ABSTRACT
The change, growth or development of how a teacher thinks about another teacher is analysed as a form of adult learning. The analysis draws on an integration and extension of personal construct psychology and interpersonal theory. It is facilitated by facsimilating professional experience with, in these instances, the thinking of school administrators when making staff decisions. The process is developed through several briefly reported studies ultimately leading to a model for creating change in personal thinking. The model joins cognition and reflecting and human interaction in a manystage process used in a currently ongoing project on affirmative action in promotion decisions. Some assumptions behind these studies are explicated: organizations are persons, administration is persons’ purposes, culture is what characterizes a group or organization and can be created by people, art and magic have as much to do with understanding teacher thinking in complex organization as does scientific analysis, theory grows out of interpersonal experience, experience can be accelerated by facsimilation, literacy is necessary for growth in thinking and requires ability to interarticulate the explicit and the implicit, unnerving though it may be.
