StigmergicWeb

One project I’m involved in this year is trying to develop a communication/knowledge management strategy at school. A perpetual problem at all large high schools, at least those where I or friends have worked, is communication amongst staff. We use a variety of means at the school where I work, some more effective than others but none of which seems to offer a truly efficient means of communication.

I have observed that high school teachers, perhaps more so than elementary school teachers, don’t tend to create a school-wide shared culture as often happens in elementary schools. In my mind, I’ve always felt that I was much more interested in forming a positive learning culture in my classes before I worry about the school as a whole. I’ve heard a few different reasons tossed around for this. Some argue, for example that this is an artifact of the age group we deal with (high school teachers tend to believe that students aren’t as affected by school culture and climate as much as elementary students, but that’s for another time). Another popular reason is that high school teachers tend to be subject matter experts, many with university degrees in their teaching area, and are therefore more content oriented than context (i.e. school culture) oriented.

I think that the latter is perhaps tangentially correct, but it has more to do with the size of the neocortex in our brains. Robin Dunbar is a biologist who noted that the social group size of non-human primates was correlated with the size of their neocortices. He calculated that the maximum social group size for humans was 147.8, but we’ll just round that to 150 to make things easy. (In his results, Dunbar actually calculated that the maximum social group size for humans was somewhere between 100 and 230, but lets go with 150 to make things simple.) This value of 150 has since become known as Dunbar’s number, and has been found to show up in a few interesting places as a maximum size for social groups (such as Hutterite colonies and unit size of professional armies).

So what does this have to do with shared school culture, or lack thereof, in high schools. Looking at elementary schools first, teachers usually stay with a single class of students for an entire day. Even allowing for extrememly large classes of 30 to 35, this still leaves the possibilities of many other personal connections within each teacher’s social group. Contrast this to a typical high school in which each teacher teaches many different classes throughout the day. In my school, for example, most teachers teach 5 classes a day. Assume that there are about 25 students in each class, and that brings each teacher’s social group size to 125; this only leaves about 25 more people at most to top off each teacher’s social group. Is is any wonder that in a school with over 60 staff, that teachers don’t always feel as connected to any kind of school culture?

There seems to be an easy solution to me, if the development of a school culture is a desired outcome. By lowering class sizes, reducing the number of students a teacher teaches in a day, or some combination of both, the cognitive load of maintaining positive relationships with the student part of the teacher’s social group will be reduced. This would in turn allow the teachers to develop a stronger culture within the school as a whole, which could then have several positive effects on the quality of teaching and learning within the school.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 01:24 and is filed under communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.