Michelle E. Jordan

Surprise, surprise, surprise! A complexity science view of the unexpected

Surprise can emanate from two sources: lack of sufficient information or knowledge and the basic dynamics of complex adaptive systems. The authors expand the traditional view of surprise with a complexity perspective that makes it possible to ask new questions and to consider new ways of understanding the world around us. They discuss creativity and learning as two strategies for capitalizing on the surprises that confront organizations.

The Role of Conversation in Health Care Interventions: Enabling Sensemaking and Learning

BackgroundThose attempting to implement changes in health care settings often find that intervention efforts do not progress as expected. Unexpected outcomes are often attributed to variation and/or error in implementation processes. We argue that some unanticipated variation in intervention outcomes arises because unexpected conversations emerge during intervention attempts. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of conversation in shaping interventions and to explain why conversation is important in intervention efforts in health care organizations. We draw on literature from sociolinguistics and complex adaptive systems theory to create an interpretive framework and develop our theory. We use insights from a fourteen-year program of research, including both descriptive and intervention studies undertaken to understand and assist primary care practices in making sustainable changes. We enfold these literatures and these insights to articulate a common failure of overlooking the role of conversation in intervention success, and to develop a theoretical argument for the importance of paying attention to the role of conversation in health care interventions.DiscussionConversation between organizational members plays an important role in the success of interventions aimed at improving health care delivery. Conversation can facilitate intervention success because interventions often rely on new sensemaking and learning, and these are accomplished through conversation. Conversely, conversation can block the success of an intervention by inhibiting sensemaking and learning. Furthermore, the existing relationship contexts of an organization can influence these conversational possibilities. We argue that the likelihood of intervention success will increase if the role of conversation is considered in the intervention process.SummaryThe generation of productive conversation should be considered as one of the foundations of intervention efforts. We suggest that intervention facilitators consider the following actions as strategies for reducing the barriers that conversation can present and for using conversation to leverage improvement change: evaluate existing conversation and relationship systems, look for and leverage unexpected conversation, create time and space where conversation can unfold, use conversation to help people manage uncertainty, use conversation to help reorganize relationships, and build social interaction competence.

Managing Uncertainty During Collaborative Problem Solving in Elementary School Teams: The Role of Peer Influence in Robotics Engineering Activity

This study investigated how interaction with peers influenced the ways students managed uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in a 5th-grade class. The analysis focused on peer responses to individuals’ attempts to manage uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative efforts to design, build, and program robots and achieve assignment objectives. Patterns of peer response were established through discourse analysis of work sessions for 5 teams engaged in 2 collaborative projects. Three socially supportive peer responses and 2 unsupportive peer responses were identified. Peer interaction was influential because students relied on supportive social response to enact most of their uncertainty management strategies. This study provides a useful theoretical contribution to understanding the roles of peer interaction in collaborative problem solving. Conceptualizing collaborative problem solving as a process of negotiating uncertainties can help instructional designers shape tasks and relational contexts to facilitate learning.

Being polite while fulfilling different discourse functions in online classroom discussions

Using a discourse analytic qualitative approach, we investigated the naturally-occurring discourse that arose as part of two kinds of regular course activities, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated discussions. The messages contributed by members of a graduate course were analyzed for the kind of discourse functions and the kind of politeness strategies they displayed. Results indicated that synchronous CMD afforded more information seeking, information providing, and social comments than asynchronous CMD. Asynchronous discussions were slightly more likely to allow for such functions as discussion generating, experience sharing, idea explanation, and self-evaluation functions than synchronous discussions. Proportionately the two modes were similar in how politeness was expressed. Finally, in relating politeness and function, we found more politeness indicators when students were posting messages with such functions as positive evaluation and group conversation management, functions that carried the potential for face threat, and the least politeness associated with messages serving the function of experience sharing.

Reciprocal learning and chronic care model implementation in primary care: results from a new scale of learning in primary care

BackgroundEfforts to improve the care of patients with chronic disease in primary care settings have been mixed. Application of a complex adaptive systems framework suggests that this may be because implementation efforts often focus on education or decision support of individual providers, and not on the dynamic system as a whole. We believe that learning among clinic group members is a particularly important attribute of a primary care clinic that has not yet been well-studied in the health care literature, but may be related to the ability of primary care practices to improve the care they deliver.To better understand learning in primary care settings by developing a scale of learning in primary care clinics based on the literature related to learning across disciplines, and to examine the association between scale responses and chronic care model implementation as measured by the Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (ACIC) scale.MethodsDevelopment of a scale of learning in primary care setting and administration of the learning and ACIC scales to primary care clinic members as part of the baseline assessment in the ABC Intervention Study. All clinic clinicians and staff in forty small primary care clinics in South Texas participated in the survey.ResultsWe developed a twenty-two item learning scale, and identified a five-item subscale measuring the construct of reciprocal learning (Cronbach alpha 0.79). Reciprocal learning was significantly associated with ACIC total and sub-scale scores, even after adjustment for clustering effects.ConclusionsReciprocal learning appears to be an important attribute of learning in primary care clinics, and its presence relates to the degree of chronic care model implementation. Interventions to improve reciprocal learning among clinic members may lead to improved care of patients with chronic disease and may be relevant to improving overall clinic performance.

Wicked problems: inescapable wickedity

The article explores the concept of wicked problems and proposes a reinvigorated application of this concept for wider educational use. This recommendation stems from the contributions of a number of scholars who frame some of the most contentious and recalcitrant educational issues as wicked problems. The present authors build upon these previous explorations of wickedity and initially apply it to literacy learning. They then discuss the relevance for wicked responses and wicked actions for the wider educational community (e.g. parents, teachers, policy-makers, teacher educators and educational researchers). The authors conclude with three proposals for understanding and addressing wickedity: (a) promoting careful observation and continuous curiosity, (b) increasing conversations with diverse stakeholders and (c) engaging in collective and distributed sense-making.

Expressing Uncertainty in Computer-Mediated Discourse: Language as a Marker of Intellectual Work

Learning and dialogue may naturally engender feelings and expressions of uncertainty for a variety of reasons and purposes. Yet, little research has examined how patterns of linguistic uncertainty are enacted and changed over time as students reciprocally influence one another and the dialogical system they are creating. This study describes the occurrence of uncertainty expressions of graduate students collaborating in computer-mediated discussions to negotiate and construct understandings of new concepts from course readings. We report on how often uncertainty was expressed in online synchronous and asynchronous discussions and the characteristics of its expression. We also explore the antecedents and consequences of such expression. Findings indicate that students expressed uncertainty often and in many ways and that such expression seemed to be integrated in a dynamic system of influences on the conversation. We conclude that the ability to deal with and express uncertainty appropriately is an important skill in online academic contexts that may be related to the intellectual work of students in the process of appropriating the discourse of their academic disciplines as they make meaning of scholarly texts.

Communication in Creative Collaborations: The Challenges of Uncertainty and Desire Related to Task, Identity, and Relational Goals

This study offers a systematic analysis of uncertainty in communication education by examining communication goals and challenges in the context of collaborative creative problem-solving in engineering assignments. Engineering design projects are seen as having the potential to help K-12 students learn to deal with uncertainty as well as a means through which to learn science and math. Educational researchers have emphasized the cognitive or very general social aspects of this context. The current investigation argues that collaborative, creative design work involves a distinctive constellation of communication challenges: ongoing efforts to temporarily suspend normal inclinations to understand well, to appraise what we understand, and to do so in relation to instrumental, identity, and relational meanings. This argument guides textual analyses of transcripts of fifth-graders assigned to groups tasked with designing and building an environmentally beneficial robot. Implications for communication education are discussed.

A Microgenetic Analysis of Classroom Discussion Practices How Literacy Processes Intermingle in the Negotiation of Meaning in an Online Discussion

Unlike previous research on computer-mediated discussions that has focused analysis on the final conversation as a completed product, this study was focused on the process by which the conversation was created. Using screen-capturing software, the on-screen actions of the nine participants in an online classroom discussion were recorded and analyzed for evidence of reading, writing, and thinking processes. Retrospective interviews were conducted with three of the student participants for additional insights into these processes. A triangulation of data sources revealed participants engaged in at least three distinct patterns of reading, writing, and thinking, with some participants fluidly moving between these patterns throughout the conversation. The three patterns were described as follows: (a) a methodical reading of most messages, and composing of responses occurring as the reader/writer thinks of it; (b) a coordination of reading, thinking, and writing, with careful revisiting of messages already read and deliberate crafting of responses; and (c) a complex orchestration of processes, with several reading resources consulted in addition to the conversation’s unfolding messages as well as composing processes that were interleaved with thinking and reading. This study provides clear evidence that the experiences of individuals in the same online conversation can vary considerably even as they contribute to a co-constructed publicly shared conversation.

I Guess My Question Is: What Is the Co-Occurrence of Uncertainty and Learning in Computer-Mediated Discourse?.

The purpose of this study was to contribute to a better understanding of learning in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments by investigating the co-occurrence of uncertainty expressions and expressions of learning in a graduate course in which students collaborated in classroom computer-mediated discussions. Results showed that uncertainty expressions appeared related to the kinds of intellectual work engaged by students in online discussion, co-occurring with learning in systematic ways. For example, direct expressions of uncertainty were likely to co-occur with learning categories associated with presenting a new idea and with applications of an idea whereas indirect expressions were more strongly associated with elaborating on a new idea. These findings suggest that the ability to deal with and express uncertainty appropriately may be related to learning as it takes place in online environments. We contend that the role of uncertainty in learning is currently undervalued, and that educators and researchers may benefit from considering how uncertainty can be productive for learning in CSCL environments.