Complexity is concerned with boundaries because that is where all kinds of unpredictably interesting behavior always emerges. I think that a study of the emergence of collective learning in complex adaptive systems like classrooms is doable. But they are only doable if we manage to measure in some way what is happening at the edge of chaos. I am trying to prove that reflection that starts with the person and moves to the collective is a way to do that.

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What I am proposing is not to devise a system of discrete measurement like Jeremy Bentham did in his Nineteenth Century utilitarianism. He thought that he could measure happiness as \'useful\' behavior which could be counted in \'benthams\' . This pipedream was taken up by economists in the last century who simply assumed that human agents acted in their own best economic interests. They conveniently ignored the human facts that we often don\'t do that. It hasn\'t been until the behavioral economists of the last ten years have taken up the mantle of complexity theory that this profoundly mistaken assumption has been modified.

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Teacher researchers and by extension leaders in educational reform have made the same mistakes, had the same blindspots, and ignored the same realities. Complexity exists in the classroom and we must study it even if, by definition, it cannot be pinned down like a butterfly. I hope that reflection will give us a way to watch the hinctly flutter of that butterfly so that we can at least know when to lead our students interests and when to follow them.

Complexity, Reflexivity, and Self-Emergent 'Classrooms'