‘Pond life thinking’ - What's that then? It's a metaphor for thinking of you, your role and place within education as part of an ecological ecosystem. Why should you adopt that thought? Well, you don't have to, but it might be helpful, to you, your students and school. Pond life thinking allows you to see what ecologists see. So indulge me for a few moments, jump to a lily pad with a view and cast your eyes about while watching for the next bug to come along.

Firstly, and you may well agree with me here, competition exists. It won't disappear, but as a concept, along with survival of the fittest, it is a bit old hat, if your view is dominated by that and that alone. Ecologists realised that, though important, competition was just one of the many factors that shape ecological communities. The emergent effects of ecological webs were at least as important, if not more so.

Bringing this thought back to education for a moment, then; the swift don't always have the race. Just because someone or something seems to be brilliant, it doesn't mean that it will be a winner overall and long term, with everyone and everywhere.

As an example, you might think of an A star student who did well in exams, but then is crippled in other parts of his or her life, and just never seems to get off the ground. On another level, someone in the student leadership team (SLT) might have a brilliant idea, but not all brilliant ideas make it into practice, do they? This does render going for gold individually to be a bit pointless. Going for gold in terms of home growing something that makes sense in its own pond though, that's a different matter.

People and projects that are inclusive of others have a solid foundation and bottom-up strength. So team values should be taught and practised as values and habits from early on. Developing the ability to recognise and understand insights on interconnections between people has to be as important as reading and writing.

We have to acknowledge as educators that we are part of a rich interconnected ecosystem, a complex adaptive system, and we have to have some way of teaching this as well. There is no point in atomising individuals and learning so that we disable the rich interconnections between things, people and the insight that enables these interconnections to be seen, valued and worked with. We absolutely need to act on the knowledge that an ecosystem view of life presents.

We need to teach and work with the idea that every student and teacher is embedded in a larger, complex adaptive system; that is, the educational and social pond in which they are functioning. Every teacher and school, irrespective of status or personal level of experience or qualification, is a player in a web of connections that can be thought of in terms of educational ecosystems. The paradigm we need to adopt to comprehend this view is the networked character of education and real life. So what would make a difference? Perhaps if we co-evolve new ideas within the educational networks that we are part of they might have lift off.

This means we have to be critical thinkers as educationalists. We have to critically reflect, first and foremost, on our own thinking. We need to unpick our thinking and methods and processes very carefully, to examine how and where they are linear, and we need to replace them with methods and processes that are flexible, adaptive and in harmony with the networked paradigm.

SLT need to abandon a formal, static, linear planning process, because we live in a nonlinear world, where no predictions remain valid for too long. Education is part of complex adaptive system, nested in a larger complex adaptive system (society, technology, politics and the economy). As educationalists we should always expect surprises, no matter how carefully we plan, or how simple the goal. It's been said that we should not even attempt to plan too precisely, because inevitably a linear approach will fail in some respect or other as the environment constantly changes.

In other words, change needs to recognised as a fundamental constant as part of our educational pond life, in order to keep adapting in an ever shifting landscape - together with others on the educational landscape of where our pond is, and what makes it the kind of pond it is.

Another big insight is the need for our thinking to become more interdisciplinary. We need to continue interacting across disciplines to share ideas and innovations in an environment of experimentation and fun, through conferences, teachmeets, social media and social networks.

This interdisciplinary approach allows people to work together on common problems from different angles, and for cross-fertilisation of ideas to occur in innovative ways. But you have to be prepared to explore and discover. Another question for you there: how often do you expose yourself to different disciplines that your line of work in education seemingly has nothing to do with? More food for thought maybe. So if something's bugging you, just eat it.

You can read about these ideas and others in the 1992 & 1999 book by Lewin, on “Complexity: Life at the edge of chaos,” published by the University of Chicago Press: Chicago

How do these ideas correlate with your own teaching experiences? Let us know in the comments.