Coaching Letter #214

May 5, 2025

Honoring the complexity of teaching, and teachers everywhere

Hello, and thank you for reading The Coaching Letter. You are awesome. This issue is in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week (TAW).

As a teacher, I was always a bit conflicted about TAW. On the one hand, I liked the wee treats that the PTA and/or the building administrators put in our mailboxes every day, and the bagel breakfast on Friday, and it was nice to feel special and appreciated. On the other, I felt like if we were really that valuable then we would be paid more or at least treated better the rest of the year. I also dislike the conceptualization of teachers as heroes. Hero has the connotation of bravery and personal sacrifice, and while I frequently felt that I was sacrificing a lot when I would go into work on Saturdays and spend Sunday nights grading, it ought not to be the case that teachers are spending hours and hours of time outside working hours just trying to keep their heads above water. Because, just to be clear, I was not an exceptional teacher. Well, I mean, I was pretty good. OK, I don’t want to get lost in how good I was; my point is that it’s not really sustainable to build an entire profession on the premise that its major practitioners must be exceptionally dedicated and selfless all of the time. When we frame teachers as heroes, we let policymakers and the public off the hook for building systems that actually support effective teaching.

And while we are so focused on the altruistic and relational aspects of teaching, we forget that teaching is actually extremely complex and remarkably difficult, and that being a professional teacher requires competence across a large constellation of practices. Yet, teaching is consistently underestimated. I think “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” is now seen as inaccurate and insulting, but there’s still an undercurrent of “this is not rocket science” (mmm, no, rocket science is easier), and “we’re not curing cancer here” (mmm, no, but we are educating those who are going to cure cancer). The tendency leans towards making teaching seem more technical and straightforward than it really is.

There’s a term I’d like to introduce here: the category error. I first came across the term last summer when I was working on Equitable School Improvement; I think I’ve mentioned before that I had to do an enormous amount of research in preparation for drafting the data chapter, and “category error” was in one of the books I read, Bernouilli’s Fallacy. But I digress. A category error occurs when constructs or things are misclassified—when something is treated as belonging to a conceptual category it doesn’t actually belong to. The category error in the way we conceptualize teaching is that we treat it as a technical endeavor when it is more accurately a complex, adaptive practice.

Yes, I know, now I have to address the difference between complicated and complex. Complicated systems are, well, complicated. My son is studying to be an aviation mechanic, and there are very few things more complicated than airplanes—large software systems, perhaps, aircraft carriers, or particle accelerators. Airplanes involve thousands of interdependent parts, require rigorous engineering and maintenance, and function according to tightly controlled principles. My son has to be certified in all the different systems that go into an airplane, each of which is also complicated: airframe, hydraulics, electronics, engine, communication. Systems are, in other words, frequently nested, with systems residing inside larger systems. Still, despite the enormity of the number of parts and the connections among them, an airplane functions in entirely predictable ways that can be analyzed and understood by breaking into components and modeling how they interact with each other. Problems may not always be easily diagnosed, but they can be definitively determined. In a complicated system, the inputs, processes and outcomes in the system are knowable.

Complex systems, on the other hand, involve parts that interact in unpredictable ways. They do not create perfectly predictable outcomes in the same way that increasing throttle increases speed, or deploying flaps increases lift and drag. The characteristics of complex systems include interconnected elements, feedback loops, and elastic causal relationships such that a mechanism may be quite distant in time or space from its outcome, and indeed it may be unclear which is which.

I think most educational leaders have taken classes that include systems thinking, and are likely to have read Senge’s The Fifth Discipline or Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science or Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, all of which are brilliant. And there are other more recent books that are just as useful and possibly better: Simple Habits for Complex Times, for example, by Berger and Johnson, and my personal favorite, Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. brown uses dandelions as a metaphor to illustrate the beauty and power of complexity in natural systems and social change. For her, dandelions are a symbol of emergence, where small, decentralized actions can result in significant change. This mirrors the way complexity functions—through nonlinear interactions, adaptation, and self-organization rather than top-down control. The metaphor serves to challenge hierarchical, efficiency-obsessed systems in favor of patterns of interdependence, diversity, and responsiveness. I love it. The picture of dandelions at the top of this post is a print that is propped up next to my computer to remind me of these ideas. Here are brown’s Principles of Emergent Strategy:

Small is good, small is all.

Change is constant.

There is always enough time for the right work.

There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.

Never a failure, always a lesson.

Trust the people.

Move at the speed of trust.

Less prep, more presence.

What you pay attention to grows.

(My favorite, by the way, is “less prep, more presence”. It’s one of the many ideas and realizations that nudged me away from spending hours on PowerPoints, towards thinking about how to engage people in the room in real time.)

All this is to say: Just as airplanes are vastly complicated, classrooms are supremely complex. A classroom is not simply a space for delivering content; it is a social ecosystem where each student brings unique prior knowledge, cultural background, emotional state, and ways of thinking and being. These students interact not only with the teacher but with each other, producing emergent group dynamics that cannot be predicted from individual characteristics alone. The teacher, meanwhile, constantly makes thousands of decisions in real time—Deborah Ball’s discretionary spaces—responding to behavior, adjusting pacing, interpreting student understanding, and negotiating the demands of curriculum, and institutional expectations. The task of instruction requires attention to both short-term goals and long-term developmental trajectories, which are often in tension. It is, in other words, not easy. And because learning—the fundamental activity of classrooms—is itself a complex, invisible, recursive process, classrooms may be the most intricate systems we’ve ever attempted to design and enact.

And yet, while I don’t think anyone thinks of teaching as simple, we continue to treat teaching as though it is complicated rather than complex. Which means that we make mistakes in how we describe and explain what’s going on in classrooms, and we underestimate the difficulty of teaching.

OK, so much more to say here, but I think I’m going to pause here for emphasis: Nothing harder than teaching.

Have a great week, enjoy the Paydays and the bagels, and let me know if I can do anything for you. Best, Isobel

Isobel Stevenson, PhD PCC
860-576-9410
@IsobelTX
Author of The Coaching Letter
Author with Jennie Weiner of The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders: Principles and Processes Routledge, 2021
Author with Sarah Woulfin & Kerry Lord of Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools Teachers College Press, 2023