Peter Senge on Organizational Learning: in a Q&A, he applies his concepts to school systems and their leaders - Interview

School Administrator, May, 2003 by Amelia Newcomb

If Peter Senge is eager to make one If point, it's this: Kids learn in schools that learn.

That seems simple enough. Yet Senge, director of the Society for Organizational Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Field-book for Educators, Parents and Everyone Who Cares About Education, says the institution in which we place our greatest hopes for children's futures is often stuck in tradition and industrial-era thinking.

To make matters worse, its clientele--more specifically, its clientele's parents--wants the most creative approaches, but fears anything that might threaten test performance.

Creating and sustaining thoughtful improvement is a high priority for school leaders. But it can be an elusive goal, especially as schools struggle to strike a balance between longstanding practices and experimentation to fix problems. And resorting to a familiar top-down form of leadership doesn't always yield the desired results.

Senge is one of the world's leading experts on how organizations can develop new ways to communicate and grow. He knows too well the damage that can be done when an organization gets caught up in the "fad cycle"--where a new idea holds leaders' imaginations for just a year or two, instead of the five or even 10 years that might be necessary for true reform.

Senge argues that help in breaking this pattern that afflicts many schools may lie in a simple if little-appreciated idea: rejecting a focus on the "outer" world of institutional structures and procedures in favor of a closer look at "mental models."

In other words, he says, to educate children well, school superintendents and cafeteria workers alike need to scrutinize how they think about their jobs. They must become aware of deeply ingrained assumptions they may not even know they have--but that can inhibit their performance or blind them to new possibilities.

"The central message of The Fifth Discipline," Senge writes, "is more radical than 'radical organization redesign'--namely that our organizations work the way they work, ultimately, because of how we think and how we interact. Only by changing how we think can we change deeply embedded policies and practices. Only by changing how we interact can shared visions, shared understandings and new capacities for coordinated action be established."

It's a distinct shift from the constant focus on discrete problems--low math scores, say--or to look at a school in isolation from its community. And it dramatically reorients our notions of leadership. Senge wants to toss out the idea that most of a child's learning takes place within a certain structure and promote instead the idea that all parts of a community--its superintendent and teachers, to be sure, but also its businesses and families--are integral to and responsible for learning.

At first blush, it may sound a touch utopian. But if Senge is right, rethinking traditional patterns of leadership and interaction will result in long-term shifts that produce a true learning community, where improvement becomes a lifelong journey instead of an ultimate and often-imperfect destination.

What follows are excerpts from a recent interview Senge granted The School Administrator.

Q: Most people think that schools immediately qualify as learning organizations. Do they?

Senge: People think schools should be learning organizations, but there's no reason in fact for that to be the case. School is about training and socialization, that's its history. The history of school originally was to train workers for factories. So you wanted certain standards of numeracy and literacy, but it was every bit as important that people knew how to pay attention to the time clock and to learn to work under schedule pressure.

People had to learn to become obedient to authority, and the definition of learning was getting the answer the teacher knew in advance. It doesn't really make a very good model for learning how to be a good parent or how to be a good spouse or how to do any of the things that really matter to us as learning. But it became the model, and after a while, it became what learning looked like in work, too: You learn to please the boss.

Q: Are we developing a new sense of the mission of schools? Can that result in a greater disconnect between what we think school can be and what it seems to be much of the time?

Senge: There's growing dis-ease on virtually every front around schools and learning. I think [there is a] disconnect between the reality of the world today and the reality of the world kids are growing up in and the schoolroom model of learning: Sit down, be quiet, follow what the teacher tells you, and try to get the right answers on tests. By the time kids are 9,10 or 11, they've become pretty well socialized, and they're either with the program or in active rebellion. We see a lot of kids, not just poor kids but middle-class kids, who are really disengaged. But they have this dilemma: either they get with the program or they are not going to get into the right college.