Socio-technical Systems Analysis and Sense Making in Complex Education Environments My name is Steve Albury and in this article I would like to introduce myself and my current research project to you. I believe the findings point to a way of ensuring more effective collaboration in designing and shaping what ‘Quality Improvement’ means in differing ecologies of learning. I really look forward to sharing and discussing these findings and their practical application with both IfL members and others over the coming months. I have been researching effective quality improvement processes in the learning and skills sector for four years. This, I have to admit, has not been an exciting thing to talk about when meeting new people, unless you want them to think you are an obsessive bore. This is in stark contrast to my friend who designs and builds robots. He gets to sound geeky but cool, and people can understand he’s ‘inventing the future’. I am, in contrast, an ethnographer, the recorder of the everyday. I study the humdrum daily practice of those seeking to improve lives through a commitment to education and a willingness to cope with an ever-changing landscape of funding regimes, staff organization charts and curriculum requirements. I could have trodden the more typical path for research into technology in education. I might for example have examined a current trend in a project entitled ‘how Twitter revolutionised my maths classroom’. However, interesting as some of these projects are, there is little evidence to suggest they have had any fundamental effect on classroom practice or on learners’ outcomes. This is discussed by Robertson (2003) who looks back over decades of overpromise and under-delivery from education sector technology. Little has changed today, as a recent editorial in the Learning Media and Technology Journal highlights . In this article Neil Selwyn (2012) shows how ‘computer scientist’ thinking (or ‘technological determinism if you want a label for it) has focused attention on the idea of, ‘here’s a great new piece of technology, now how can we use it in education settings?’ rather than ‘what do we want to achieve and is new technology necessary to help us achieve it?’ I wanted to avoid this style of research. I therefore decided to try a different approach to thinking about technology, by using a more traditional definition, rather than as a synonym for a variety of ICTs. I knew that what interested me was the idea of what is meant by ‘good quality’ in teaching assessments. I wondered how might technology provide richer evidence of classroom life to support the more prosaic data required by most quality reporting – many readers will be familiar with spreadsheets containing data on recruitment, retention, outcomes, success rates, value added and average shoe-size of students. I wanted to dig into more tacit aspects of high performing colleges. For example the people, how they shared and shaped the culture of a college. This led to other questions such as how overall strategy was conveyed down, and real outcomes from
its application conveyed up the inevitable hierarchy. These tacit aspects are part of inspections and everybody knows they are. However, capturing them is not easy, but they do form part of that question asked by everyone in the sector at various times of their working life, “How do we know teaching quality is good?” This is a big question and even the most statistically inclined wouldn’t claim it is purely down to exam results. As a problem it could be approached from many different angles, each of which can provide a useful view. Psychological studies of individuals, sociological examination of the power relationships in a situation and operations research of efficiency and productivity are just some of the lenses through which the people in a college could be studied. For this project though I adopted an approach based on an area of complex systems theory usually referred to as ‘sociotechnical systems analysis’. This treats an organization as a system and looks at the interplay between the different components. These components are basically, the stakeholders, the processes and documents they use and the infrastructure in which everything happens. With this approach it is possible to take an overall view of how a system (in my case a large general FE college) works and identify interesting aspects of where things are effective and where there are gaps. For my study I combined elements in the system into thematic groups The following diagram provides a broad overview of some typical thematic groups (which are a sort of thematic community of practice) that interact with teaching and learning in an FE college system. The interaction between stakeholders is mediated through the environment in which they work and the technologies they use. In this case ‘technologies’ refers to documents and processes such as the self-assessment review process or the Common Inspection Framework, as well as IT systems such as the learning management platform and e-register system.
A High Level Overview of an FE College seen as a socio-technical system:
Leadership and Strategy
Quality Improvement This shows thematic groups and ‘thin’ connections between them:
Teaching and Learning
Workplace culture and practice
If case studies from these are included in the quality improvement process they can provide good evidence of how everyday practice can enrich numerically based quality information
External Drivers
What the diagram shows is that one system is built from many parts but also retains an overall coherency, with the boundary of the system being porous in order to accommodate the requirements of external stakeholders (external elements are shown with dashed lines). The ‘squiggly arrows’ connecting the themes to the central one being examined are indicative of the fluid and transient nature of network connections in the college. These ‘thin connections’ are based on issues of current common interest and dissolve, reconfigure and change membership as necessary. As a socio-technical system a college can be studied ‘in the round’ in a way similar to the ecological models of education that are being revived currently (and are being used to develop interesting approaches to apprenticeship learning), but also in a way that seeks to identify and help shape the processes in use to ensure optimal system performance. In practical terms this means accepting that as a system a college relies on separate
components that need to communicate effectively. Technology, in the form of well understood processes and well designed infrastructure such as building layout and location and IT systems can then support people in achieving organizational objectives. My own study focuses on looking at those squiggly arrows because it is at the boundaries between system components where interests rub against each other and effective ways of working need to be developed. In my next article I will discuss how, based on in depth case studies, general principles for the design of quality improvement systems can be drawn. ‘Design principles’ have been used in fields as far apart as the economics of common fisheries to in-patient healthcare. They can be used to design a locally contextualized version of a solution to a general problem (a good starting read is Elinor Ostrom). I will use an example from my own study connecting the work of the board of governors to practice in the classroom, a squiggly arrow in action!
Steven Albury is a college lecturer and was formerly a head of department before embarking on a career as a student. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford.
References: Ostrom, E. (2000). "Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms." Journal of Economic Perspectives 14(3): 137-158. Robertson, J. W. (2003). "Stepping Out of the Box: Rethinking the Failure of ICT to Transform Schools." Journal of Educational Change 4(4): 323-344. Selwyn, N. (2012). "Ten suggestions for improving academic research in education and technology." Learning Media and Technology.