“Every essential part of a system can affect the performance of the whole but cannot do so independently of other essential parts. Therefore, in changing performance of any essential part, its effect on the system as a whole should be taken into account.” – Russell Ackoff, Jamshid Gharajedaghi
Post #2 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.
Solutions for learning and development problems for children with special needs cannot be solved by simply addressing the isolated parts, their delayed or disordered fragmented skills and understandings. Parents, therapists, and teachers need to address the child as a whole.
Many educational and treatment approaches fall short. They are not as successful as they could be because they treat the child as though the child were made of fragmented, isolated parts, of independent domains. As though the mind and the body were not connected. As though the child was not affected by internal and external contexts.
When we isolate a part, a given behavior or skill, and institute localized training to improve it, there may be some change, but too often the changes are ineffective, limited, impractical, and ungeneralizable to other behaviors or to higher learning. A fragmented learning process may even interfere with the learning of later, more complex, human processes and systems. We see the child as a whole connected system operating in conjunction and cooperation with other systems.
Russel Ackoff discusses synthetic thinking vs. analytic thinking.
Analytic thinking breaks things down into individual parts to try to discover origins and difficulties. A kind of separating, dividing, dissecting, or dismantling; a reductionism.
Synthetic thinking involves a more design-based, more forward-thinking, more constructional or architectural approach, which emphasizes putting things together to create higher, larger, and more smoothly integrated functioning systems.
The human child is continually changing.
The child is a whole connected system restructuring themselves, rebuilding themselves with each new experience. With each new challenge, the child combines and restructures experiences, mental and neurological parts, and wholes. Humans are dynamical systems, not engineered, mechanical clocks made of fixed parts that either work or are defective.
Human beings are always changing and always have the potential to improve their functioning, their skills, and understanding. They have changing feelings and empathy, have changing needs and intentions, make choices according to changing contexts, and need to engage in purposeful, intentional, and meaningful behaviors.
Human beings, the human brain, the human mind, human relationships, learning, and development are complex networks of countless combinations of changing relationships.
Human beings are not like robots, not deterministic machines. They form close human interpersonal relationships. They can change their minds. Human beings are adapting, sensing, thinking, and feeling social animals. Freedom, learning, and choice-making define human beings, all human beings.
Making choices without proper skills and experience results in confusion, insecurity, errors, avoidance, and conflict. Human beings who have difficulty making choices, not knowing how to make adaptive changes, not able to adapt to changing conditions and situations, not learning from their experiences and other people’s experiences, are trapped in lonely states of confusion, frustration, and repetition.
Increasing errors and frustration increase their confusion. Increasing states of confusion increase their errors and frustration. This negative cycle makes change, adaptation, learning, and development even more difficult. Feelings of failure and hopelessness eventually set in, paralyzing the mind, killing their curiosity and initiative, delaying their development, dehumanizing the child and demoralizing the family.
Fragmentation and lack of positive interactions and positive feedback loops result in blockage and futility. If a person does not feel capable, does not feel whole or centered, they will not believe in themselves or in others. They have not yet built the trust, confidence, skills, or the will to face novelty, complexity, or change.
Development is a life-long, continuous process of organization, re-organization, and self-renewal.
We program computers and robots, not children.
Through nurture, mediated learning experiences, and shared life experiences, children with developmental delays learn to communicate and to connect, learn how to learn, and become increasingly more interested and increasingly self-organizing.
Through mediated learning and play relationships, the child learns the skills and the confidence to think more independently, to make considered choices and changes, to learn from their successes and from their failures. Not merely engaging in non-thinking habitual responses or blindly following temporary, forced changes based on external commands, superficial reinforcers, and meaningless manipulations.
Through the mediated learning relationship, we help children learn to manage their own feelings and thinking, their own interactions, their own exploration and play, their own choices, growth, and development.
Children learn how to engage in fulfilling interpersonal relationships, to have more opportunities and experiences available to them, to have more possibilities, more choices, better judgment and decision making, more self-reliance and safer, more responsible independence.
Children learn appropriate flexibility within limits, so their relationships, their learning, and development can advance. They learn to adapt to changing situations while still maintaining stability, consistency, continuity, and coherence. They achieve a positive self-concept and self-worth accompanied by empathic consideration and respect for others.
Coherence involves a harmonious relationship between the parts and between the parts and the whole. There is an integrity of the whole child, not merely a gathering of meaningless responses and isolated, memorized fragments.
Nurtured coherence influences the quality and disposition of the whole child. Coherence produces a unity of mind, of character, of thinking, of feeling, and of acting. Coherence of mind involves parts, elements, and systems that are all interconnected, reciprocally interacting, and influencing each subsystem and the larger systems beyond the self. Coherence is a process that achieves connectedness within the mind and between minds, within the person and between persons.
The Interpersonal Relationship Becomes a Working Model for Flexibility and Coherence
Adults should not harshly or rigidly define the structure of their interactions with children. There should be order, reason, and organization in the reciprocal, interactional processes, in the goals and strategies, but there must also be room for flexible adjustment.
Mediation involves consideration of changing contexts and incorporating happy accidents; realizing there is more than one way to arrive at an answer, more than one way of solving problems, for making choices, and for doing things.
This flexibility comes with a more secure, calm, and confident understanding and respect for the child’s changing moods and needs and for the changing nature of the human relationship, of the interactive learning experience, and of the content and context.
With genuine interpersonal connections, time, and increasing understanding, communication, human relationships, and learning experiences increase in complexity and depth. But with collaboration, support, enjoyment, motivation, and increasing success, learning becomes richer, more useful, and more satisfying.
The process of human development involves change, the emergence of a more fully functioning individual. A transformation takes place without losing the essential core of the person’s existence. The connection and continuity of the person, and the person in relation to other people, are enhanced for the child and for their adult mediators. Everyone gains.
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