From School Delusion to Design

This book explains how school organization by age (grade) alone, sets schools on a factory course that is harmful and ultimately self-defeating to all involved and to ecology. It returns us to three systems thinking concepts; purpose, measures, and method. The book explains why school managers and administrators are deluded by the system they operate and by how they understand complexity (the variety of value demand on the system, or what people need to be able to draw-down to make progress).
This book returns us to the fundamental confusion of purpose. It involves revisiting our interpretation of human psychology and its application in the workplace-seeking out flaws in our organizational thinking and finding the best means of putting us back in touch with who we are-our thinking selves. The answer, or at least its start, is Vertical Tutoring. Vertical Tutoring (mixed-age groups) is the first domino of a redesign process. It changes all learning relationships and through personalization and it is this that drives the management task. It is the first domino needed for better systemic change and ensures that parents, students, and everyone employed by the school is involved in learning.
For school leaders, parents, teachers and students, this means redesigning the way school management works, identifying values driven purposes from the customers' perspective, and the roles stakeholders play in trying to make the work, work. In short, this book cuts through the dross of the great education debate and offers a better, more innovative, and safer way forward -and at no cost.

Peter A. Barnard has been involved in education for over forty years as a successful high school principal, international trainer, speaker, and writer. He is a passionate advocate of Vertical Tutoring (school organization based mixing all age-groups) as the managerial means of understanding and meeting the many challenges schools around the world face today. He is the author of The Systems Thinking School: Redesigning Schools from the Inside-Out, published by Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Way We Think We Think Isn't the Way We Think We Think
2. The Five Disciplines
3. Complexity and Demand in Systems Thinking
4. A Letter, Some Thoughts, and Some Math
5. The Real Problem is the Way We See the Problem
6. Problems, Purpose, Energy, and Complexity
7. The Systems Thinking Process to Seeing
8. Background to the Checking Process
9. Counter-intuitive Truths and the Nature of Leverage Points
10. Learning in Loops
11. Unlearning and Training a School
12. Psychology and Design for Learning
13. Psychology as the Arbiter of Design
14. Drawing up a Design Spec
15. Learning from Finland and Other Jurisdictions
16. Learning about Customers
17. Managing the Change Process: the Implementation of Vertical Tutoring
18. The Journey from Delusion to Design
Bibliography
Glossary