A school as an open system 2 PDF

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Introduction There is no clear cut definition of a system but according to the businessdictionary.com, a system can be defined as a set of detailed methods, procedures and routines created to carry out a specific activity, perform a duty, or solve a problem. An organized, purposeful structure that consists of interrelated and interdependent elements (components, entities, factors, members, parts etc.). These elements continually influence one another directly or indirectly to maintain their activity and the existence of the system, in order to achieve the goal of the system. A system is also commonly termed as a group of interacting units or elements that have a common purpose. (Senge, 2006) defines a system as an interrelated set of elements functioning as an operating unit. Systems are generally classified as open systems and closed systems and they can take the form of mechanical, biological, or social systems. Open systems theory was developed after World War II in reaction to earlier theories of organizations, such as the human relations perspective of Elton Mayo and the administrative theories of Henri Fayol, which treated the organization largely as a self-contained entity. Virtually all modern theories of organization operate around the open systems perspective. Open systems theory originated in the natural sciences and subsequently spread to fields as diverse as computer science, ecology, engineering, and management. In contrast to closed systems, the open system perspective views an organization as an entity that takes inputs from the environment, transforms them, and releases them as outputs in tandem with reciprocal effects on the organization itself along with the environment in which the organization operates. In other words, the organization becomes part and parcel of the environment in which it is situated. An open system is that which is able to import and export energy. On the other hand one that cannot import energy is called a closed system. A closed system that cannot generate a sufficient amount of energy internally to replace what is lost will die. Senge (2006) considers a system as an interrelated set of elements functioning as an operating unit. Systems theory works on the inside and outside of the organization, as a way of understanding and anticipating the consequences of any

decision

(Ahrweiler,

2011).

Open systems theory refers simply to the concept that organizations are strongly influenced by their environment. The environment consists of other organizations that exert various forces of an economic, political, or social nature. The environment also provides key resources that sustain

the organization and lead to change and survival. As a system, a school is moderately open. The primary types of energy are financial and intellectual. The school also operates under a series of sometimes conflicting legal mandates rather than a social mandate that represents a consensus of the participants. Consequently, substantial amounts of systems energy are consumed in maintaining

relationships

Significance

of

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rather school

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achieving

goals.

open

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Organizationally, schools are divided into classrooms, the day into periods, teachers into subject areas and rank, and students into groups by performance results on examinations. Like other formal organizations, schools have memberships composed of individuals holding different positions necessary to carry out the functions and goals of the school. The term education refers to a system of schools, in which specifically designated persons are expected to teach children and youth certain types of acceptable behaviour. The school system becomes a unit in the total social structure and is recognized by the members of the society as a separate social institution. Within this structure a portion of the total socialization process occurs. (Norlin, 2009) refers to schools as social systems in which two or more persons work together in a coordinated manner to attain common goals. By this, several important features of schools are specified. To be precise, they consist ultimately of people, they are goal-directed in nature, they attain their goals through some form of coordinated effort and they interact with their external environment. Teaching and learning practices within the classroom can generally refer to the ways in which teachers choose to carry out their functions to encourage learning to promote knowledge acquisition and intellectual and personal development, as the basic pre-conditions for future successful performance in society (Parsons, 1959; Thorkildsen, 1989b). According to open school systems views, schools constantly interact with their environments. In fact, they need to structure themselves to deal with forces in the world around them (Scott, 2008). In contrast, a closed system theory views schools as sufficiently independent to solve most of their problems through their internal forces, without taking into account forces in the external environment. Systems theory works on the inside and outside of the organization, as a way of understanding and anticipating the consequences of any decision (Ahrweiler, 2011). Open systems involve systems that interact with other systems or the outside environment, whereas closed systems refer to systems having relatively little interaction with other systems or the

outside environment. This means that open systems interact with what is around them and can be understood only by including an understanding of their relationship to everything else, which means that in a closed system sense they can never be fully understood. An open school system can exchange ideas with other schools to improve overall teaching and learning. (Scott, 2008) classifies an open system into five basic elements: inputs, a transformation process, outputs, feedback, and the environment. The environment surrounding the school includes the social, political, and economic forces that impinge on the organization. The social, political, and economic contexts in which school head teachers work are marked by pressures at the local and national levels. Hence, school head teachers today find it necessary to manage and develop internal operations while concurrently monitoring the environment and anticipating and responding to external demands. According to Katz and Kahn (1966), open systems like schools have

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• The system exhibits differentiation, a tendency toward increased complexity through specialization. The Constitution of Ghana guarantees “freedom of education”, which embraces the freedom to set up schools and freedom to determine the principles on which they are based, that is freedom of conviction and freedom of organisation of teaching. The open systems view of schools provides an excellent framework for analysing the process of education and the role the school head teacher plays in that process. The head teacher’s job involves combining and coordinating various resources to attain the school’s goals which is learning for all. The interaction between students and teachers is part of the learning process by which students become educated citizens capable of contributing to society. The major duty of the head teacher in the system is to produce output or productivity. Tasks performed by head teacher within the organization’s structure affects the school’s outputs. It is the head teacher‫׳‬s duty to secure and use inputs to the schools, transform them while considering external variables to produce outputs. The objective of the school leader should also be to develop a faculty with a needs disposition that is compatible with

the mission and goals of the school. Leaders must give consideration to the entire faculty, individuals on the faculty, and the interaction that occurs between and among the faculty. This will ensure that the school functions as a whole because the school functioning as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A school must provide satisfaction to members of the school community beyond the physiological needs like salary, working conditions, job security (Herzberg, 2009). Schools must provide for employees’ needs for affiliation, acceptance, esteem, and perhaps even self-actualization if they hope to retain a motivated, committed work force capable of performing at maximum levels (Maslow, 1998). As an open system, the school maintains its stability through feedback, which refers to information about outputs that a system obtains as an input from its task environment. The feedback can be positive or negative and can lead to changes in the way an organization transforms inputs to outputs. Feedback is crucial to the success of the school operation. Negative feedback, for example, can be used to correct deficiencies in the learning process or the inputs or both, which in turn will have an effect on the school’s future outputs. The environment is made up of several social, economic and political institutions, which are constantly interacting and inter-dependent. Everything in an environment is a complete system on its own. But it is a unit or subsystem of yet a larger system and all are inter-dependent. The same is true of the school system. A Social System is a set of interrelated elements functioning as a unit to achieve a specific purpose, Hanson (1996). Within this is interaction between the elements and forces in the internal and external environments of the system, Hanson (1996). The school is an open social system that has parts, and the parts interact within the internal environment and in response to elements in the external environment. Parts of the basic social system are Inputs (teaching and learning process),Outputs ,Feedback, Environments. Inputs are the human, material, financial, or information resources used in the teaching and learning process. Teaching and Learning Process involves the interaction between and among the parts. Outputs are the graduates and/or services produced. Feedback encompasses Information concerning the outputs or the teaching and learning process that influences decision making and the selection of inputs during the next academic year. Environment comprises the external environment of the school including the social, political, and economic forces that impinge on the school’s operation. All parts of the system are interdependent and subject to influence by any other part. The focus of the leader is

on the whole, all parts, and the relationships among all parts. Hanson (1996). Social Interaction in Schools are about individual ,group, formal and informal behaviours. Individuals in schools function as members of the faculty (the formal group), as well as members of subgroups (informal groups) that exist within the faculty. The behaviour of individuals and the interaction between individuals influence school effectiveness. The values held by an individual working in schools largely determine his/her willingness to work and the amount of effort he/she will exert to be effective in completing an assigned task Boyatzis & Skelly (1995). And for the school to be effective, the value of each individual must be acknowledged and utilized. Theorists examine education as a process involving the following five forms of inputs: 1. Human resources such as students, teachers, administrators, catering workers, gardeners, bus drivers, and others. 2. Materials resources such as buildings, desks, books, equipment, pencils, among others. 3. Financial resources such as money. 4. Constraints such as requirements of the law and policy, expectations of parents, values and goals and 5. Existing knowledge in the society. Within a larger system a subsystem exists where a set of components interconnect for a purpose that relates to the purpose of the larger system. Examples of subsystems include:(a) Organizational structure – classrooms, school levels, hierarchy, and departments. :(b). Instructional technology – data base learning theory, teaching, administering tests, and conducting extra curricular activities. The output or products of the educational system are students in the form of educated people now better equipped to serve themselves and society. Feedback is the process by which self-regulating and self directing systems adjust themselves. It puts the accent on drawing some of the systems output back into the system as information inputs so that possible discrepancies between intended outputs and actual outputs could be compared. Feedback is positive when no discrepancy exists but it is negative when there is. Schools tend to be more mechanistic than organic, as evidenced by rigid structures that tend to treat all elements similarly: class periods of fixed length, a single textbook for all students in a class, classes of the same size for different subjects, and so on. Students learn from both the formal and informal systems, each quite important to understanding how schools work. In fact, argues that success in school requires mastery of both systems, even though there are contradictions between them. Students who have problems in school are often the ones who have not learned to balance the two systems or to negotiate the contradictions. The

“hidden curriculum,” as labelled by Snyder (1971) in his book by the same name, defines this system as “implicit demands (as opposed to the explicit obligations of the visible curriculum) that are found in every learning institution and which students have to find out and respond to in order to survive within it”. These unwritten regulations and unintended consequences are an education in themselves and determine how we learn to cope with the unspoken expectations in life. In schools, the interaction between students and teachers is part of the transformation process. The output may be students’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes. Feedback serves as a control mechanism. Negative feedback from the outputs or environment can be used to correct deficiencies in the learning process. The inputs are used to teach students who are then exported into the outside environment. These graduates continue to contribute energy to the school system in the form of one or more resources (human, financial, physical, or information). Conclusion On the whole, closed systems are theoretical systems that do not interact with the environment and are not influenced by its surroundings. While Open systems are real world systems whose boundaries allow exchanges of energy, material and information with the larger external environment

or

system

in

which

they

exist.

Open systems theory has profoundly altered how we understand schools as organizations and the demands placed upon educational leaders. Treating schools as if they are independent of their environment would lead to wide misperceptions of the driving factors behind organizational change. Contemporary studies of accountability movements, teacher professionalization, and instructional leadership all benefit from a strongly open systems approach to understanding environmental demands and the resulting adaptation in school policy and its implementation, or lack thereof. Indeed, today scholars are rightfully dubious of work that fails to consider the rich context in which schools develop. Schools, as proposed earlier, have a limited set of goals: the same goals for each student. While they are unitary in character with respect to goals, schools generally have some autonomy with respect to the means to achieve those goals. The difference between closed-systems and open-systems, then, is in the complexity of environmental interactions. A closed-system perspective views organizations as relatively independent of environmental influences. The closed-system approach conceives of the organization as a system

of management, technology, personnel, equipment, and materials, but tends to exclude competitors,

suppliers,

distributors,

and

governmental

regulators.

The improvement of quality involves the design of an educational system that not only optimizes the relationship among the elements but also between the educational system and its environment. In general, this means designing a system that is more open, organic, pluralistic, and complex. Banathy (1991, p. 80) has described such a system as interacting with constantly changing (multiple) environments and coordinating with many other systems in the environment, also, coping with constant change, uncertainty, and ambiguity while maintaining the ability to co-evolve with the environment by changing itself and transforming and the environment. In addition, that system lives and deals creatively with change and welcomes complex and ambiguous situations and not just tolerates. Besides this, it increases the amount of information it can process, processes it rapidly, distributes it to a larger number of groups and people, and transforms

the

information

into

organizational

knowledge.

In order to make this kind of transition, it is necessary only to shift perspective from a one-tomany toward a many-to-one orientation. To illustrate, in education this means a shift from viewing education as a system in which one teacher provides information to many students toward a system in which there are many information resources accessible by one student, only one of which is the teacher. This shift can accurately be characterized as moving from an emphasis on instruction to an emphasis on learning....