river that periodically floods or the presence or absence of fertile farmland or mountains), as well as certain relational constraints (such as who wants to live where, and how well the prospective villagers are connected to each other).

This reflective practice is illustrated in the concept of Auftragstaktik, a military term which denotes a distinct strategic approach to imposing order on a battlefield.  Auftragstaktik is one of two general approaches, and both have a common goal: to maximize the chances for winning battles.  However, the "set-piece" approach seeks to maximize the chances of success by eliminating all uncertainty from the battlefield.  This is done by having one mastermind (or a small cadre of masterminds) draft a detailed plan down to the level of the individual soldier and making every member of their force memorize the plan and their place in it.  The problem with this approach is that the mastermind (or small team of masterminds) must be omniscient in order to anticipate all the things the enemy will do that the original plan didn't take into account.  Also, an individual soldier may notice that things are not going by the book, yet he is not given the freedom to act on his realization unless the mastermind behind the overall plan gives him permission.

On the other hand, the basic premise of Auftragstaktik is that war is inherently chaotic.  Moreover, it is impossible in modern warfare for one person (or one small team of people) to know everything about a modern battle while it is happening.  Therefore, strategy must be defined at a high level as a set of goals or "mission intents."  Then the subordinate troops must be given this set of goals along with the freedom to take the initiative to achieve the goal assigned to them, the freedom to adapt their tactics to the ever-changing situations they encounter, and the training to make sure that their initiative will succeed.  An example of this is the order given by Oberst Kurt Zeitzler to his troops before the German invasion of France in 1940: "Gentlemen, I demand that your divisions completely cross the German borders, completely cross the Belgian borders, and completely cross the River Meuse.  I don't care how you do it, that's completely up to you."

As I previously said, the authors of both approaches have the same goal in mind: they want to win.  But the second approach is vastly better suited to situations that are non-textbook, to situations that require creativity and reflective practice, to a conversation with a situation in which the practitioner makes moves, listens to the situation's back-talk and revises his original moves or makes new moves in his pursuit of his ultimate goal.  And therefore, both Auftragstaktik and reflective practice are a perfect way to approach the endeavor of teaching kids - especially kids who have to grow up in the disruptive environment of modern American society.  The one thing that Auftragstaktik demands of a team is that all its members be united on the strategic goals of the team.  A team of people who have diverging goals is not an example of Auftragstaktik.  As for me, as a person of color I know with absolute certainty what my strategic goals are.  Among the people who have come into contact with this project, I am happy to say that there is a group of us who are united in our dedication to the same goals.  I won't put those goals into words in this post, but in pictures they look like creating a group of children of color who can do this (6th grade), and this (3rd grade), and this (4th grade), and this (middle school/high school), and this (middle school/high school).  My next few posts will describe the situation we find in teaching our particular group of students, and our reflective dialogue with our teaching situation.  But for the present, I will leave you with a picture of a happy student of ours who won a flash card contest at our teaching session two weeks ago.