Individuals and groups can keep up with today’s complex change only when they operate in an ecology that supports continuous learning. As one solution, systems have established professional learning communities (PLCs). However, people often struggle to maintain effective and lively PLCs. In an HSD Learning Ecology Adaptive Action Lab, you will learn to set conditions for collaborative learning communities (CLSs) by addressing four challenges:
- Connect professional learning to desired outcomes
- Sustain engagement and productivity over time
- Support organizational and system change
- Develop a plan to create a learning ecology in your community or classroom
Each day you face intractable challenges that seem to have no answers. Your world is shaped by social, economic, cultural, and community forces you can’t predict or control. Increased diversity of thought, information, and culture overwhelm you. Today’s challenges have no “root cause,” so there is no clear target for change. Traditional PLCs often are not robust enough to build individual or group capacity to adapt and move toward their targets. HSD helps you build deep learning ecologies you—and others—need to function in today’s complexity.
- Stand in inquiry. In complex times, you can’t have enough answers to meet your day-to-day challenges. The best you can do is learn to ask good questions that help you see deeply into your system.
- Use Adaptive Action to build Adaptive Capacity. Adaptive Action uses cycles of inquiry and action to move forward on multiple fronts. You make meaning of your world and take your next action, given local conditions you face. That is the essence of Adaptive Capacity.
- Set conditions for deep learning ecologies wherever you live, work, or play. Whether you are a teacher, CEO, or PLC leader, you can use HSD to build an ecology to support deep learning and wise action for you and your colleagues.
Wherever you live and work, HSD helps you set conditions to build adaptive capacity. In this Lab, you will engage with experts in HSD to build your deep learning ecology. You will learn to shape patterns of inquiry and action between and among learners at all scales. Those patterns will empower members of your learning community to address their most complex and intractable challenges.
It is beneficial to participate live, but we know you have busy schedules! All sessions will be hosted on Zoom.us, and are recorded and made available to you, in case you are unable to attend. The recordings are not shared with anyone who is not enrolled in the course. For more information contact info@hsdinstitute.org.
Faculty & Coaches
Royce Holladay has been working to support people as they navigate change for over 30 years. With a Masters degree in counseling, she began learning about the dynamics of personal change and has been using those skills in multiple areas of her work and personal life since that time. She has worked with individuals of all ages, supporting them to find their own path through the challenges of their complex lives. Over the past decade, Royce has co-authored five books based on Human Systems Dynamics. Her most recent books are a series of brief guides designed to help people apply HSD principles to specific areas of work in human systems. Examples include coaching, instructional design, and facilitation.
Leslie Patterson taught English and language arts in Texas middle and high schools for ten years before becoming a teacher educator. Since then, she has taught undergraduate and graduate teachers, retiring from University of North Texas in 2013. She is now a Co-Director of the North Star of Texas Writing Project, affiliated with the National Writing Project site, and an Associate with Human Systems Dynamics Institute.
Patterson integrates her work on literacy learning and professional development networks with systems-based school reform. Patterson’s recent publications, including Radical Rules for Schools: Adaptive Action for Complex Change, combine her interests in writing instruction, support for multilingual students, professional learning, and school reform—all from a perspective that views teaching and learning as networks of complex adaptive systems.
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