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EDU 702 Collaborative Inquiry through Systems Thinking (3)

September 8, 2022

Personal Mastery, Antiracism Systems Thinking

Collaborative Inquiry through Systems Thinking is about systems thinking and change—building knowledge of some key frameworks and applying the frameworks to cases and to our own personal contexts, including ourselves, the organizations we work in, and our doctoral cohort. Systems thinking involves the capability to conceptually examine the whole, the sum of parts, rather than the individual parts separately. And systems thinking propels thinkers and leaders to be able to act with a view of both the current reality and the future.

During this course, we will explore many of the concepts that undergird the entire doctoral program: organizational change, social justice, personal leadership, and policy research. We will focus with a strong emphasis on the first three (organizational change, social justice, personal leadership) in this course, and systems thinking and change will serve as a springboard into our doctoral program in education policy and leadership.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

  1. Build conceptual knowledge of systems thinking frameworks, including Senge’s five disciplines, Heifetz’s technical and adaptive leadership approach, and Bolman and Deal’s Four Frames
  2. Apply systems thinking frameworks to your current organizational context and your own personal reflection
  3. Utilize systems thinking to generate proposals for shared case analysis