examples of systems thinking in education

What Is Systems Thinking in Education? Understanding Functions and Interactions in School Systems

Schools, districts, and classrooms are dynamic environments, full of energy and talent. Managing them calls for creative leadership and teaching approaches. Leaders in education need to anticipate how interconnected aspects of schools interact and affect each other.

Systems thinking in education offers a valuable approach for teachers working to build student engagement. The approach also helps leaders organize schools by harnessing their assets. American University’s EdD in Education Policy and Leadership trains educators to apply systems thinking and other effective leadership approaches to transforming schools for the better.

The Systems Thinking Model

An education system is composed of many interdependent components working together. How well these components operate and interact determines the system’s health.

Education systems at the national, state, and local levels consist of interacting parts, including:

• Laws and regulations
• Funding and funding policies
• Schools and administrative offices
• Teachers and staff
• Books, computers, and instructional materials
• Students, parents, and communities

Those seeking to improve an education system might choose to analyze the system’s parts. In this way, they can identify individual characteristics of each part and evaluate how it functions. While this approach can offer some benefits, it has limitations. It stops short of examining the relationships between the parts.

For example, limited school funding might result in high student-teacher ratios and inadequate supplies for students. These factors then lead to lower levels of student achievement which, in turn, puts further strain on teachers to help their students meet achievement benchmarks, and so on.

Responding to the growing demands placed on US education, solving problems such as achievement gaps, and dealing with shrinking school budgets are significant challenges. To face them effectively, educators need to value their system’s high level of interconnectivity and interdependency.

Applying Systems Thinking in Education

Systems thinking is a mindset that helps educators understand the complex education system in a more holistic way. Teachers and administrators using systems thinking might ask questions such as:

• How might cuts to arts education impact student performance in math?
• How can policies linking teacher salaries to standardized test scores affect a low-achieving school’s ability to attract accomplished teachers?

The goal is to consider several possible scenarios to find solutions to interconnected challenges.

Helping teachers solve classroom management issues, for instance, may involve addressing missing support structures in classrooms, such as a need for special education teachers, or adjusting student schedules to give time and space for children to unwind and release their energy.

As a mindset, systems thinking guides educators to deliver thought-provoking, engaging lessons. It encourages school leaders to coordinate districts and manage schools with improved efficiency. It can also replace piecemeal approaches to implementing policies with organized and systematic approaches that bring success across the board.

Specifically, educators can use systems thinking as a framework to structure classrooms and deliver instruction, while school and district leaders can apply it to their management and organizational styles. Additionally, administrators can use systems thinking as an approach to restructuring educational systems or schools.

Systems Thinking in the Classroom

Systems thinking can be a powerful classroom tool, giving students a participatory role in the learning process. By viewing teaching through a systems thinking lens, educators can help students recognize how seemingly disparate systems interact, identifying meaningful connections in the world around them. This not only deepens students’ understanding of specific subjects, but also strengthens their critical thinking abilities.

For example, teachers at Orange Grove Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, used a systems thinking approach to develop a project that strengthened their students’ abilities to analyze and problem solve. They tasked students with developing plans for a new national park that met specific design requirements: parks needed to be attractive to users, inflict limited environmental harm, and respect an Indian burial ground on the chartered land.

During the process of developing their designs, students discovered connections between the social, ecological, and economic components of the project.

Leadership and Systems Thinking

Systems thinking in education empowers education leaders to align school initiatives, improve instruction, increase efficiency, eliminate waste, and strengthen student outcomes.

For example, by closely monitoring student data, administrators can adjust budgets to allow for the purchase of the instructional materials they need most.

A systems thinking approach lets administrators build systems that do the following:

• Recognize and adapt to changes (technological advances, policy reforms), coordinating with other parts of the system fluidly
• Include mechanisms that allow for self-reflection and self-correction
• Process information quickly and make it available to all parts of the system
• Distinguish between situations that need adjustments and those that need overhauls

Discover How an EdD in Education Policy and Leadership Prepares Education Leaders to Excel

Building collaborative cultures in districts and schools calls for a holistic, innovative approach. Systems thinking in education allows education leaders to not only recognize the relationships between the different components of a school system but also use them to solve problems.

Explore how American University’s EdD in Education Policy and Leadership cultivates the knowledge and expertise leaders in education need to confront obstacles and transform schools.

The Role of Educational Leadership in Forming a School and Community Partnership

Path to Becoming a School District Administrator

5 Effective Principal Leadership Styles

Getting Smart, “Why School System Leaders Need to Be Systems Thinkers”

Journal of School Leadership , “Sources of Systems Thinking in School Leadership”

The Learning Counsel, “What Is Systems Thinking in Education?”

Medium, “How to Practice Systems Thinking in the Classroom”

Systems Thinker, “Revitalizing the Schools: A Systems Thinking Approach”

Systems Thinker, “Systems Thinking: What, Why, When, Where, and How?”

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Teaching Students About Systems Thinking

These strategies guide students to explore the interconnected parts of complex systems like the human body, governments, and ecosystems.

Our world is interconnected and complex. As a result, our students need to move beyond fragmented ways of thinking, which look at problems in isolation or focus on short-term solutions. By developing our students to be systems thinkers, we can enable them to see patterns and organize their learning both inside and outside of school.

Let’s break this idea down by first describing what we mean by a system. Generally speaking, a system is a group of interconnected elements that are organized for a function or a purpose. System elements, or parts, may be physical or intangible things.

Importantly, system parts are interdependent. A change in one element can produce change within the entire system. This means systems are nonlinear. When consequences occur, they’re not isolated. They ripple through a system. Systems we encounter daily include the human body, cities, governments, social networks, and the Earth’s climate.

To give a narrative example, in Dr. Seuss’s well-known book The Lorax , the parts of the system are things like the water, air, Truffula Fruits, Brown Bar-ba-loots, and Humming-Fish, as well as the Once-ler’s greed and desire for economic growth above all else. Imagine if the Once-ler had truly understood how his behaviors impacted the Truffula Tree ecosystem, including the sustainability of his own Thneed production. His inability to think holistically led not only to a range of negative environmental consequences, but also to the collapse of his own business. 

In a global issue such as plastic pollution, system parts may include crude oil production, plastic manufacturing, companies, consumers, wastewater, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Systems thinking helps students manage complexity

Systems thinking is a mindset as well as a set of tools that enables students to recognize and understand relationships and interconnectedness. It’s an ability to toggle between the parts and the whole of a system to understand how interactions produce negative or positive behaviors. 

Systems thinking supports our students to understand the complexity of the world and manage its uncertainty, especially in a time of increased globalization; it is an essential component of critical thinking that teachers can apply across the curriculum. For example, using systems thinking, students can do the following:

• Chart character development in a piece of literature with behavior-over-time graphs
• Map nonlinear causes and consequences of historical or political conflicts
• Understand the relationships between parts of a cell, as well as between cells, organs, and body systems
• Analyze and take action on real-world issues, such as global warming, poverty, or overfishing

Teachers, curriculum coordinators, and school leaders can also use systems thinking tools, such as Agency by Design’s Mapping Systems protocol , to better understand the way parts of our educational system connect to produce positive or negative outcomes for students, such as lower attendance, higher referrals to learning interventions, or increased mental health issues.   

Fostering systems thinking as critical thinking

There are a number of ways teachers can facilitate systems thinking in the classroom. By slightly shifting how we interact with students—our questions or thinking prompts—we can promote “thinking in systems.”

Question with intention: Knowing we want to move away from “A leads to B” linear thinking, we can intentionally ask questions that encourage students to reflect on multiple parts of a system and how they connect. Instead of asking, “What caused this?” which communicates that there is a single cause, we can instead ask, “What factors contributed to this?” allowing students to search for multiple causes and nonlinear relationships.

Take a helicopter view: Toggling between the details and the big picture is an important systems thinking skill and one of the habits of a systems thinker . When looking at a situation, event, or particular issue, encourage students to discuss systems as a whole. For example, in the classroom we may create a circle, where each student represents a system part and makes connections with a ball of string. Students name how they connect to another system part as they toss the ball of string to one another, with each student retaining some of the string as they pass the ball around. At the end, students can see the interconnectedness of parts by gently tugging on the yarn and seeing who is affected.

Encourage pattern recognition: We want students to see the web of interconnections within systems and recognize how systems connect to other systems. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for instance, we saw how health systems impacted transportation and the economy, leading to certain goods being unavailable. By asking, “What’s this got to do with that?” we nudge students to go both deep and wide in an investigation.

Strategies for Teaching systems thinking

Many strategies for systems thinking encourage students to visualize and create “system pictures.” Because of the high degree of interaction within systems, many strategies invite students to map connections in nonlinear ways. Here are some concrete strategies we can use in the classroom.

Connected circles: In this strategy, a circle represents a particular system, and the parts of the system are written around the outside. Using a case study such as an article, video, or real-life experience, students chart connections across the parts of the circle, writing the relationship between parts on the connector line. A connected circles template can be modified for any system that students will explore.

Systems models: After researching a system such as a tropical rainforest or coral reef, students create a systems model using divergent physical materials, e.g. Lego, magnetic tiles, wooden blocks, paper, cotton balls, shells, stones, etc. After making representations of the system and its parts, students annotate the model with sticky notes, arrows, etc. to show relationships between them. This may also include inputs and outputs of the system. For example, sunlight and carbon dioxide go into the rainforest (inputs), and oxygen and water vapor come out (outputs).

Games and simulations: Matthew Farber has written extensively about the use of constructionist gaming to promote thinking about complex systems. He shows how making and thinking come together to allow students to play with systems. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop also writes about the role of digital learning to promote understanding of systemic causes in young children. 

By inviting students to play with and explore systems thinking tools, we enable them to see structures and patterns within and across the content areas. Such engagements can empower students to find solutions to local, global, and intercultural issues that may have previously seemed unsolvable.

Designing Education for Tomorrow

Jumpstarting innovation through thought experiments

Systems Thinking

For a comprehensive cover of the need and usefulness of Systems Thinking in Education read the Educational Development Trust report available here . This blog, when ready, will aim to capture some of its highlights. 

Systems thinking is an approach used to tackle complex issues that persist over time, with no successful solutions to date.  It seeks sustainable solutions based on deep understanding of issues. 

“Systems thinking is different to linear or cause and effect thinking, as it recognises more complex interdependencies and how multiple components may affect each other in different ways. It also helps to differentiate between the underlying issue and the symptoms of something deeper.” (Ndaruhutse et al, 2019, p. 13)

Table 1 below can be found on page 13 of the   Educational Development Trust report on systems thinking.

“ Traditional responses to improve education outcomes that take a piecemeal approach may have some success but are unlikely to solve the ‘wicked problems’ that different education systems around the world face. Systems thinking can help policymakers achieve faster and more sustained progress in education that results in broad outcomes for the current and future generation of children and young people.”  (Ndaruhutse et al, 2019, p. 11)

Key ideas and concepts in systems thinking:

• the components of any system are not only interlinked, but interconnected – that’s why when considering reform one needs to think about the unintended consequences of proposals, underlying processes , secure stakeholder involvement and seek to understand & resolve internal tensions  resulting from proposed changes.
• the system and its components are constantly changing and adapting – expect the possibility of  unforeseen results & plan mitigations as much as possible, maintain a big picture view , solutions should be iterative, experimental and co-created. 
• a system doesn’t exist and operate in isolation; influences what happens outside of it as much as external forces influence it – solutions need to be context-specific  (not just based on good practice elsewhere), external ‘forces’ need to be identified, understood and taken into account when generating solutions.
• distinguishing between underlying causal-relationships and symptomatic ones – leads to deeper understanding of the issue, multi-layered stakeholder analysis,  closer inspection  of  correlation vs causation and the need to challenge existing assumptions and own biases.

Figure 1 below can be found on page 10 of the   Educational Development Trust report on systems thinking.

The report also helpfully identified 5 policy tensions  in any reform proposal on education which are, by themselves, “a collection of complex, intractable problems and considerations that must remain at the forefront of the minds of those leading and delivering global education reform efforts” (Ndaruhutse et al, 2019, p. 11) :

1. Keep a balanced focus on how to use systems thinking to address simultaneously the two ‘wicked problems’ of equitable access and quality learning.

2. To work across organisational boundaries in a joined-up way, reforming education systems to improve outcomes for all children whilst also considering the wider systemic influences so reform is not undermined.

3. Balance the desire to be evidence-informed with the reality that operating in a political, economic, social and cultural context will make this hard to do.

4. Pay equal attention to a) the change management programme and accompanying capacity development approach needed to implement a reform and b) designing the reform itself.

5. Carefully balance what the system can achieve with personal and collective responsibility for decisions that can (negatively or positively) impact the functioning of the system.

“Systems thinking expands the range of choices available for solving a problem by broadening our thinking and helping us articulate problems in new and different ways. At the same time, the principles of systems thinking make us aware that there are no perfect solutions; the choices we make will have an impact on other parts of the system. By anticipating the impact of each trade-off, we can minimize its severity or even use it to our own advantage. Systems thinking therefore allows us to make informed choices.’ (Goodman, 2018)

Adopting a systems thinking approach in education would mean (a short, but not exhaustive list):

• thinking about all the actors and stakeholders involved in the system, their dynamic interrelationships and the need for co-creating solutions together (e.g. adjust expectations according to agency limitations of actors at each level);
• understanding that there are no piecemeal solutions without a ripple effect of some sort;
• thinking holistically about issues (understanding how system components work together) and transcending the boundaries of said system, like external drivers (e.g. the impact of pupils socio-economic background on their learning);
• gaining enough trans-sectional understanding of issues across the system to grasp inter-reactions between system components (this may involve going outside our areas of expertise);
• challenging own cause and effect assumption regarding issues in education;
• being more critical of ‘borrowed’ reform and understanding how to contextualise solutions and their impact; etc.

Bibliography:

Goodman, M., 2018, ‘Systems thinking: What? Why? Where? When? and How?’. The Systems Thinker Website available at  https://thesystemsthinker.com/systems-thinking-what-why-when-where-and-how/ 

Ndaruhutse, S., Jones, C. & Riggall, A., 2019, ‘Why systems thinking is important for the education sector’. Educational Development Trust ,  https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/EducationDevelopmentTrust/files/17/17fec588-e413-461b-a107-78b6569304cc.pdf

Soeonline, 2020, ‘What Is Systems Thinking in Education? Understanding Functions and Interactions in School Systems’. July 28, 2020, American University’s School of Education Website , available at https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/systems-thinking-in-education#  

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LOOKING BENEATH THE SURFACE

The Education Changemaker’s Guidebook to Systems Thinking

• Topics: Systems Change

Systems thinking can be a powerful element of systems change, no matter whether we decided to pursue transition or it was thrust upon us.

Systems thinking can help us grapple with the complex and interconnected world around us and make visible our own perceptions of how it works. Ultimately, it can help us deepen our understanding of what stands between us and our aspirational visions and articulate what it might take to bring those visions to reality.

This guidebook introduces education stakeholders and changemakers to the theories, language, mindsets and tools of systems thinking for the purpose of informing approaches to systems change. The content is organized into four lessons that introduce core concepts of systems thinking and include practice questions and exercises.

• Lesson 1: Framing the Focus of a Systems Problem Setting the scope of a systems exploration and identifying systems behavior that stakeholders wish to change
• Lesson 2: Visualizing the Structure of a Systems Problem Drawing the components and interactions related to a problem that stakeholders agree is important
• Lesson 3: Looking for Leverage to Create Change Identifying possible actions and their potential depth of impact on the systems problem being explored
• Lesson 4: Anticipating Futures of a Systems Problem Evaluating the effects of various interventions or events on a systems problem and the larger system in which it sits

Systems thinking tools and processes help groups identify novel, non-obvious solutions and reframe problems. They serve as gateways to new ways of thinking and collaborating and can help groups begin the journey toward transformation. Begin your transformation with our guidebook.

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Insight Note

Applying Systems Thinking to Education: The RISE Systems Framework

Marla Spivack

RISE Directorate

This Insight Note was updated on 27 January 2023. Please access the webpage, Applying Systems Thinking to Education: Using the RISE Systems Framework to Diagnose Education Systems , for the latest version of this Insight.

• Many education systems in low- and middle-income countries are experiencing a learning crisis. Many efforts to address this crisis do not account for the system features of education, meaning that they fail to consider the ways that interactions and feedback loops produce outcomes.  
• Thinking through the feedback relationships that produce the education system can be challenging. The RISE Education Systems Framework, which is sufficiently structured to give boundaries to the analysis but sufficiently flexible to be adapted to multiple scenarios, can be helpful.
• The RISE Framework identifies four key relationships in an education system: politics, compact, management, and voice and choice; and five features that can be used to describe these relationships: delegation, finance, information, support, and motivation.
• This Framework can be a useful approach for characterising the key actors and interactions in the education system, thinking through how these interactions produce systems outcomes, and identifying ways to intervene that can shift the system towards better outcomes.

Introduction

The last 30 years have seen dramatic success in the expansion of schooling access and attainment for children around the world. Education systems in the majority of low- and middle-income countries have become very successful at achieving schooling for all (or nearly all) children. However, they persistently fail to produce learning for all (Pritchett, 2013; World Bank 2018). The World Bank estimates that 53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries, and nearly 80 percent of children in low-income countries will reach the end of their primary schooling without being able to read a simple text (World Bank, n.d.). Recent analysis also shows that this problem has been getting worse, not better overtime. Analysing repeated cross-sectional data on years of schooling and literacy across 88 countries shows that the “quality” of schooling—defined as the literacy rate of adults with a given level of schooling—was either stagnant or declining in most developing countries between 1960 and 2000 (Le Nestour et al., 2021).

It is not just the poorest and most marginalised who are being left behind. Even children from households among the socio-economic elite in many low- and middle-income countries fail to master the basics (Pritchett and Viarengo, 2021). If the majority of the children in an education system lack the foundational skills needed not only to succeed in higher levels of education but also to reach their full potential as adults, then education systems are failing to deliver on one of their fundamental objectives.

How is it that education systems have succeeded in expanding schooling access and grade attainment, and yet consistently struggle to achieve learning for all? How can governments, donors, and civil society better understand the constraints to the achievement of foundational skills in national education systems and identify priorities for reform? An accurate and comprehensive diagnosis of why education systems persistently deliver poor learning outcomes is the first step in understanding how national education systems can transform into learning systems, capable of delivering high quality education to all.

This essay summarises a framework for understanding education systems that specifies the systems’ components and the ways that those components interact to produce or undermine learning for children. 1

Discussions of systems thinking in education can sometimes induce eye-rolls and groans. It is perceived as too theoretical, the purview of academics who want to develop theories and donors who want to spend money on “capacity building”, far removed from the practical, pressing concerns facing country-level decision makers and implementers.

But systems thinking can be a useful approach to diagnose the problem so that solutions that address the needs of a particular education system can be identified. If too little water is coming out of your tap, increasing the water pressure might seem like an obvious solution. But if the cause of your slow waterflow is a leaky pipe, raising the pressure might just exacerbate the problem. Since education systems are complex, a structured framework for characterising their features can help identify problems and the way towards solutions to overcome them.

To deliver learning for all children, the interactions between teachers and students in tens of millions of classrooms around the world will need to improve. Conventional wisdom asserts that those who wish to be useful to “policymakers” should provide actionable solutions. But an approach that starts with a solution in mind and tries to adapt that solution to fit the context is much less likely to succeed than an approach that starts with a careful definition of the problem and then makes an effort to develop a solution (Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock, 2017). Rushing to point to a solution to improve teacher–student interactions ignores the fact that teachers and students are embedded in larger systems that might be the cause of their poor performance and that determine the scope for intervention to improve it.

This essay opens with a discussion of what systems thinking is and how it can be useful in understanding outcomes in service delivery sectors like education. Next, it presents the RISE Framework for understanding education systems. Finally, it illustrates why a systems perspective—and the RISE Framework in particular—are useful for understanding the outcomes in education systems and for moving beyond a description of problems towards a diagnostic understanding of why the problem exists and how it can be addressed. 

Systems thinking

A system is a set of elements that are connected to each other by feedback relationships and organised in a way that achieves a function (Meadows, 2008). Ecosystems are a very familiar example of a system.

Table 1 shows a simplified illustration of the elements, relationships, and functions of the marine ecosystem.

Table 1: Simplified illustration of the components of a system

Source: Author’s illustrative example based on Meadows, 2008

The elements of the system are its visible components, but the crux of the system are the feedback relationships between the elements, which produce the functions, or emergent properties of the system. Often, the functions of the system are not the explicit goal of any individual system’s element (Meadows, 2008). Sun, water, chemicals, plants, and animals all interact to produce the marine ecosystem. But the sun does not shine so the seaweed can grow, and the seaweed does not grow so that it can feed the fish.

Though systems are made up of their elements and the relationships between them, they exist as ontologically distinct “things” from those elements and relationships. Studying the individual animals and plant of the marine ecosystem reveals some useful information, but studying the interactions between the species and how these interactions produce system functions can reveal a great deal more.

Because the system’s properties are produced by interactions between elements, interventions in the system that focus on one element can have unintended consequences. To take a specific example from marine life, in the Pacific Northwest killer whale populations have been steadily rising since the mid 1980s—a victory for conservation of this endangered species. At the same time, though, Chinook salmon populations have been declining. Both species are protected under different provisions of the endangered species act, but provisions of the law only allow for interventions that protect individual species. There are no provisions for interventions to support the ecosystem when both a predator and prey species are designated for protection (Marshall et al., 2015). An element-by-element approach is insufficient in this case; a solution that takes the interactions and the overall system into account is needed.

Systems thinking for education

It can be easy to grasp the connection between the feedback relationships and emergent properties of tangible systems, like that of ocean life, but it can be harder to see these connections in social systems like education. This is why developing a framework for studying education systems that clearly identifies the elements, relationships between them, and resulting system functions is so helpful.

Education systems are made up of elements that include people acting in specific roles, like teachers, students, and parents; organisations, like schools and ministries; and things like classrooms and teaching materials. These elements interact with each other via relationships: the parents send their children to school, the teachers teach the students, the teachers are employed by the school, and the school is managed by the ministry, and so on. As with the economy, the functions are revealed by the results of the interactions among the elements, but they might include: teaching foundational skills, ensuring a minimum number of years of schooling are reached, or socialisation to a national identity.

Table 2: Elements, relationships and functions of an education system

Source: Author

Distinguishing between symptom-only and diagnostic thinking

Medicine is one area where systems thinking is essential. When a person gets sick, their symptoms can be treated one by one, but correctly diagnosing their ailment first is likely to lead to a better outcome.

Table 3 shows a (highly stylised) list of symptoms and treatments for a mystery ailment. Without a correct diagnosis of what is making the patient ill, treating the symptoms might offer temporary relief, but it cannot offer a cure. Moreover, in some cases treating the patient without an accurate diagnosis could lead to prescriptions that do more harm than good.

Table 3: Symptoms and possible treatments of disease

Poorly performing education systems face many problems. Poor teacher training, poor teacher attendance, poor teaching materials, high dropout rates, and poor learning outcomes are all symptoms of a poorly performing education system.

One way to think of these symptoms is as potential “proximate determinants” of the low learning outcomes of a particular child. A child might emerge from her basic education without foundational skills because her teachers were not adequately prepared to teach her, because there were inadequate or inappropriate teaching and learning materials in her classrooms, because she dropped out of school, or because of some combination of these and other factors. We could point to any one of these as the “cause” or proximate determinant of her low learning outcomes at the end of primary school (Pritchett, 2015).

To improve outcomes, the interactions between teachers and students have to change. Those who want to help facilitate that change often begin by asking: “What needs to be different about this classroom for the student to emerge prepared?” This line of thinking leads to a focus on all of the symptoms mentioned above. A well intentioned NGO or government official interested in improving outcomes might observe that there are no textbooks in a classroom. Having identified this symptom, they might reasonably think: “There are no textbooks in this school, so we will provide textbooks. Students will be able to study at home now, follow along better in class, and their learning will improve.”

The problem with this symptom-only way of thinking is that it fails to acknowledge that the teacher and student are embedded in a larger system. It doesn’t ask why there are no books in the classroom in the first place. Failing to develop a diagnostic understanding of the problem can lead to a false conclusion about the cause, and to an intervention solution that has little effect on learning (see the example below).

Since education systems in developing countries face so many constraints, symptom-only thinking is tempting. Examples abound of project or programme interventions that look like the “symptom treatments” in the right-hand column of Table 4. Textbooks are missing, so provide them; teachers are absent, so monitor their attendance and enforce it with payment rewards or punishments; students drop out, so provide cash incentives for them to stay in school; and so on. Moreover, the symptom-by-symptom approach is also conducive to the “project dominated” approach to education aid favoured by many donors, making it even more attractive to the sector (Nino-Zarazua, 2016).

Table 4: Symptom by symptom treatment of the education system

All too often programmes are designed to address one of these symptoms, are implemented faithfully, and yet fail to improve learning outcomes. When a programme fails to have the desired impact, it is tempting to look for a devil in the details, some aspect of programme design or execution that could be tweaked to produce better performance. But often the devil is in the system, not in the details (Silberstein, 2020). The programme failed not because of a design flaw, but because of its overall incoherence with the rest of the education system.

One example is a 2009 study of the distribution of textbooks to Kenyan schools. An RCT found no effect of the books on pedagogy or average test scores, but a positive effect on test scores of the best performers. The authors noted that the textbooks were in English and so were inaccessible to most of the students, who could not read English well. The books were the standard government textbooks for this grade level, so the fact that they were in a language that most children could not read reflected the overambitious, elite orientation of the Kenyan curriculum at the time. The intervention was designed under the assumption that lack of resources for textbooks was the constraint to performance in Kenya. But, as the evaluation revealed, the deeper cause of poor performance in the Kenyan system was a curriculum that moved too quickly and left students behind (Glewwe, Moulin, and Kremer, 2009). This type of systemic misalignment is common in education systems in low- and middle-income countries (Hwa et al., 2020).

A second example can be found in a study of a teacher policy reform effort in Indonesia in the early 2000s. The 2005 Teacher Reform Law, as originally proposed, aimed to improve teacher quality by providing financial incentives for teachers to receive higher certifications that were meant to include rigorous external assessment. Pressure from teacher lobby groups diluted the law, and the certification process eventually adopted was a much weaker portfolio submission process and two-week training for those who did not pass. The reform ultimately resulted in the near universal doubling of civil servant teacher salaries (World Bank, 2013; de Ree et al., 2018). Researchers worked with the government to randomise the rollout of these increases so that teachers in a group of treatment schools were able to have higher pay sooner, allowing for an assessment of the effects of the salary increase. They found that while teachers were more satisfied with their jobs, the pay increase had no effect on teacher attendance, subject knowledge, or student learning (de Ree et al., 2018). Changing just one element of teacher’s employment—their salary—without changing anything else about the system that the teachers were embedded in did not change their behaviour.

A final example comes from a more recent study conducted as part of the RISE Programme. In this case a randomised evaluation studied a large-scale management reform meant to improve teacher performance initially implemented in Madhya Pradesh, India, and then scaled to hundreds of thousands of schools nationally. The programme was modelled on state-of-the-art management approaches, and process evaluations revealed it was implemented faithfully. The results? No impact could be detected on any of the performance indicators the study followed: student absence, teacher absence, monitoring and support by managers, or student test scores. The bureaucrats responsible for implementing the programme filled out paperwork and developed plans for improving schools, as they were required to, but when it came to transforming these plans into actions and changes in teachers’ behaviour, the programme broke down. The authors found a “disconnect between the programme’s objectives and how it was actually perceived by those implementing it” (Muralidharan and Singh, 2020, p. 20). In other words, there was an incoherence in the system, not in the details (Silberstein, 2020).

These examples do not prove that providing more textbooks, higher teacher wages, or school improvement plans do not contribute to student learning. Instead, they show that attempts to address these individual problems without considering the wider system are likely to fail.

The shortcomings of the symptom-by-symptom approach underscore the need for a framework that can illuminate the true functions and incoherences of education systems. With a clear picture of these, policymakers can design reforms and interventions that bring the system into alignment with learning objectives.

The RISE Systems Framework

The RISE Education Systems Framework 2 provides the scaffolding for considering the key elements of an education system, the relationships between them, and the ways in which these relationships operate to produce the system’s functions.

The elements are the range of actors who are a part of the system. This includes individuals playing specific roles (described here as groups) and organisations 3 . Chief among them are: citizens; highest executive legislative and fiduciary authorities of the state; education authorities; school leaders; teachers; parents; children; and communities.

Relationships

In considering the relationships between the elements of the system, the RISE Framework draws on the paradigm of a principal-agent relationship. A principal-agent relationship is a model used to describe a situation where one actor (the principal) wants a task accomplished, so they engage another actor (the agent) to complete the task. The principal sets out what is expect of the agent and how the agent will be rewarded for completing the task(s) the principal lays out—in other words, how the principal will hold the agent accountable 4 .

The RISE systems framework assumes four key relationships of accountability in an education system.

Figure 1: Four accountability relationships in the education system

Source: Adapted from Pritchett, 2015

Politics is the relationship between citizens 5 — the principal— and the highest executive, legislative, and fiduciary authorities of the state—the agent .  The citizens can act in their role as the principal in the politics relationship in a number of different ways. These include participating in elections, participating in party activities, and engaging in civil society activities. While the mechanisms through which these activities operate differ between democratic and non-democratic regimes, they are relevant to both (Edsyclopedia, Politics-Delegation). The executive authority of the state is usually embodied in a President, Prime Minister, or other chief executive. The role of the legislative body in education and budget-setting differs across countries, so its importance in the relationship of accountability varies. The fiduciary authority (i.e., organisation(s) within government that make decisions about budget allocations) usually rests in the Ministry of Finance. Since in most countries the Ministry of Finance is tightly controlled either by the executive or the legislature (depending on how budgeting is conducted) the framework groups them together as a joint agent in this relationship. The politics relationship is the starting point of what has been termed “long route of accountability” because, while the ultimate accountability for service delivery originates with citizens, that accountability passes through political leaders and government agencies before reaching the frontline, where services are actually delivered.

Compact is the relationship between the highest executive, legislative, and fiduciary authorities of the state—the principal—and education authorities and organisations—the agent . The principal in the compact relationship is the highest executive, legislative, and fiduciary authority. The organisations and individuals that comprise the agent in the politics relationship are the principal in this relationship. In this way, the principal in the compact relationship acts as a conduit to convey the objectives of the politics relationship to the organisations responsible for delivery of education.

The agents of the compact relationship include the Ministry of Education. In many systems there are other government or non-government organisations that executive, legislative, and fiduciary authorities also delegate education responsibilities to. These can include national curriculum boards, regulatory agencies, or religious authorities who run schools in parallel with the Ministry of Education.

A second set of agents in the compact relationship are private sector actors in the education sector—for example, private schools and private providers of textbooks and other education materials and services. These private actors are another group of organisations, alongside government agencies, responsible for delivery of education. They are often regulated by government and operate with the implicit or explicit permission of government. In this sense, they are an agent of the highest executive authorities.

Management is the relationship between education authorities and organisations—the principal—and school leaders and teachers on the frontline—the agents . In some education systems the management relationship exists within a single organisation—the Ministry of Education. This would be the case if all or most education functions fall under the remit of a single ministry. In others, the relationship is more complicated, with multiple organisations in the “education authority” role, and each with their own set of frontline workers. For example, in some systems there are schools that fall under the authority of the Ministry of Education, and other schools that are managed by a religious authority.

The management relationship also includes interactions on a smaller scale, such as between an individual and their boss (i.e., school leaders and teachers), but the framework emphasises the relationship between the leaders or centre of the education organisation, and the frontline providers. This emphasis on the main centre-frontline relationship is partly because every education system’s configuration of smaller-scale management relationships is unique to how authority and discretion are distributed in that particular context.

Voice and Choice is the relationship between recipients of services, parents, children, and communities—the principal—and the providers of services, school leaders and teachers—the agent . To the extent that there is any power in the voice and choice relationship, this is the direct relationship between parents and community members and the teachers and school leaders who serve their children. Students, parents, and communities can hold schools and teachers accountable for education primarily in two ways: through exercising their voice to exert pressure on a school or teacher to change, or by using exit (i.e., choice) to leave a school or teacher they are unhappy with and select a different one. Parents can form school committees or parent associations to enhance their ability to exercise voice. Parents exercise choice as an individual decision, not intending to have a systemic effect, but the collective choices of many parents to shift from one school to another, or out of the public sector and into private schools, can have significant effects on the education system overall (Edsyclopedia, Voice & Choice). Local communities can also exert pressure on schools via representative local government, village groups, or traditional leaders, who can use their platforms to pressure schools and sometimes also control the provision and use of supplemental funds to schools.

School leaders and teachers are in the particularly challenging position of being accountable to two different principals. They are directly accountable to parents and communities in the voice and choice relationship, but they are also accountable to their supervisors at the school or district level, in the management relationship.

Figure 2: The “accountability triangle”, a graphical illustration of the relationships between the various elements of the system.

Relationship features

There are five features that are helpful for analysing each relationship. These design elements describe the nature of the relationship between the principal and the agent in terms of what the principal asks the agent to do, how the principal equips the agent to do it, and monitors and incentivises their performance.

Delegation  is what the principal wants the agent to do. For example, in the management relationship the Ministry of Education delegates what should be taught to students via the curriculum.

Finance refers to the resources the principal has allocated to the agent to achieve their assigned task. For example, in the compact relationship the Ministry of Finance allocates budget to the education authorities to carry out educational activities.

Information is   how the principal assesses the agent's performance. For example, in the voice and choice relationship parents can gather information about their children’s school experience by asking their children how they feel about school or by reviewing their children’s test scores.

Support  refers to the preparation and assistance that the principal provides to the agent to complete the task. For example, in the management relationship the Ministry of Education may prepare teachers for their job by providing pre- and in-service teacher training.

Motivation  refers to how the principal motivates the agent, including the ways in which the agent’s welfare is contingent on their performance against objectives. This can be extrinsic (mediated by principal) or intrinsic (mediated by agent). For example, in the voice & choice relationship parents or community groups may directly pressure teachers to improve their attendance at school by calling them out in community meetings for failing to do so.

Combining the four key relationships and five features together, as shown in Table 5, produces the RISE Systems Framework.

Table 5: The 5x4 Education Systems Framework

Functions or emergent properties of the system: alignment of relationships and types of incoherence.

Education systems deliver learning when strong relationships of accountability are aligned around a learning objective across their design elements. In other words, systems deliver learning when coherence for learning emerges as a feature of the interactions between the elements of the system (Crouch, 2020).

There are at least two alternatives to a well-functioning system that is coherent for learning: 1) interactions among the elements of the system produce alignment around an objective other than learning; or 2) interactions among the elements of the system produce incoherence (Pritchett and Spivack, forthcoming). 

The coherence or incoherence among the relationships and their features, and the alignment of the relationship around learning or some other objective, can all be thought of as the emergent properties of the system. The emergent properties of the system are the result of the interactions between the elements. Innovation is an emergent property of an economy, just like a fish’s gills colours are an emergent property of an ecosystem. It may seem like there is an “invisible hand” creating the economy or a “mother nature” orchestrating evolution, but these features emerge from system pressures, not from any intentional plan. Similarly, the alignment of the relationships or incoherences in an education system can be outcomes of the system even though they are not intentionally created by any actor in the system.

Alignment of relationships of accountability

The alignment of a relationship of accountability is one of the emergent properties of an education system that the framework can help identify and evaluate. Systems deliver learning when relationships of accountability are coherent around learning objectives, but in many systems relationships are aligned around other objectives.

Examining each relationship of accountability and its features can point towards the overall alignment of the relationship, which may be implicit or different from explicitly stated purposes. An overall alignment can be identified by defining the organisations that comprise each relationship and then asking what delegation, finance, information, management, support, and motivation look like from the perspective of both the principal and the agent in the relationship.

The most common alignment in education systems is alignment for access and attainment. In relationships aligned for access and delegation of objectives, financing of activities, information used to evaluate performance, support to improve performance, and motivation to deliver are all geared towards expanding the number of children in school and the years of school they complete. The alignment for access and attainment in most education systems is evidenced by the rapid expansion in enrolment and grade attainment over the last 50 years.

While alignment for access and attainment is most common, alignment for other purposes can also be a feature of relationships and systems. These others include:

• Learning: Elements of the relationship of accountability are aligned around learning objectives. Clear learning objectives are delegated. Financing is sufficient and sufficiently flexible to achieve learning objectives. 
• Access and attainment: Elements of the relationship of accountability are aligned around expanding enrolment and grade attainment.
• Socialisation: Relationship is characterised by a socialisation or ideological goal.
• Clientelism: Relationship is characterised by short-term political objectives, education system is deployed as a tool of clientelism.
• Special interests: Relationship is characterised by protection for special interests. Special interest groups, such as teachers’ unions  that have become dominated by partisan priorities, dominate the compact relationship.  Ensuring that their needs are met becomes the primary focus of the relationship of accountability.
• Process compliance. Relationship is dominated by support functions (e.g., human resources, information technology, or procurement) and bureaucratic compliance, focus of the relationship is entirely on process compliance

Relationships may have overlapping or complementary alignments. For example, alignment for socialisation is compatible with alignment for access, as the expansion of an ideological perspective is supported by bringing more children into the school system (Pritchett and Spivack, forthcoming).

Types of incoherence

Incoherence in the system can hinder progress towards learning objectives. The three main types of incoherence can be described in terms of the 5x4 matrix.

Within a column: incoherence between the design elements within a particular relationship of accountability.

For example, within a compact relationship, executive and fiduciary authorities (i.e., the Ministry of Finance) may delegate learning improvements but only ask education authorities (i.e., Ministry of Education) for information on enrolment rates. This means that there is incoherence between what is delegated, and the information used to evaluate the ministry’s performance. This undermines the delegated objective, as ministry officials shift their focus to what is being measured, rather than what is being rhetorically delegated, weakening the overall relationship of accountability (see Table 6).

Within a row: incoherence between the relationships of accountability across one or more design elements.

For example, executive and fiduciary authorities may delegate a focus on access and attainment, but education authorities may try to begin delegating goals around improved learning outcomes. This incoherence in what is being delegated at different levels of the system may cause confusion. It may also result in insufficient finance and support for the learning objectives the Ministry of Education is trying to adopt.

Within-row incoherence is a particular challenge for frontline providers (teachers and school leaders), who are the only actors in the system who are the agent of more than one principal. As a result, they are particularly vulnerable to incoherence due to misalignment between their two principals. 

For example, education authorities may want to change the pedagogical approach in schools. They can delegate this change, finance it adequately, provide support to help teachers adopt it, and collect information about the adoption. However, if parents are opposed to the change they can pressure teachers to stick to the old approach (see Table 7).

Table 6: Examples of column incoherence

Table 7: Examples of column coherence and row incoherence

To explore the concept of incoherence in more depth, it’s helpful to look at a practical example of activities in an education system and analyse the types of incoherence that can stymie success in these activities.

Example of incoherence: Teacher training in a new curriculum or pedagogy

Teacher training programmes are a critical activity through which education authorities support frontline school leaders and teachers, but they often fail to improve learning outcomes. These activities fall within the “Management–Support” cell of the matrix (see the green cell in Table 5). Applying the systems framework can reveal the incoherences at the root of why a seemingly well designed programme can fall short of a goal to improve student learning outcomes.

A recent experience with a teacher training programme in Rwanda offers a real world illustration, which can be used to explore the different types of incoherence that emerge. In 2016, Rwanda undertook reforms in their primary and secondary school curricula, including to a secondary school subject on entrepreneurship. The reform was aimed at and facilitated a more skills-based and student-centred approach to the subject. A non-governmental organisation (NGO) identified training in the new curriculum as an implementation gap and developed a training programme to be deployed in parallel to the curriculum rollout. The programme included in-service trainings, exchange visits to other schools, and outreach and support. While the curriculum was deployed around the country, the NGO training was only deployed to a randomly selected sample of schools, allowing for a quantitative, randomised evaluation of the training’s effects on teacher practices and student learning outcomes alongside a qualitative study of teacher and student perceptions of the new curriculum and training.

The quantitative evaluation found that, two years after the training programme was launched, treatment schools saw a six-fold increase in the use of skills labs—extended sessions for conducting hands-on experiential learning activities—compared to control schools (a 52 percentage point increase). The increased use of skills labs in treatment schools went hand in hand with shifts in teacher pedagogy towards greater “student centredness.” Despite the encouraging indications about the role that the training played in changing classroom practices, the study found no effect of the training on student’s scores on high stakes national exams, nor on tests of financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and non-cognitive skills developed by and administered by the researchers (Blimpo and Pugatch, 2020).

Interviews and focus group discussions conducted with students and teachers alongside the quantitative evaluation offer insights into why a training that succeeded in changing teacher practices in the way that the curriculum change intended, failed to deliver improvements in students’ outcomes. The curriculum reform was not accompanied by exam reform. So while the training did help teachers adopt a more skills-based and student-centred approach, in particular scheduling and holding more skills labs, the overall pressure to teach theory and content, as the old curriculum had emphasised, remained. In interviews and focus groups both teachers and students noted this dissonance. Teachers suggested to interviewers that national exams should be updated to reflect the new curriculum, and some reported that they tried to make changes to internal, school level exams to better reflect the skills-based approach they were now meant to teach. Students in treated schools reported that skills labs and student business clubs (another feature of the new curriculum) were planned and encouraged for Standard-4 and Standard-5 students, but not for Standard-6, the year in which students take national exams, and that that time was used for exam preparations (Anand, 2020).

What incoherences may have undermined the success of the training programme in this case?

Within a column: Incoherence between the design elements within a particular relationship of accountability. The teacher training could have faced a mismatch with the other design elements of the management relationship. The new training could have been incoherent with delegation in the relationship if it were inconsistent with the new curriculum or pedagogy, or if there were insufficient support in general. It could also have been incoherent with the finance of the relationship, if insufficient resources were allocated towards it; with the information of the relationship if the authorities neglected to follow up to determine how the training worked; or with the motivation of the relationship, if teachers and school leaders had little incentive to actively engage in the training or implement the new pedagogy.

This type of incoherence is a prominent feature of this example in at least two ways. First, the business as usual approach of the government offered insufficient support to teachers to prepare for the new curriculum. As a result, the teachers who did not receive the NGO training made significantly fewer changes to their teaching practices than those who received training. Second, the high stakes exams (i.e., information) were not reformed alongside the curriculum, creating an incoherence within the column. Teachers and schools, knowing the importance of exam performance, continued to emphasise the theoretical material that was the core of the old curriculum (Anand, 2020).

Within a row: Incoherence between the relationships of accountability within a particular feature of the relationships. The usefulness of training could have been undermined by misalignments between the relationships of accountability. If the new curriculum or pedagogy featured in the training was inconsistent with executive or fiduciary leaders’ priorities, insufficient resources could have been allocated towards it. Moreover, the inconsistency in delegation could mean that some elements within the ministry were pushing the training while others were unconcerned with it, undermining motivation.

The available analysis in this case does not discuss the role that the Ministry of Finance or executive leaders played in the reform, so it’s not possible to study within-row incoherence in this case.

Across the rows of two relationships, frontline providers. Frontline providers (school leaders and teachers) are the agents in relationships with both education authorities and parents. The usefulness of the training could have been undermined if it was inconsistent with parents’ preferences for their children. If parents are uninterested in, or opposed to the new pedagogy, then even a successful training would struggle to be effective, since teachers would face pressure from parents to forgo the new approach.

The analysis of this case does not include information about parents’ perspectives, but it does include analysis of focus group discussions held with students. It found that students had a positive view of the new curriculum, reporting that it provided them with some skills to start a small business, despite the fact that it was only partially implemented. Notably, many students in the treatment schools specifically mentioned useful things that they learned during skills labs and from student business clubs, neither of which were implemented in many of the control schools. The generally positive view of the new curriculum from the students suggests that incoherence between the management and voice and choice relationships was not a significant cause of incoherence in this case, though without information on parent or community perceptions of the new curriculum it’s difficult to make a come to a definitive conclusion (Anand, 2020).

The Rwanda teacher training example discussed above, like most of the other examples in this essay, shows how incoherences in the education system can hinder programmes’ effectiveness. Overall, education quality has been stagnant or declining in most low- and middle- income countries (Le Nestour et al., 2021), but there are a handful of success cases to look to. Often the roots of successful cases can be traced to the emergence of coherence around learning goals across the system.

Take the case of Vietnam, a system that is widely acknowledged to overperform its peers (in terms of GDP per capita) (Dang et al., 2020). A key feature of the Vietnamese system is a prevalent, nation-wide “all for learning” attitude, demonstrated by high level political commitment to learning from national and party leaders, individual households’ financial commitments to education, and general public engagement in education issues, even in the absence of organised civil society in the education sector present in other developing countries. This reflects a high degree of coherence for learning in delegation and finance across multiple relationships of accountability in the Vietnamese system. This coherence around learning exists alongside other features of the Vietnamese system that could undermine performance, such as incoherent decentralisation and persistent inequalities between groups (London, 2021). The Vietnamese system is far from perfect, but it does perform much better than its peers and coherence around learning objectives is a key feature of this success.

Education systems in many low- and middle-income countries have a long way to go to deliver education of the quality that Vietnamese students enjoy. By providing a structured approach to understanding and analysing the components and interactions of an education system, the RISE Framework can help diagnose the problems their education systems face and consider the best ways to intervene to make meaningful improvement.

Acknowledgements

This note draws broadly on the work, thinking, and discussions of the team of researchers at the RISE Directorate including, Carmen Belafi, Luis Crouch, Yue-Yi Hwa, Michelle Kaffenberger, Clare Leaver, Lant Pritchett, and Jason Silberstein, whose input I am grateful for. I am also grateful to Gautam Anand, Michele Kaffenberger, Todd Pugatch, Lant Pritchett and an anonymous reviewer from Oxford Policy Management for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. Any remaining errors are my own.

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• 1 This framework builds on, adapts, and expands a general accountability framework for service delivery in the 2004 World Development Report “Making Services Work for the Poor”, adapted to education systems in a 2015 paper by RISE Research Director Lant Pritchett, and further illuminated by research and synthesis as part of the RISE Programme.
• 2 Sometimes referred to as the “5x4”, or the “accountability triangle”.
• 3 The discussion includes “things” or artifacts like teaching materials and classrooms as systems elements. While these can be considered elements of the system, the RISE Framework focuses on principal – agent relationships between individuals or groups and organisations, and artifacts of the system are not included in the framework.
• 4 This is why the RISE Framework is sometimes referred to as the “Accountability Framework”.
• 5 Using the term citizen here is not intended to suggest that the views and needs of non-citizen residents are not important in the politics relationship. Instead, this is partly a term of convenience and partly a term to highlight the importance of electoral politics in many contexts.

Spivack, M. 2021. Applying Systems Thinking to Education: The RISE Systems Framework. 2021/028. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-RI_2021/028

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Introduction to Systems Thinking and Change

• Living reference work entry
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• First Online: 11 July 2019
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Eugene G. Kowch 4  

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This 15 chapter section in the major reference work marks a shift and the evolution in thinking about systems in education as the first compilation on education Systems Thinking and Change by scholars. Education graduate students, education professors, and researchers can use these chapters in the major reference works to explore, to teach, and to learn the newest theory and applications of systems thinking in education contexts. First, this Introduction offers a high-level history and analysis of systems thinking, theory, and systemic change for new and seasoned scholars. Most encouraging from these 15 chapters is an overall shift toward knowing education systems as nonlinear, open, and complex relational ecosystems that can exist or replace traditionally bureaucratic, closed, institutionalized ways of knowing. Learning environment designers will also notice a design gaze extending beyond classroom learning to learning in much larger, interconnected ecosystems. These authors also promote the notion that contemporary education ecosystems are unstable (and wonderful), leaving further behind the notion that systems thinking is about applying systems theory to regain or achieve organization equilibrium. The section “Systems Thinking and Change” is organized into three subsections: (1) the first five chapters explore new systems thinking theories for educators; (2) the next five chapters demonstrate systems thinking frameworks for leading change ; and (3) the final five chapters demonstrate systems thinking applications and research in university, K-12, industry, and government settings.

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Kowch, E.G. (2019). Introduction to Systems Thinking and Change. In: Spector, M., Lockee, B., Childress, M. (eds) Learning, Design, and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_133-1

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Using systems thinking in education: benefits and strategies

Systems thinking is becoming a valuable cognitive skill in our interconnected world, with businesses voting it as one of the top- ten growing skills for employees. Thus, as educators, it’s crucial that we develop our own understanding of systems thinking so we can successfully teach this approach to students and prepare them for academic, personal, and career success.

With this in mind, let’s explore systems thinking in education, examine its many benefits for students, and discover how Kialo Edu discussions can provide a useful framework for systems thinking.

What is systems thinking in education?

Systems thinking is an approach to problem-solving and decision-making that views issues as part of wider, dynamic systems.

Systems thinkers see the big picture — the whole system — when solving problems or making decisions. They evaluate how changes to one part of the system could impact other areas and the system as a whole. This gives systems thinkers a holistic understanding of complex issues, enabling them to make informed decisions and generate effective solutions.

This systems thinking approach is crucial in today’s world where systems surround us. From the energy grid to transportation networks to complex supply chains, systems form the infrastructure of society. The same is true in education, where a network of smaller systems such as assessment, curriculum design, and teacher training contribute to the wider education system. 

In education, systems thinking can have an impact in two key ways:

• Stakeholders, such as national education departments and school leaders, can use systems thinking to improve education systems.
• Educators can teach students a systems thinking approach to improve decision-making and problem-solving skills.

Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Why is systems thinking important for improving education systems?

The problems that arise in complex systems, such as education, are aptly named “ wicked problems ” because they involve numerous interdependent factors. This makes finding solutions challenging. 

For example, implementing an intervention to address attainment gaps would impact staff training, resource allocation, timetabling, assessment methods, and more. Thus, education leaders aiming to improve an educational system can benefit from adopting a systems thinking approach. Evaluating the wider impacts of potential solutions on the whole system enables them to confidently select the most effective option.

What are the benefits of teaching systems thinking to students?

Creating systems thinkers who can address these “wicked problems” begins by teaching students how to use systems thinking in the classroom. And just as altering one component of a system affects other elements, instructing students in systems thinking brings them numerous additional benefits!

1. Students practice better problem-solving and decision-making skills

Systems thinking helps students to develop a holistic approach to problem-solving and decision-making. By viewing a problem as part of a system and examining interdependencies, students learn to look beyond the outcomes of a problem and instead identify its root causes. This deeper understanding leads them to make informed decisions and create effective solutions.

2. Students value multiple perspectives

Systems thinking helps students recognize that every part of a system involves stakeholders with diverse needs, goals, and viewpoints. Teaching students to consider these multiple perspectives helps broaden their thinking and moves them away from narrow solutions. 

Instead, students generate inclusive and effective solutions that address the needs of all those involved.

3. Students develop critical thinking skills

Systems thinking requires students to practice critical thinking by analyzing interdependencies within a system. With an understanding of these interconnections, students can evaluate the potential implications of different improvement strategies for every type of situation they come across.

4. Students engage in long-term thinking

Teaching students about feedback loops within systems thinking helps them to develop long-term thinking. Once students understand that the output of any decision they make becomes the input for future operations, they will move away from short-term solutions and instead evaluate the longer-term impacts of their decisions.

5. Students become knowledgeable, active citizens

Real-world systems thinking activities provide students with valuable insights into complex systems in society, including political, economic, and environmental systems. Equipping students with knowledge of these systems builds their civic literacy and can empower them to become active and informed citizens of the future.

How can I teach systems thinking to students?

Open-ended, real-world problems or scenarios provide an ideal context for teaching students to use systems thinking. Here’s an example of how this works in the classroom.

Example systems thinking problem: What is the best way to fight climate change?

Step 1: identify the parts of the system.

Begin by asking students to identify the different parts of the climate change system. This could include energy production, industry, transportation, and agriculture. If students are new to systems thinking, consider narrowing down the number of elements to focus on.

Step 2: Identify interdependencies within the system

Then, guide students to identify the interdependencies between different parts of the climate change system. You could ask them to draw a web to represent this visually. Or, for a more active approach, have some students hold a card to represent a different part of the system, while other students link them together with string to show the interdependencies.

Step 3: Analyze potential solutions

Next, ask students to investigate the different ways to fight climate change. Make this manageable by allocating teams of students different areas to investigate. 

Students should use the interdependence webs they created in step 2 to analyze potential impacts of their option on other areas of the system. For example, improving the renewable energy infrastructure could impact agricultural land use, which may impact food production. 

Encourage students to develop long-term thinking by having them explore feedback loops, for example by investigating the effect of a temperature increase. Graphics organizers like flowcharts or argument maps can help students to reason through potential impacts.

Step 4: Draw an informed conclusion

Finally, ask students to use their research to draw an informed conclusion to present to the rest of the class. Different groups may draw different conclusions. Teach students that this is acceptable provided that they can justify their decision based on their systems thinking approach.

How to support systems thinking in the classroom with Kialo Edu

Kialo discussions provide an engaging way to develop your students’ systems thinking skills. Our Topic Library contains discussions that are ideal for engaging students in real-world problem-solving scenarios. For example, students can investigate the best source of renewable energy or the best method of transport in a city .

You can even create a discussion question to match your current topic, and guide students’ research by adding your own top-level claims.

Each discussion is framed around an argument-mapping structure that provides students with a visual framework for systems thinking. The branching claims in the discussion prompt students to work through the pros and cons of different ideas. And it’s easy for students to link claims to other claims , helping them to demonstrate interdependencies.

Importantly, there is no limit to this branching system, giving students the space to delve deeply into the topic. Plus, being able to see a representation of the whole system facilitates students in evaluating the wider impact of their suggestions.

Our exploration of systems thinking shows why businesses rate it as an important future skill. But systems thinking in education is not just about preparing students for the future. By teaching students a systems thinking approach, you can equip them with a range of important skills that will have immediate benefits in your classroom! 

We’d love to hear your ideas for teaching systems thinking to students. Contact us at [email protected] or on social media.

Want to try Kialo Edu with your class?

Sign up for free and use Kialo Edu to have thoughtful classroom discussions and train students’ argumentation and critical thinking skills.

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Why systems thinking is important for the education sector

Susy Ndaruhutse

Former Head of Global Programme Quality

Susy consulted on projects and research with Education Development Trust, having previously worked for the organisation as part of her 20 years’ experience of working collaboratively with low- and middle-income governments, multilateral and bilateral donors, and NGOs on policy, strategy, finance and capacity development initiatives.

Charlotte Jones

Former Global Head of R&D

Charlotte has 15 years' experience as a change management and organisation design professional, working as a teacher, management consultant, researcher, and architect of a ground-breaking music education programme in the UK. At Education Development Trust Charlotte used her expertise to advise on education system change and the design of high impact education reform programmes for donors, charities and ministries of education globally. Along with her team, she provided advice on teacher workforce development, inspections and accountability, and school collaboration, and worked closely with clients to transfer knowledge and build long-term reform capacity.

Dr Anna Riggall

Director of Research and Consultancy

Dr Anna Riggall leads Education Development Trust's global programme of academic educational research and promotes evidence engagement across the organisation. She has over 20 years’ experience leading international educational research and holds an MA in Education & Development Studies and PhD in Education. She specialises in the areas of education system reform, education for marginalised groups including children with disabilities, girls and refugees, teacher development, leadership, accountability and education in emergencies.

Our new report about systems thinking and its place in education transformation reflects on key published literature and on specific outputs from our own programme of research which has placed emphasis on system reform over the past five years. The work we do at Education Development Trust brings us into direct contact with education systems, and their governments. We are tasked with helping to solve intractable educational challenges. Systems thinking is a vital component part of what we do, how we understand the nature of the issues and how we support change.

Systems thinking has a past that tracks from computer engineering in the 1950s through urban planning, development and health.  It has revolutionised the conceptualisation of problems and approaches to solutions in equal measure.  In education, since the 1990s the discourse of systems thinking has increasingly permeated the fabric of donor and governmental thinking. 

Our analysis of examples from our own research work and the work of others leads us to identify six accelerators for reform at scale:

• Vision and leadership at all levels
• Teacher and school leadership capacity
• Data for accountability and improvement
• Delivery architecture including collaboration
• Evidence-informed policy and learning
• Coalitions for change

Our report concludes with a reflection on five policy tensions that suggest a need for us all to:

• Keep a balanced focus on how to use systems thinking to address simultaneously the two ‘wicked problems’ of equitable access and quality learning.
• To work across organisational boundaries in a joined-up way, reforming education systems to improve outcomes for all children whilst also considering the wider systemic influences so reform is not undermined.
• Balance the desire to be evidence-informed with the reality that operating in a political, economic, social and cultural context will make this hard to do.
• Pay equal attention to a) the change management programme and accompanying capacity development approach needed to implement a reform and b) designing the reform itself.
• Carefully balance what the system can achieve with personal and collective responsibility for decisions that can (negatively or positively) impact the functioning of the system.

The SDGs have set out ambitious targets for education in 2030 looking at equitable access, quality teaching, relevant learning and ensuring children and young people are developing the skills, values and competencies needed to sustain them during adulthood and to provide a sustainable livelihood. The scale of the challenge is significant. 

Traditional responses to improve education outcomes that take a piecemeal approach may have some success but are unlikely to solve the ‘wicked problems’ that different education systems around the world face.  Systems thinking offers a glimpse of a different future.  It can help policymakers achieve faster and more sustained progress in education that results in broad outcomes for the current and future generation of children and young people. 

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How to Practice Systems Thinking in the Classroom

Tatum Moser

Education.com’s Teacher Voice

More and more, systems thinking is becoming a sought-after skill in the workplace and therefore, schools. To develop systems thinking one of the most important skills one can learn is how to identify systems. A system is a collection of things or actions that work together as a connected whole. This can include anything from freeways to bus schedules to even natural systems found in nature like the water cycle. Given the amount of man-made systems one encounters in life the benefit of teaching students to see systems in the world around them is that ultimately you empowering them to not only see, but also possibly influence and in some cases disrupt the systems they identify.

Understanding how to create systems helps us develop routines and good habits. Knowing how to “see” and uncover systems created by others helps us to ask great questions about the world around us and why we do the things we do, prompting us to ask ourselves questions like: “Why do we do it this way? What if there was a better way?”

My kindergarten class, along with all kids in this age range, are natural questioners. In his book A More Beautiful Question , Warren Berger quotes Alison Gopnik and writes, “Children are the research and development division of the human species.” As teachers, we should leverage this natural curiosity and tendency to ask questions to help children develop the skill of analyzing and creating systems. Mastering this skill will help them in school and beyond, for the rest of their lives.

So, how can you go about teaching systems thinking in your classroom?

Identify Systems That Already Exist

The Agency by Design research team at Harvard’s Project Zero believes that being able to see systems starts with understanding the difference between a system and a heap. They have come up with some great working definitions that can get you started and encourage you to also try and come up with your own definitions!

• A system is a collection of parts that have some influence on one another and the whole.
• To be considered a system, the components must interact or influence each other in some way.
• Systems have subsystems and may themselves be part of larger systems.

Introduce this concept by showing students an example of a system and an example of a heap , which doesn’t meet the requirements of a system. For example, display a collection of crayons that are part of an art workstation with things like paper, pencils and paint (system) and a pile of crayons that are by themselves (heap). After a short demo, turn your students loose on a systems hunt. You may be surprised at what they uncover! During my last kindergarten systems hunt, students identified our classroom library, our math materials cabinet and other systems present in our classroom.

Highlight That Systems Can Be a Series of Actions

After students uncover the physical systems in your classroom, make a point to help them see how often systems are acted out in our daily lives. For example, the way your class transitions to different spaces throughout the school every day. In order to get from the classroom to recess, or to the cafeteria or library, you need a system.

For my class, getting into a line for these location transitions included a consistent series of events. With a little practice, the kids mastered the system and were able to assume the role of the teacher during the transition because they had every step memorized. Ask your class to call out systems that they act out. Answers could include how they move to from the story rug to the teaching rug, the signals used to request things during quiet time, and many others. Your class will realize that these action-based systems are just as prevalent in the classroom as the physical systems.

Acknowledge Different Systems with the Same Outcome

It’s important that your students understand that there’s usually not just one “right” system for getting something done — problem-solving can take many different forms. Using the example of standing in line as a system, I asked my students to watch how other classes did it. Giving my class the opportunity to observe other people’s systems helped them ultimately understand that processes can work well in many different ways.

By teaching students to tune into these subtle system differences, they learn how to uncover and adapt to new systems more quickly. This will allow them to thrive in many different life situations, such as adjusting when a substitute teacher comes in. After each time I was out, I chatted with my students about how a substitute’s system worked, whether they were able to adapt, and why is was (or wasn’t) easy to adapt. This encouraged them to think about and practice ways they could quickly adapt to a new situation, helping them grow.

Hack and Adjust Systems

Most (if not all) systems always have room for improvement. Highlight a particular system in your classroom, such as getting into line, and start a class discussion on what could be done to improve the system. For example, I initially wrote my students’ names on a piece of tape to show them where to line up. Over the year, students had changed spots, but the names were never updated. One child suggested that we use fresh tape without names, to solve some space and confusion issues that we dealt with on a daily basis. Empowering your students to offer solutions to class system issues will give them the confidence they need to apply the learnings to their lives outside of school as well.

Practice Systems Thinking in Informational Writing

Teaching a unit on systems thinking opens up awesome opportunities to integrate various different disciplines. Creating how-to books is an excellent activity for using systems thinking to identify and write out the steps of different systems. Each student can focus on a different classroom system, and write a book about how it works. Not only will these reinforce the steps of your classroom systems, but these books are also a great resource for substitute teachers.

Discuss How Persuasive Writing Can Help Us Challenge Systems

Another way your students can showcase what they have learned about systems thinking is by having them use the art of persuasion. Thinking of ways to adjust systems is a powerful way for kids to experience true ownership over their daily lives, and can act as inspiration for their peers. Encourage your class to revisit the systems they choose to hack and have everyone write persuasive arguments that detail the different reasons why their systems would work better than the ones currently in practice. Give them examples of systems in the world to help them, such as going through the work of Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and Wangarri Mathai. Each of these leaders challenged systems and accomplished change to help make the world a better place for everyone.

Before you take this back to your classroom, take a moment to ask yourself how many systems you have created and participate in on a daily basis. Question your systems. Are there ways that are better? Understanding the importance of stepping back and examining your own systems will help you approach teaching this unit with perspective you can use to inspire your class to improve their lives, one system at a time.

For more ideas on how to incorporate design thinking, making and systems exploration in your classroom visit Agency by Design .

To get started with systems thinking in the classroom, check out our Exploring Systems with the See, Think, Wonder Thinking Routine lesson plan !

Originally published at www.education.com .

Written by Tatum Moser

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By: MIT xPRO on September 14th, 2022 5 Minute Read

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Ask an MIT Professor: What Is System Thinking and Why Is It Important?

Professional Development | Leadership | Systems Thinking

System Thinking Is the Cognitive Skill of the 21st Century

Look around you, and you’ll see: life as we know it is becoming more and more complex. 

From the iPhone in your pocket to the organizations driving public health, national defense, finance, criminal justice, and [insert just about anything else you can imagine], the world is powered by increasingly intricate systems working behind the scenes to integrate countless moving pieces into a meaningful whole. 

“One of the characteristics of the 21st century is that we’re investing more in complexity, and things are just getting damn complicated,” says Professor Edward Crawley , Ford Department of Engineering, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT. 

Professor Crawley is one of the MIT lead faculty instructors for MIT xPRO’s online course on system thinking , a skill that helps organizations examine and simplify complexity, recognize patterns, and create effective solutions to challenges. He considers system thinking “ the cognitive skill of the 21st century.” We recently sat down with Professor Crawley to discuss system thinking and what learners can expect from his course. 

What is system thinking? 

Professor Crawley explains that “system thinking is simply thinking about something as a system: the existence of entities—the parts, the chunks, the pieces—and the relationships between them.” 

There are measures of both performance and complexity in system thinking. “Complexity is what we invest in: more parts, more sophisticated parts, more parts talking to more parts,” Professor Crawley states. “Performance is the benefit that emerges.” 

Who uses system thinking, and how might they use it?

“System thinking is for everyone on this side of the life-death line,” Professor Crawley jokes. Anyone who has taken a course he teaches will tell you that he has an excellent sense of humor.

More specifically, system thinking is broadly used by:

• Leaders who have a high-level view of how different parts of a system fit together and need to be able to step back and see how all the pieces connect.
• Individual contributors who want to understand how the part they’re responsible for fits into the bigger picture so that they can perform at their highest potential.

In a professional setting, leaders and individual contributors use system thinking all the time to understand: 

• How organizations work (e.g., team dynamics) 
• Complex technologies (e.g., smartphones and other devices) 
• The optimal ways to track, organize, and utilize information (e.g., medical records) 
• Intricate processes (e.g., the tax system: who pays taxes, how much they pay, and how the revenue is distributed)

Professor Crawley specializes in using system thinking to understand the space system, exploring the answers to questions like: Who builds the satellites? What orbits are they in? How do they communicate with each other? How can humans produce brilliant images like those from the James Webb Space Telescope ? “Those images are an example of an emergent value proposition that resulted from NASA’s multi-year effort on the James Webb Space Telescope,” remarks Professor Crawley. 

What pedagogical methods and tools do you use to get learners comfortable with system thinking?

The big challenge in being one of the faculty instructors for MIT xPRO’s system thinking course, explains Professor Crawley, is using examples that exhibit just the right amount of complexity. The systems need to be complicated enough that the answers aren’t too obvious but not so complicated that no one can understand how they work, even after learning the tools for system thinking. 

Professor Crawley prefers using examples that he categorizes as “middle-complexity systems that people commonly encounter in their lives.” One example is a bicycle. If a rollerblade is too simple and an automobile is overly complex, a bicycle is just right. “You want to train your mind and train your methodology to think about automobiles, but it’s a hard place to start,” says Professor Crawley. “So you start with the middle-complexity system.” 

Professor Crawley uses these types of examples to teach students:

• The principles underlying the system
• The methods used to think about the system
• The concrete tools that system thinkers activate each day 

What are some challenges learners face during a system thinking course? 

Nevertheless, getting comfortable with system thinking can be extraordinarily challenging for learners! Why? Because system thinking is, in essence, an entirely new way of thinking. 

“You’re literally neurologically tuning up your brain. You’re creating connections between neurons that didn’t exist before because you’re developing new neural pathways that allow you to think about things differently,” states Professor Crawley. 

“I tell my class at MIT at the beginning of the term, ‘I predict that within a week or two, you’ll have headaches,’” he says with a grin. “They look at me and laugh. But sure enough, I check in with them two weeks later, and I’m right.” 

What would you say to someone considering enrolling in a system thinking course? 

“You’ll get over the headaches once the brain is rewired,” Professor Crawley jokes. 

On a serious note, Professor Crawley encourages students to take a system thinking course because learning a new way of thinking about the world is of vital importance in the 21st century. 

“Life is only getting more complex,” he says. If you see him in person, ask him to tell the story about how he and a colleague—two actual rocket scientists—couldn’t figure out how to make a photocopy. “That was two decades ago, and already technology was so complex that you had to be trained to operate it!” he exclaims. 

With devices and organizations becoming ever more complicated, system thinking can give learners the skills to succeed.

Those skills include being able to engage in the unknown and think differently about the relationships between the parts that make up a system; ultimately, learners evolve from reductionist thinkers to integrative thinkers ready to face a limitless future. 

If you’d like the opportunity to learn from Professor Crawley, as well as Professors John Sterman, Daniela Rus, and Hasma Balakrishnan, enroll in MIT xPRO’s 5-week online system thinking course . 

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Understanding systems thinking concepts and workplace applications

By Laurie Davies

This article has been vetted by University of Phoenix's editorial advisory committee.  Read more about our editorial process.

Kathryn Uhles, MIS, MSP, Dean, College of Business and IT

In this article

What is systems thinking.

• Application of systems thinking across industries

Learn systems thinking at University of Phoenix

This article was updated on April 29, 2024.  

Have you ever met people who see things from a 10,000-foot view? They look at the big picture rather than get derailed by details, and they’re good at assessing problems before taking action. Such people are probably good “systems thinkers.”

What is a systems thinker? It’s someone who recognizes that a sum is greater than its parts — that all the pieces of an organization connect, interact and play a part in outcomes.

Read on for a systems thinking definition, key elements, examples and ideas on how you might use systems-level thinking in your own educational journey or career.

Systems thinking can be applied in business and healthcare settings. Learn more about online management degrees at UOPX!

Systems thinking is a way to approach issues by looking at them as systems. Rather than considering only how to solve an immediate problem, you consider how all of the pieces connect to make the whole.

University of Phoenix instructor Michael Marticek, DBA, MBA, teaches systems thinking and explains the concept to his students this way: With systems thinking, you solve problems by investigating factors and outcomes of those factors on your work.

“It gets made to sound so tricky,” he says. “But it’s really just logic.”

Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you’ve got a piece of machinery in which one pesky gear keeps breaking. Instead of replacing that same gear over and over, a systems thinking approach might look at the gear’s construction and design (casting, forging, metallurgy), the operational conditions (weight, friction, torque, noise), the environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, sanitation), and the maintenance (cleanliness, lubrication). Various interconnected factors could be affecting the gear’s performance and durability.

An iceberg metaphor is often used to describe what systems thinking is. With an iceberg, there’s what we see above the water, and the much bigger, unseen portion underwater.

Continuing with this metaphor, a systems thinker might approach a problem by asking:

• What could be under the surface that we don’t see?
• What are the conditions (budgets, resources) that influence the problem?
• What issues, people or systems are working together to create what is seen above the water?
• What ripple effects might be created by our ideas/solutions?

Six key elements of systems thinking 

Marticek says six key building blocks are key to understanding what systems thinking is:

• Interconnections : Projects and people are connected. A systems thinking approach identifies those connections and considers all of them.
• Emergence : This is the phenomenon of a larger idea, function, property or outcome that results from the interaction of smaller parts. It often is a better solution than could be gleaned from simply looking at the individual parts in isolation.
• Synthesis : This means combining two or more components in a system to form something new that helps us understand the entire system better or to build a better system. “Sometimes you’re combining old ways to make a new way. Sometimes you gain new information and create something new,” Marticek says.
• Feedback loops : Feedback loops illustrate via charts or diagrams the feedback between various parts of a system. “You gather different pieces of the pie, and at the end, hopefully you have an outcome,” Marticek says.
• Causality: Causality looks at how one thing influences others in an interconnected system.
• Systems mapping : Systems mapping is the chart or flow that will inform decision-making. “If you hand this to an executive, this flow diagram will help them understand what is needed to make the change,” Marticek says.

For this process to work, buy-in from the top-down and bottom-up is essential. “If you’re going to alter your business or organization, you have to have a new vision. This is the road everyone is on. Everyone has to be on board with the process — you can’t have holdouts who think, ‘My idea is the best,’” Marticek says.

What is a systems thinker? 

A systems thinker is someone who is able to look at a complex system and consider its interconnectedness and interdependencies, not just its isolated components.

Effective systems thinkers usually have an open mind and think holistically, rather than rely on a predictable formula or a linear approach. Marticek says those who operate from a systems thinking perspective:

• Are curious
• Find root causes
• Have an open mind
• Are good listeners

“If you have ‘I-know-everything’ executives, this never works. People will try to dismantle that process because of frustration with the person creating it,” he says.

Systems thinking often involves considering a number of components, including humans, machinery or equipment, and the environment, and how they work together.

One systems thinking example in the workplace is organizing supply chains, which are highly complex and often involve multiple suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers. Another example is project management, which involves designing schedules, considering competing priorities and anticipating potential delays to make sure that projects can be completed on time and within budget.

Those who have an interest in this type of analysis may want to consider a bachelor’s degree in data science to help them gain the necessary education to succeed in this role. With a wide range of applicable industries, a degree in data science is an option for enhancing or beginning a new career. 

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Application of systems thinking across industries .

The application of systems thinking is used across a wide range of fields and industries, especially business, healthcare and education. The University of Phoenix degree and certificate programs in these areas integrate systems thinking into the curriculum to help ensure that you are equipped to tackle the challenges ahead by envisioning workable solutions.

Systems thinking in healthcare

Systems thinking in healthcare can help with everything from improving patient outcomes to developing a more streamlined billing process. Examples of systems thinking in this industry include:

• Considering social, cultural and emotional factors affecting a patient’s health to identify optimal treatment
• Figuring out how to improve quality of care by integrating treatment plans across primary care facilities, specialists, and urgent or emergency care
• Analyzing data on demographics, healthcare usage and disease to improve population health and services within communities

Systems thinking in business

Although various departments within a company may be working toward a common goal, they may also be competing for the same resources, implementing different project requirements, or prioritizing different outcomes for success. The ability to design effective solutions and anticipate issues ahead of time is critical to business success. Knowing how to apply systems thinking to business processes and operations management can help to ensure that departments are working together rather than against each other.

A systems thinking approach can be applied to business situations such as:

• Managing airline fleet maintenance, setting flight schedules and arranging sufficient staffing
• Planning a marketing campaign while also considering customer personas, budgets, legal constraints and competitors’ efforts
• Implementing new customer-service software that may require additional employee training or reveal incompatibilities in other systems

Those interested in applying systems thinking in business will want to consider a bachelor’s degree in management or an operations management certificate to begin their career.

Systems thinking in education

Systems thinking provides a powerful framework for understanding and addressing the interconnected factors that affect teaching and learning. This thinking can help educators and administrators develop strategies to better support students as well as the institutions themselves.

What is systems thinking in education? It can include:

• Developing lessons and programs that build on past learning and are appropriate for the student’s age and educational level
• Ensuring programs are aligned with required competencies and current and future workforce needs
• Assessing learning outcomes to identify areas for improvement or gaps in curricula and programming

In all of these fields, questions like “What am I not seeing here?” or “What's under the iceberg that I don’t understand?” can help you begin to grasp the whole system.

If you’re interested in learning more about the mechanics of systems thinking and the ways it can be applied in business, healthcare, education and other fields, UOPX teaches these and other vital skills in the following programs:

• Bachelor of Science in Data Science : In this program you’ll gain the fundamental knowledge needed to analyze, manipulate and process data sets using statistical software. Learn extract, transform and load (ETL) processes for integrating data sets for business intelligence platforms. Discover techniques to transform structured and unstructured data sets into meaningful information to identify patterns and drive strategic decision-making.
• Bachelor of Science in Management : Learn what it takes to improve and optimize organizational effectiveness and productivity in a dynamic and evolving workplace. Develop and apply career-relevant skills in a practical way with coursework in leadership, operations and logistics, project management and strategic management — all of which will help you align resources, improve communication and make key decisions in various industries. 
• Operations Management Certificate : The Operations Management Certificate provides you with a strategic approach to managing the performance of business planning, global sourcing and procurement, production, and logistical activities within an organization. Evaluate quality management approaches within business operations, implement project management best practices, and identify sourcing opportunities and logistical improvements that can enhance organizational efficiency.
• Project Management Certificate (Undergraduate) : Learn about project planning, project coordination, strategic planning, business process and more. In this program you’ll also learn how to estimate project costs and build timelines and use project management software.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A journalist-turned-marketer, Laurie Davies has been writing since her high school advanced composition teacher told her she broke too many rules. She has worked with University of Phoenix since 2017, and currently splits her time between blogging and serving as lead writer on the University’s Academic Annual Report. Previously, she has written marketing content for MADD, Kaiser Permanente, Massage Envy, UPS, and other national brands. She lives in the Phoenix area with her husband and son, who is the best story she’s ever written. 

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How Systems Thinking Applies to Education

Current approaches, systems definitions, open systems, schools as open systems, implications for education.

• the piecemeal, or incremental, approach;
• failure to integrate solution ideas;
• a discipline-by-discipline study of education;
• a reductionist orientation;
• staying within the boundaries of the existing system (not thinking out of the box).

Figure 1. Key Evolutionary Markers

How Systems Thinking Applies to Education - table

• Energy is transformed, and something new is produced.
• A product is exported into the environment.
• The pattern of energy exchange is cyclical; the product that is exported into the environment is the source of energy for repetition of the cycle of activities.
• The system aims to “maximize its ratio of imported to expended energy.”
• The system exhibits differentiation, a tendency toward increased complexity through specialization.
• It interacts with constantly changing (multiple) environments and coordinates with many other systems in the environment.
• It copes with constant change, uncertainty, and ambiguity while maintaining the ability to co-evolve with the environment by changing itself and transforming and the environment.
• It lives and deals creatively with change and welcomes—not just tolerates—complex and ambiguous situations.
• It becomes an organizational learning systems, capable of differentiating among situations where maintaining the organization by adjustments and corrections is appropriate (single-loop learning) and those where changing and redesigning are called for (double-loop learning) (Argyris 1982).
• It seeks and finds new purposes, carves out new niches in the environment, and develops increased capacity for self-reference, self-correction, self-direction, self-organization, and self-renewal.
• It recognizes that the continuing knowledge explosion requires a two-pronged increase in specialization and diversification and integration and generalization.
• It increases the amount of information it can process, processes it rapidly, distributes it to a larger number of groups and people, and transforms the information into organizational knowledge.
• outcomes (broad statements of purpose);
• outcome-related standards;
• benchmarks for each standard against which to measure individual and program progress continuously;
• assessment based on performance compared to benchmarks, not to other students (feedback);
• self-assessment;
• triangulation (use of multiple forms of assessment by multiple assessors to increase the validity and reliability of feedback);
• immediate intervention;
• generative learning (Wittrock 1974);
• reflective practice (Schon 1987, Educational Leadership 1991);
• balanced instructional design (Betts and Walberg, unpublished manuscript);
• varied learning structures (self-directed, one-to-one, small groups, lecture, field study, apprenticeships, mentoring);
• year-round schooling;
• assignment to learning groups based on individual performance, rather than age-grade distinctions;
• intact teams working over an extended period of time (more than one year) to achieve a common goal;
• increased sources of information via telecommunications from school and home, through peer and cross-age relationships, using cooperative learning structures, from video and optical media, supported by fully integrated, interactive computer-assisted instruction through a variety of electronically linked community resources (home, school, work, libraries, recreation centers, health care facilities, churches);
• increased access to information;
• digitized student information and instructional resources, fully accessible via touch-tone phone;
• “electronic books”;
• multilingual resources;
• multimedia delivery (sound, graphics, and/or text options);
• tightly integrated curriculum, instruction, and assessment, such as total immersion second language instruction;
• hierarchy of small, six-to-eight person, self-sufficient, semiautonomous teams (sub-systems).

Ackoff, R. L. (1981). Creating the Corporate Future . New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Ackoff, R. L. (1986). Management in Small Doses . New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Argyris, C. (1982). Reasoning, Learning, and Action . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Banathy, B. H. (1991). Systems Design of Education: A Journey to Create the Future . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications.

Betts, F.M., and H.J. Walberg. (Unpublished manuscript). “Improving Student Achievement through Balanced Instructional Design.”

Boulding, K. E. (1956). The Image . Ann Arbor, Mich.: The University of Michigan Press.

Educational Leadership . (March 1991). Theme Issue on “The Reflective Educator.” Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Katz, D., and R. L. Kahn. (1969). “Common Characteristics of Open Systems.” In Systems Thinking , edited by F. E. Emery. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd.

Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wittrock, M.C. (1974). “Learning as a Generative Process.” Educational Psychologist 11: 87–95.

Frank Betts has been a contributor to Educational Leadership.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

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Systems Thinking in the K-12 Classroom: Perspective, Practice, and Possibilities

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Revitalizing the Schools: A Systems Thinking Approach

Fortune magazine recently labeled the U.S. school system “our most endangered institution,” highlighting a growing national concern about the quality of education in America. Steadily rising rates of illiteracy and dropouts underline a harsh reality — schools simply are not preparing students to be productive members of society.

Many corporations, which have watched their skilled labor pool shrink over the past decade, are responding with a slew of innovative approaches to education. In 1989, Fannie Mae began a ten-year mentor program in a Washington, DC high school. Sears and United Airlines, along with 14 other Chicago-area corporations, have donated $2 million to start a model school that practices school-based management. Citicorp, Exxon and RJR have donated money toward the Coalition of Essential Schools, a network of over 50 schools dedicated to curriculum reform which focuses on active, small group learning.

The Role of Systems

Thinking Out of these innovative educational programs, a vision of a radically different school system is emerging — one that is managed more like an organization, where teachers are accountable for their students’ results and principals have the power to give raises and tire teachers; a school where the curriculum stresses critical thinking skills over dry facts and learner-directed learning replaces the typical lecture format. Systems thinking holds the promise of making such a school a reality.

“Education in the U.S. is generally recognized as serving less and less well in meeting modern needs. Failures in education appear in the form of corporate executives who cannot cope with the complexities of growth and competition, government leaders who are at a loss to understand economic and political change, and a public that supports inappropriate response to immigration pressures, changing international conditions, rising unemployment, the drug culture, government reform, and inadequacies in education.” -Jay Forrester, System Dynamics as a Foundation for Pre-College Education

Primarily, systems thinking is being applied to schools in one of two ways: as a problem-solving framework that enhances students’ understanding of a subject; and as a restructuring tool for creating a more effective educational system (see “Systems Thinking in the Classroom: Two Accounts” for an example of how systems thinking is being used in the classroom). The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Says Jim Daniel of the Kentucky Educational Foundation (KEF), “As systems thinking creates a new culture within the school system, that change should eventually translate into systems thinking being taught in the classroom, as a problem-solving approach.”

A “Hybrid”

Since its introduction three years ago, systems thinking has come to play an increasingly important role at the Orange Grove Junior High School in Tucson. It is now being used in almost all of the science curriculum, and is in the process of being expanded to all six schools in the district.

Orange Grove Junior High can be described as a hybrid of traditional educational techniques and innovative new methods. Teachers still give grades and have one-hour classes devoted to a particular subject. But courses no longer have specific titles, such as biology or history — report cards sport such broad-ranging topics as human studies and marine studies, which emphasize the systems orientation of the subjects. Classes are scheduled in blocks (for example, science and social studies are back-to-back), so that they can be shortened, lengthened, or combined to allow students to pursue more in-depth projects in one subject or both.

Because of the flexible scheduling, teachers are able to pursue more interdisciplinary projects. For example, one class recently conducted a mock trial to learn first-hand how the legal system works. However, the subject of the legal dispute was scientific, allowing them to expand their knowledge in that area as well.

Systems thinking has sparked a dramatic change in the roles of teachers and students at Orange Grove. “In our classroom, students shift from being passive receptacles to being active learners. They are not taught about science per se, but learn how to acquire and use knowledge, scientific and otherwise,” says biology teacher Frank Draper. “Our jobs have shifted from dispensers of information to producers of environments which allow students to learn as much as possible.”

From Vermont to San Francisco

The Systems Thinking and Curriculum Innovation Network Project (STACI) began at the Brattleboro Union High School in Vermont in 1985. Four committed teachers wanted to use systems thinking to improve their teaching, but they had no computer skills or understanding of systems theory. Undaunted, they applied for and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and enlisted the support of High Performance Systems, creators of STELLA, to give them technical assistance and training.

Their work attracted the attention of researcher Ellen Mandinach of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), who was interested in studying the impact of technology on learning. ETS, through its affiliation with the Educational Technical Center at Harvard, established STACI to examine the introduction of systems thinking in the Brattleboro High School.

At the prompting of an Apple Computer representative, ETS decided to try a similar experiment on the West Coast. “We learned from our early experience in Vermont that teachers need lots of resources, training and support,” explains Mandinach, “so rather than pick one site in California, we decided to use a consortium of schools.” In order to create a continuity of systems learning for the students, they selected two San Francisco middle schools and the four high schools that they feed into.

Systems Thinking in the Classroom: Two Accounts

“In this project, students had to research park philosophy, park management, land management, recreation theory, social systems, geography, ecological community theory, and politics. They then used their newly-acquired knowledge to design a new park with a $100 million budget. The park had to include land required by the park’s charter, yet deal effectively with a threatened lawsuit if they desecrated nearby Indian burial sites; be attractive to users, yet not cause appreciable environmental degradation. As the students designed the park on a computer, they used a spreadsheet to keep fiscal accountability and a STELLA model of park development/environmental degradation to keep design accountability.

“Through the process of developing and presenting their design to their peers, our students developed mental models (structured with help from us) of land use decision making that connected the seemingly unrelated facts they found during their research. In other words, we were able to accomplish learning that, for many adults, never happens. What more do we ask of educators than to prepare people to be able to find the information they need and use it in new ways?” — Frank Draper

Mandinach describes STACI as an “implementation project” whose focus is on developing materials, training teachers, and providing resources for those teachers to develop systems-based curricula for the classroom. But she adds, “Ultimately, it is a study of the impact of systems thinking on students, classrooms, and schools.

“What happens to teachers, their instruction, and the classroom environment when a systems approach is used? You cannot introduce systems thinking into a school without changing the structure of the school. Do teachers start to cross disciplines, or communicate differently with each other and with their students? And, ultimately, do kids learn more effectively or efficiently using systems thinking? These are the types of long-term questions we are trying to answer.”

Precollege Education

Project Professor Emeritus Jay Forrester, the founder of system dynamics, has been the driving force behind the precollege education project at MIT. Funded by John Bemis of Concord, MA, the project is staffed by MIT undergraduates who are exploring ways to introduce systems thinking into local schools. The project is only a year old and still at a “beginning point,” says staff advisor Nan Lux, but in the past year the students have put together several tutorials for I I teachers at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. The interactive tutorials, explains Lux, are intended to “grab teachers’ attention and show them another way to teach their subjects.”

One of the most exciting things to come out of the project is the idea for creating a central clearinghouse to track the work being done on systems thinking in education. Although the plans are still in the works, Forrester sees the center as a “focal point to maintain communication between the network of schools, to expand the presently available training seminars for teachers, and to assist teachers in preparing their new materials for wider dissemination.”

Kentucky — Starting Over

In 1989, prompted by a lawsuit in which 23 Kentucky school districts charged that funds were not being distributed equally, the Supreme Court declared the entire Kentucky state educational system unconstitutional. This watershed event sparked a complete restructuring of the state educational system. The result: the Kentucky Educational Reform Initiative (KERA), has been described as an “integrated, comprehensive, systemic effort to change public schools.”

KERA will have wide-ranging effects on the way schools are structured and classes are taught. The end result, according to Jim Daniel, will be to “change the educational system to an outcome-based system.” By 1996, schools will be graded on how well students solve problems, work in teams, and make the transition to higher education, the workplace, or the military.

KERA also established baseline performance goals for the schools: those schools that perform above the base range will receive more money and resources, while those who fall below the range will be penalized. In order to foster choice in the school system, school districts will be required by law to publish their rating. If a school is declared in “crisis,” parents can take their children out of the school at the state’s expense.

Successfully implementing KERA may prove even more challenging than drafting the legislation. To help facilitate that process, KEF has created the Institute for the 21st Century, a two-year leadership education and training program for educators. The goal of the Institute, says KEF’s Daniel, “is to use a systems thinking approach to produce leadership teams of change within ten selected school districts.” Each of the ten district teams participating in the project was nominated by a business partner and was selected on the basis of its commitment to change.

The ultimate goal for the Institute is to foster innovation in education. In the type of school they hope to create, says Daniel, “teachers won’t go to school to lecture students. Instead, they will act as resources and as facilitators for those students.”

The Nordic Experience

In the Nordic countries, systems thinking was introduced as a result of their efforts to bring computers into the schools as interactive educational tools. Says Professor PAI Davidsen of the University of Bergen, “System dynamics filled that vacuum between the available technology and the educational goals of the schools.”

The highly centralized educational system in the Nordic countries required a different approach. Rather than bringing systems thinking directly to the schools, it has been introduced in the graduate teacher’s schools. The idea, according to Davidsen, is to “train the trainers” — to teach educators how to use systems thinking, and let them develop tools and curriculum that will integrate systems thinking into the classroom.

Initially, computer simulations were used only to support the current curriculum by illustrating key concepts. Now educators are exploring more inter-disciplinary activities. For example, in a systems thinking study of the marine pollution, students can trace declining fish population to an overgrowth of algae caused by chemical fertilizers. This leads to a study of crop farming and fish farming and their interaction — economic, cultural, and sociological. Understanding the many interrelationships requires further study of government regulations concerning both industries, the biological systems of aquaculture and agriculture, and the methods by which pollutants are transferred to and within the sea.

Computer models, explains Davidsen, remove the constraints of traditional educational material. “Computer models have a high degree of interaction, unlike textbooks. In effect, students can create their own course material, giving them a degree of creativity that is missing when working with textbooks.”

Early results of the use of systems thinking in the classroom have been anecdotal, rather than empirical, but they are encouraging. Frank Draper, for example, has witnessed a remarkable change in his classes: “Not only are we covering more material, but we’re covering it faster and the students are learning more useful material than ever before.”

Preliminary results from the ETS study at Brattleboro reveal interesting differences in skills acquired by students taught with traditional teaching methods versus those who were taught with a systems approach. In a general physical science class, so-called “traditional” students were able to identify and define patterns of speed and motion on simple graphs, but had difficulty with more complex problems. Systems students, on the other hand, were more adept at synthesizing parts of problems to understand the entirety.

Another set of students in a physics class were given a story problem to solve, first using the traditional quadratic equation approach, then by designing a model and testing various hypotheses. After the exercise, students commented that when working with quadratic equations, the numbers did not have concrete, real-world meaning. But with the model, they were able to demonstrate theoretically and practically what the problem and solution meant.

Systems Thinking Tools for the Classroom

“STELLA is a visual language that provides a new frame of reference for looking at problems,” explains Lyn Swett of High Performance Systems. “It combines the brainpower of humans with the technical abilities of the computer in order to help students think dynamically.” Swett feels that one of STELLA’s biggest benefits is its effect on classroom dynamics. “STELLA puts the teacher in the role of facilitator, which creates a more dynamic interaction between the teacher and students.”

The Nordic countries have also made tremendous strides in creating educational software based on the Mosaikk/SimTek collection of simulation software for the IBM-PC and compatibles (see “In Review: Mosaikk/SimTek,” May 1991). Much of their work has been focused on creating vivid connections between the abstract results of a computer simulation and the real-life phenomena it represents. This is done through the use of animation and colored graphics that make the link between the behavior of the simulation and the structure of the system being simulated more apparent.

Although the results of the Brattleboro study are preliminary, ETS’s Mandinach notes that students “seemingly achieved a more conceptual understanding of the content and solution processes by using the systems approach.” A more thorough implementation and systematic examination of the curriculum is in progress and will continue over several years to determine the impact of systems thinking on general problem solving skills.

While many communities are making significant progress in introducing systems thinking into the schools, they are a long way from achieving the visionary school described at the beginning of this article. The main roadblocks are a lack of resources to fund innovative projects and the knowledge and experience to restructure the existing school system — two areas where businesses can play an important role.

Getting involved in the school system can no longer be viewed as a charitable activity — it is vital to businesses’ survival because the labor pool on which they draw is the product of that school system. As Vivian Ruth Sawyer of Humana, a partner in the Kentucky reform initiative, points out, “We owe that responsibility to our stockholders for the long-term prosperity of our business.”

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We must embed systems thinking in education. Here’s how

Helping students develop systems thinking could transform education. Image:  Photo by CX Insight on Unsplash

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Abhinav chugh.

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Stay up to date:.

• To ensure the next generation of decision-makers can tackle tomorrow’s global challenges, we must embed systems thinking into the education system.
• To do this, in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, the World Economic Forum deployed its Strategic Intelligence platform at a variety of education institutions.
• The recommendations from the pilot could help reignite imagination, creativity and innovation in the classroom, making learning more enjoyable and fulfilling for students.

In today's rapidly evolving world, it is increasingly clear that traditional educational models alone are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of a dynamic global society characterized by accelerating complexity. The integration of interactive digital learning tools holds the key to revolutionizing education and empowering learners of all backgrounds. We live in a time when having a systems perspective on the world around us has never been more important.

Have you read?

Innovative learning solutions to navigate complexity: adapting systems thinking to future classrooms.

For example, taking effective action to address the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, energy security, and inequality requires an in-depth understanding of the patterns, relationships, interdependencies and trade-offs between them. Approaching these problems from this holistic perspective will generate the kind of sophisticated analysis and understanding that is required, especially in a world increasingly overloaded with information, both real and false.

The World Economic Forum collaborated with Trinity College Dublin to explore how we might go about embedding those necessary systems thinking mindsets into all stages of the education system . The outcome was the development of innovative and practical teaching and learning practices as well as an understanding of changing demands of learners with the onset of more intelligent information and communications systems.

The classroom of the future

Past efforts at educational reform have been largely reactive – always playing catch-up rather than being future-ready. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is only accelerating the pace of change, with the evolution of interconnected digital technologies, a skills-oriented workforce and complex value-creation systems.

The need for educational reform arises when an existing system fails to meet the changing demands of society and learners. However, so far, reforms have often tended to focus on short-term fixes rather than future-proofing the system. To create a more adaptable, flexible and innovative education system, there needs to be a shift from traditional, rigid approaches to more dynamic and responsive ones that can account for the complexities of learning, teaching and a rapidly changing world.

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the world’s attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will help—not harm—humanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) , autonomous vehicles , blockchain , data policy , digital trade , drones , internet of things (IoT) , precision medicine and environmental innovations .

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

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We envisage a classroom of the future with a variety of digital tools that can facilitate the systems thinking approach, but for the purpose of our pilot, we deployed the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Intelligence platform at a variety of education institutions globally.

Strategic Intelligence originated from the Forum’s engagement with universities, experts and thought leaders, and its commitment to addressing global challenges through multistakeholder collaboration. The initiative emerged from the Forum’s network of Global Agenda Councils, which brought together more than 1,000 thought leaders from academia, government, international organizations, business and civil society, grouped in expertise-based thematic councils.

To scale this engagement and provide continuous access to the collective intelligence of this broad network of contributors, a dedicated platform and methodology were developed to analyse and address the interconnected global challenges that were at the heart of this network. In the realm of education, this provided several benefits:

Embrace change and adapt to the future

The advent of digital technologies has disrupted various industries, and education is no exception. We find ourselves at a crucial juncture where we must recognize the urgency to embrace change and harness the immense potential of digital learning tools. These tools not only augment traditional pedagogical methods but also provide unparalleled opportunities for personalized learning, collaboration, and accessibility on a global scale.

Personalize learning to empower students

One of the most significant advantages of digital learning tools is their ability to personalize the learning experience for everyone. By leveraging artificial intelligence, adaptive algorithms and data analytics, these tools can tailor educational content to diverse learning styles, abilities, and pace. This customization empowers students to take ownership of their learning journey, fostering a deeper understanding and long-term retention of knowledge.

Expand access and overcome barriers

Education should be a fundamental right, accessible to all, regardless of geographical location, socioeconomic status or physical abilities. Digital learning tools like Strategic Intelligence break down the barriers of traditional classrooms, enabling students worldwide to access quality education remotely. Through online platforms, virtual classrooms and interactive multimedia resources, education becomes borderless, offering equal opportunities for learners in both urban centres and remote communities.

Foster collaboration and lifelong learning

Digital learning tools transcend the boundaries of physical classrooms, fostering collaboration among students, educators and experts from diverse backgrounds. Online forums, video conferencing and interactive learning environments facilitate peer-to-peer engagement, collective problem-solving and the exchange of ideas. Moreover, these tools encourage lifelong learning by providing access to a vast repository of knowledge, resources and interactive experiences, empowering individuals to continuously adapt and grow in an ever-changing world.

How to embed systems thinking in education

While the benefits of digital learning tools are undeniable, we must also address the challenges associated with their implementation. Quality assurance, data privacy and ensuring equitable access are critical considerations that demand continuous attention.

Collaboration between educational institutions, policy-makers and industry leaders is vital to establish robust frameworks that safeguard the integrity and efficacy of digital learning tools, ensuring they are harnessed to their full potential.

Why ethical AI requires a future-ready and inclusive education system

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The resulting report of this exploration, Innovative Learning Solutions to Navigate Complexity: Adapting Systems Thinking to Future Classrooms, presents case studies that offer solutions for stakeholders, either as models to replicate or as inspiration to develop new approaches. Additionally, the report highlights the importance of harnessing the power of technology and encourages the use of digital systems thinking tools, such as those available through Strategic Intelligence.

Educators, learners and policy-makers should adopt a constructivist and constructionist approach to learning, which involves actively engaging with and exploring complex systems. This approach fosters curiosity, imagination and innovation, and helps to inspire a lifelong love of learning.

By implementing the strategies and recommendations provided in this report, educational reform can have a profound and influential impact on the next generation of global citizens. While not the focus of this report, it should be noted that the use of generative AI in education has the potential to both hinder and enhance the development of critical thinking, analytical, and problem-solving skills.

Based on the case studies and research presented in the report, we hope that teachers and/or learning institutions consider these recommendations:

– Build educators’ capacity in systems thinking tools and innovative lesson and curricular planning through workshops, training programmes and knowledge exchange loops. These capacity-building efforts could focus on areas like using hybrid intelligence models that merge AI with human expertise.

– Develop and expand college credit or micro-credentials to train young and adult learners to understand and use systems thinking methodologies and tools for developing their skills and jobs.

– Initiate a community of practice and knowledge networks among educators and learners at the regional or city level to scale successful use cases.

– Provide media literacy training programmes for educators, embed cross-curricular media literacy skills using systems thinking frameworks, and encourage a hybrid model where media literacy skills are augmented by technology rather than replaced with technology.

– Shift teaching and training from solution-led to problem-led learning methodologies to encourage critical reflection by emphasizing the need to identify underlying problems before seeking solutions. This approach leads to better decision-making, more effective resource allocation, and increased creativity and innovation.

– Adopt a dynamic approach to learning by restructuring curricula to integrate interdisciplinary projects or discussions, and offer courses that emphasize connections between disciplines instead of promoting traditional, siloed subjects.

– Place less focus on standardized testing to measure student abilities and instead develop practical assessments that measure students’ ability to apply their knowledge and skills in real-world situations through systems thinking methodologies.

– Equip learners with foresight and scenario-planning skills to explore potential career paths and identify the skills needed to succeed in those careers. This gives students the agency to plan for their futures and stay ahead of emerging trends in the job market.

Traditionally, people have turned to higher education to acquire the knowledge and skills to succeed in the world as it exists. The challenge today is that the world will exist in a radically different way tomorrow and again the day after. Therefore, educating people for reinvention in this fluid context will require the reinvention of the education system itself. Implementing the recommendations, suited, and modified per context, can reignite imagination, creativity and innovation in the classroom, making learning enjoyable and fulfilling for students.

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EdTech Classroom

Systems Thinking in the Elementary Classroom

Disclaimer: This blog post may contain affiliate links. This means if you make a purchase, I may receive a small percentage of the sale, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I absolutely love!

Systems Thinking is an approach to teaching and learning where students identify and explore the interconnectedness of systems in our world.

In Systems Thinking, students investigate systems, and examine how these systems connect to other systems in our world.

Systems Thinking encourages us to zoom in and zoom out.

Students zoom in to study one system – even one small part of a system – and they zoom out to understand how this system might impact other related or connected systems.

In my classroom, the Systems Thinking approach works.

Systems Thinking can deepen students’ learning of standards, and even strengthen their development of skills like critical thinking ( American University School of Education ).

Introducing the Idea of Systems

Systems are everywhere!

From the school system – to the transportation system – to the water cycle – systems are all around us.

In our classrooms, students identify systems everyday. They practice the hand-raising system, or the signal system, or the line-up system. They also identify systems in stories and in nature.

Many students are naturally curious about the interconnectedness of systems, whether or not they have the language to describe the term “system.”

“To think about systems means we pay attention to interrelationships, patterns, and dynamics as well as to the parts” ( Linda Booth Sweeney, Agency By Design, Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education ).

For this reason, students and teachers will often create systems maps to document their learning process.

Systems Mapping

Systems Thinking is process-focused.

Deep learning occurs in the process rather than in the creation of a final product. This process often takes form through systems mapping.

To better understand what the systems mapping process looks like, let’s take a look at a project example.

Example Systems Thinking Project

Preparing for a systems thinking lesson.

In a Systems Thinking project, I create an essential question to share with my students.

At my school, our 2nd grade social studies theme is “neighborhood.”

Our essential question might be, “What are the systems in our neighborhood (or community)?”

To prepare for our lesson, I would write this question at the top of the board. Then, in the center of the board, I would write “Our Neighborhood.”

Identifying Systems in Our Community

I would start off the lesson asking students, “What are the systems in our neighborhood?”

I would call on students (using our hand-raising system!) and ask them to share their ideas.

As students share, I would begin mapping their ideas out on the board. To do this, I would (1) write the name of the system, (2) circle the system, and (3) based on student ideas, connect systems using lines.

For example, in response to the question, “What are the systems in our neighborhood?” a student might identify, “The Street System.”

Digging Deeper with Connected Systems

I would then probe students to consider other systems that are connected to the Street System.

Students might identify systems like the car, trash, sign/signal, or mail systems.

I would also probe students to think about systems that might be broken, unbalanced, or harmful (i.e. littering, climate change, pollution).

Sometimes, the Systems Thinking process isn’t quite so structured.

I might ask students to share a system connected to the street system, and a student might say, “this doesn’t answer your question, but… what about the school system?”

That is okay! In fact, that’s great! Systems Thinking isn’t meant to be a linear process.

Completing Your Systems Map

I usually spend about 30 minutes creating a systems map with students, but the time allotment is up to you!

In my experience, many students tend to be pretty engaged during the discussion. They seem to love thinking about the interconnectedness of our world!

In the image below, you will see a completed example of a systems map I might make with my 2nd graders.

I remind students that there are no right answers ! “This systems map shows our class’ thinking and ideas.”

I also might tell students, “There are so many other systems we could add to this map. There are so many other connections we could make. For example, we could connect ‘Homeless’ to the ‘Work’ system. Or, we could connect the ‘Car’ system to ‘Carpool.”

Identifying Human-Made , Natural, and Broken Systems

In looking at the completed systems map as a class, I would ask my students to share out which systems are human-made. I would label these systems using a color, like red in the image below.

You will notice that the majority of the systems below are human-made. Sometimes, the majority are natural, and other times it’s 50/50!

Once we have identified human-made systems, we would highlight natural systems (in blue below).

Now, you might notice that some systems (i.e. climate change and learning) have been identified as both human-made and natural. Systems can belong to multiple categories, and in my experience, students typically make this connection without guidance.

Finally, we would identify broken / unbalanced / harmful systems (indicated with a star below).

Learning About Broken Systems

After students have identified broken, unbalanced, or harmful systems in our neighborhood, we would then shift our focus to explore one of those systems in depth.

We might do a design thinking activity to design a solution (more on this in a future blog post!).

Or, we might read a book about one of these systems.

Or, we listen/read news about this system.

There are endless opportunities!

Systems Thinking in My Elementary Classroom (and Yours!)

There are many approaches to teaching and learning. Systems Thinking is just one approach that has worked for me and my students.

When students document their learning with systems maps, they are able to visualize how systems might impact each other.

Students are able to identify problems, when learning through a Systems Thinking lens.

If you are interested in this approach, consider starting with one of these essential questions:

• What systems do we have in our classroom?
• What systems do we have in our school?
• What systems do we have in our bodies?

Introduce students to Systems Thinking on a smaller scale before diving into a bigger project.

Thank you for reading this blog post about Systems Thinking in the elementary classroom. If you want to share your thoughts with me, please leave a comment down below, DM me on Instagram @edtechclass, or write me an email [email protected] .

Additional Resources

To learn more about Systems Thinking, you can visit the following resources:

• Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Visible Thinking)
• Thinking at Every Desk: Four Simple Skills to Transform Your Classroom
• Tools for Systems Thinkers: Systems Mappers
• Linda Booth Sweeney
• How to Practice Systems Thinking in the Classroom

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Systems Thinking in Action: Undergraduate Research Takes On Complex Problems

The projects presented at this year’s IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium , hosted by the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, explored alternative solutions to a wide range of problems: a team of Duke University students worked to improve audible safety alerts for freedivers; a Purdue University research group applied systems thinking to assess the performance of spaceports (the sites for launching or receiving spacecraft); and students from the UVA School of Data Science harnessed artificial intelligence as a method for detecting signs of human trafficking in state-level court cases. 

One UVA team from the Department of Systems and Information Engineering sought to help neurodiverse members of the Charlottesville community gain meaningful employment.

Building Bridges

Through a local business called VIAble Ventures , the VIA Center for Neurodevelopment provides adults with intellectual and developmental disorders with jobs as artisans, making candles, bath salts, and sachets and selling them online and at Charlottesville farmer’s markets. For Sophie Kikuchi, a fourth-year student in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering , the service-minded business was a dream client for a systems engineering project.  In research showcased at the symposium, Kikuchi and her teammates, advised by systems engineering professors Sara Riggs and Robert Riggs , applied systems thinking to help VIAble Ventures boost its sales and employ more adults with autism. Focusing on online sales, the group found ways to highlight top-selling products on the VIAble Ventures website and put the business’s unique mission front and center online.

“The mission of VIAble Ventures is just one that I've really grown to love,” Kikuchi said. “I feel like it's making an impact in the sense that, hopefully, getting the new website up will help increase the sales and employ more people with autism. The program does a lot of on-site job training and soft-skill teaching. It’s a great stepping stone for these individuals to be able to gain the experience they need to earn a paycheck.”

Kikuchi’s team presented one of the 100 papers featured this year at UVA’s design symposium, which has become one of the field’s leading student-focused forums for applied research, development and design over the past 20 years. Joining Kikuchi and her peers from UVA systems and information engineering at the conference were students from 32 higher education institutions in total, nine of which were international.

From Consulting to Co-design  

Another student team from the Department of Systems and Information Engineering looked at ways to streamline operations for outpatient cancer infusion centers, which will need to meet the nation’s growing demand for cancer care.

Rupa Valdez , an associate professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering, advised the team as they closely examined the workings of an outpatient cancer infusion center in the Mid-Atlantic region. “It’s exciting to see students learn to integrate their quantitative skills with qualitative approaches to understanding system complexity,” Valdez said. “I also find it meaningful to watch students build trusting relationships with clients throughout the project, enabling us to move from a consulting to a co-design model.”

Kikuchi was able to experience that same shift to co-designing solutions with the client while working with VIAble Ventures. “It’s been really fun working with the people at VIA,” Kikuchi said. “They’ve been so responsive. They like to be very hands-on and give feedback on new website designs. They’re excited about it, too, which has made the experience even better on our end.”

For students, presenting projects at the Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium each year allows them not only to showcase their own work, but to see the vast array of subjects that systems engineers can explore, Kikuchi said. “It really shows how broadly you can apply the education you get through UVA systems engineering,” she said.

Explore Systems and Information Engineering

Many of the new technologies being introduced today hold the promise of substantial societal benefit if we successfully apply the technologies to solve real-world problems, such as treating and curing diseases and protecting critical systems from cyber attacks.

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Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”