Applying Chaos Theory to the classroom

The Complex Adaptive Theory of Education
How you can use chaos and complexity theories in the classroom

Lee Chazen, M.A.

1. Turn the class into an open environment with broad units of study.


2. Use simple rules, but set high expectations.


3. Act like a facilitator by encouraging self-organization.


4.  Encircle the “complex system,” sending down occasional messages and reminders, while keeping broad parameters in place.


5. Set the tone for creativity, expectations and behavior early on in the semester.


6. These will serve as the broad parameters to guide creativity and scholarship.


7. Get students out of rows and into random arrangements where they will encounter divergent ideas and opinions.


8. Guide students to a middle ground or “edge of chaos,” where they can look for new discoveries and make potential breakthroughs.


9. Work with colleagues to rid the school of rigid, black and white thinking where ideas of perfection or failure and winners and losers exist. Cross any and all imaginary pre-established lines to work with people from all departments.


10. Work on building a new ethic of camaraderie, cooperation and collegiality.


11. Create a “hub” in your class or at your school, that serves as a meeting place where collaboration and brainstorming can take place.

For information on how I can help your school, company or organization please contact me at lchazen@gmail.com or theglidercell@gmail.com. You can also read more about my services here. https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01cbea3802076b197f/



For the research supporting these ideas, click here.

Note: originally published on June 1, 2005. Revised and edited on April 24, 2015

Check out the new Global Challenge website!

The new website is done. If you are a history, geography, government or economics teacher out there and want to try it out for your class – just send me an e-mail. If you’re the first to do so, try it out for free.

Why post this on Right Brain World? If you’re a right brain student, it’s sometimes easier and more interesting to learn through projects. During the playing of Global Challenge, it's often important to be a big concept thinker. Your vision or understanding of where things are headed could help guide students who do not see things in this way. Left brain students are sure to thrive too, since their keen skills in analysis are necessary to getting many things done in the game.  You'll quickly find out how much the two "hemispheres" need one another.

Here’s a quick analysis:

Right brain students will see historical patterns, put together creative plans, help create team logos, theme music, design currency, formulate plots, or interpret the behavior of other players.

Left brain students will enjoy calculating strategies based on per capita incomes, put together spread sheets to keep track of money, points, armies, teams, facts, etc. They will help in providing the much needed order and structure to keep the game moving forward.

The great part about this game, honestly, is that there is something for every type of learner.

If you’re a creative teacher, you’ll be free to integrate the arts. Have your students create theme songs, design team logos or a new look for the classroom itself. If you’re into the idea of integrating technology, then you may want to find creative ways to use Facebook or Twitter, create a class blog or wiki. It’s all up to you. Global Challenge will provide you the overall framework – and you can take it from there.

I hope you will give it a try.

The Concept Behind Succesful Websites

The best way to explain the boom of sites like eHow, Facebook and Twitter is through an analogy. According to a former college professor, In the Soviet Union under Stalin, approximately 70% of the farms were collectivized (run by the state). Thirty percent were private. Guess which sector produced more? The land that was privately owned. This same kind of thinking holds true for rental cars. When was the last time you saw someone Armor All the tires of their rental car?

The principle behind this is that people tend to have pride in things they own, or products that they have contributed to. No doubt this will be true in the classroom too. There is no “ownership” in reading a text book and answering the questions at the end of each chapter. But, if the student knows they can use this information to create something – like a blog or website, or contribute to a class wiki, they might just read the information.

I think the same goes for teaching too. If your principal or department chair were to write out your lesson plans and, therefore, take away your creativity, how many of you would be 100% motivated to carry that out? I believe sites like eHow are doing well because people can both make and see their contributions. It’s interactive. You can see the results almost immediately.

Using Chaos Theory in Organizations

Finding a link between chaos, complexity and education was the central theme of my thesis research. The research has implications in any large or small organization.

Excerpted from a piece I worked on in 2004 called Bridging the Gap: A Complex-Adaptive Solution to the Great Political Divide

…Chaos theory tells us that everything in the universe has an emerging nature, from the evolution of organisms, to volcanic eruptions, to weather patterns, to the growth of civilizations. Secondly, the greatest creativity, evolvability and progress appear to take place at the “edge of chaos.” In chaos theory, random forces can converge to form a higher order. Research in the field has gone from the study of planets to the study of the weather to microorganisms, to the growth of companies to organizational and group behavior. What one learns from a study of complexity is that random forces converge to form a higher order behavior. Keep your eye on the larger picture as we delve into the details.

Steven Johnson, in a book called Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (2001) wrote about studies of slime mold in the 1960’s by Mitch Resnick. The studies revealed that microorganisms displayed collective intelligence. Instead of one large organism moving across a floor in search of food, it was revealed that the “slime” was actually hundreds of single celled organisms coming together for a larger purpose.

In fact, evidence of self-organization is everywhere. Prigognine and Stengers in their much-cited compendium Order out of Chaos (1984) said that the biosphere as a whole and all its components existed in a state far from equilibrium. Based on this, they said life, as part of the natural order, was the “supreme expression” of a self-organizing process. Simplified, this means that the air, land and sea are all part of a complex system that tends towards equilibrium. It does so because it is adaptive. If it doesn’t – if it were rigid – it would cease to exist, and we would cease to exist.

Another example of a highly productive emergent process took place at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. As Nasser told the story in A Beautiful Mind (1998), people drifted into each other’s offices, or would just chat in the corridors. The grids and courtyards were set up “to maximize chance meetings.” The interchanges would lead to new research and colleagues exchanging challenging problems with one another. In this informal way, RAND memoranda would often start out simply as a handwritten paper being handed over to a math department secretary (Nasar).