Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the Reform Symposium, #recon10 on Twitter. Many brilliant minds in education from around the globe gathered virtually to share their thoughts and wisdom through an online, interactive “palooza” of seminars, discussions and most importantly conversations with hundreds of other educators. Each and every minute I spent as a participant strengthened my connection with this passionate community, who share a common bond: education reform. As I took in the global perspectives, ideas, experiences and knowledge being shared among us, I began to think about how profoundly I have changed my own education practice this past year since I joined Twitter.
My reflection deepened Saturday as I drove my high school daughter to Ocala, Florida. This jouney involved me spending close to 8 hours on the Florida Turnpike. For my friends that have never traveled this road, there are parts of this interstate highway that are so flat and desolate, you can’t help but think at deeper level. There is often erratic cell phone or radio reception, so you really go off grid. Powered by a little Red Bull (sugar free of course) and the soulful Dave Matthews Band on CD, here are my musings.
The Butterfly Effect (from Wikipedia)
The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system. Although this may appear to be an esoteric and unusual behavior, it is exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with "what if" scenarios where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.
As I started thinking about the Butterfly effect , RECON10 and theories of change I also pondered another model of change that I had discovered through my friend @ToughLoveforX on Twitter.
Source http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-1-2010-fractal-adaptive-cycles.html
The Story of the Butterfly
Source:
http://www.hawaiiswim.org/business/TheButterfly/TheButterfly.html
The story of the butterfly
A man found a cocoon of a butterfly.
One day a small opening appeared.
He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours
as it struggled to squeeze its body through the tiny hole.
Then it stopped, as if it couldn't go further.
So the man decided to help the butterfly.
He took a pair of scissors and
snipped off the remaining bits of cocoon.
The butterfly emerged easily but
it had a swollen body and shriveled wings.
The man continued to watch it,
expecting that any minute the wings would enlarge
and expand enough to support the body,
Neither happened!
In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life
crawling around.
It was never able to fly.
What the man in his kindness
and haste did not understand:
The restricting cocoon and the struggle
required by the butterfly to get through the opening
was a way of forcing the fluid from the body
into the wings so that it would be ready
for flight once that was achieved.
Sometimes struggles are exactly
what we need in our lives.
Going through life with no obstacles would cripple us.
We will not be as strong as we could have been
and we would never fly.
As the miles rolled by on my return trip home, I realized how much we, as innovative catalysts for change have in common with butterflies. While change is cyclical, multi-linear, sometimes random, constant, at times painful, and chaotic… it is also necessary. A year ago, I had never used Twitter. Today, I don’t want to think about teaching without it and the community and friends I have discovered there. Chances are Twitter won’t last forever, but as educators, like the adaptive models of change, we must embrace change as a constant in our lives and practice, rather then a single event to overcome. We must keep learning. My goal this year, is to keep challenging myself and others to keep innovating, growing, learning and spreading our collective knowledge and to constantly innovate and transform education. For starters, I think we can learn a lot from butterflies.
