Isn’t it interesting how it often takes someone from far away to introduce you to someone in your own neighborhood? Earlier this year, one of our friends from the Netherlands contacted us to suggest a speaker for our annual conference. Each year, a team of Dutch educators makes the journey to the U.S. for our event, and this year, they were hoping we would invite Andy Hargreaves to keynote.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t familiar with Andy, so I Googled him. Imagine my surprise to find that he is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College—which happens to be in the next town over from the Pegasus offices. Small world!
The more I learned about Andy, the more obvious it became that we had to bring him to our audience. Although he is mainly known for his groundbreaking work on educational change, Andy has also done research on sustainable leadership and is currently engaged in an exciting project on organizations in business, healthcare, education, and sports that perform “beyond expectations.” We were delighted when Andy accepted our invitation to present at the November conference.
My colleague Keith McKinnon and I recently had an opportunity to visit Andy and get a preview of his keynote presentation. In the brief video below, Andy touches on some of the themes that he will explore in greater depth on November 9.
You can also click below to read some of Andy’s writings:
On Sustainable Leadership
This piece appeared in a publication for independent schools, but the principles hold more generally.
This piece appeared in an academic journal.
On “The Fourth Way," a framework for sustainable education reform that integrates teacher professionalism, community engagement, government policy, and accountability.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
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by Janice Molloy
How can one person fit so many thought-provoking ideas into four minutes and fifty-eight seconds? When I went to film Peter Senge last week as a preview of his keynote presentation at the Systems Thinking in Action Conference in November, I thought he would give a few interesting tidbits about the impact of systems thinking in the world today and we'd call it a wrap. I mean, what can someone possibly say in the amount of time it takes to go through a car wash?
And, to tell the truth, while Peter was speaking, I was too distracted by the lighting and the camera angle to pay much attention to what he was saying. So imagine my delight when I returned to the office, uploaded the footage to my trusted MacBook Pro, and watched. In less than five minutes, Peter manages to make profound points about:
- health as a systemic phenomenon
- the need for businesses to balance long-term and short-term interests
- the increasing importance of having a systems perspective
- the surprising things kids—and the rest of us—can accomplish by understanding the systems we help to create
So take 4:58 to watch the video below. I'll be interested to hear if you find it as motivating as I do.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
by Nalani Linder and Colleen Ponto
In part 1 of this post, guest bloggers Nalani Linder and Colleen Ponto reported on what they learned about teaching systems thinking in the K-12 classroom during a recent visit with the Waters Foundation in Tucson, Arizona.
Back home in Washington, we have been reflecting on all that we saw in Tucson. Of the many good lessons we took away with us, some of them seem appropriate to share with anyone interested in teaching systems thinking (ST) or system dynamics (SD) to any audience:
- Don't spend too much effort on convincing skeptics about the value of ST and SD. Rather, focus your energy on those who are easily intrigued and receptive to the power of this way of thinking.
- Be open to experimenting with the full array of SD tools. For example, we were introduced to connection circles in Tucson (found in The Shape of Change) and recently experimented with teaching them at a workshop for adults. Participants found them useful for identifying variables and seeing interconnections in a story.
- Create examples in the area of the audience's expertise, once people get some of the time-tested systems stories
typically used to illustrate concepts (such as a thermostat to show a balancing loop, compounding interest to demonstrate reinforcing loops, and bathtubs to explain stock/flows). This may take work, but is worth the effort in order to create better understanding and more effective application.
For our part, we are focusing on developing systems thinking lessons within the K-12 science and environmental sustainability curriculum, as those are the two subject areas driving the integration of systems thinking into our state's classrooms. We see our task as helping teachers to learn ST basics so that they can insert systems language and tools into the curriculum they are already using.
Continuing on this journey, we are eager to learn more from the many who have been doing groundbreaking work in systems and education, such as the Waters Foundation, the Creative Learning Exchange, the Cloud Institute, the SoL Educational Partnership, and others--including those who have left us, like Barry Richmond and Dana Meadows, whose ideas continue to inspire and guide.
We expect that the road to statewide implementation of systems thinking in education is long and winding. However, we hope and firmly believe that through the implementation of these standards, Washington's students will learn to make better choices about their own actions in the many systems in which they live. And in a lovely reinforcing loop, adults will be able to witness and learn from students: to pay attention to systems and to ask ourselves what we're noticing, too.
Many thanks to Nalani and Colleen for contributing their story. Share your thoughts about their learnings or on your experiences with teaching systems thinking by commenting on this post.
Nalani Linder is an independent consultant and workshop facilitator who works with change agents of all ages to help them learn, practice, and apply systems thinking ideas and tools in their schools/organizations, communities, and personal lives. She is currently co-principal of a research study exploring connections between systems thinking and learning preferences.
Colleen Ponto, Ed.D., teaches at Seattle University, where she is a core faculty member of the Organization Systems Renewal Graduate Program. OSR specializes in helping adult learners to become designers and leaders of systemic organizational change. Colleen is also an independent educational and organizational consultant; one of her current passions is helping learners of all ages develop their systems thinking skills.
By Nalani Linder and Colleen Ponto
Thanks to the recently revised science and environmental sustainability education standards in the Washington State K-12 system, teachers are now required to teach and assess children's understanding of systems. (Click here to see the standards.) As parents, systems educators, and Washingtonians, we have been on a learning journey over the last few months to find out more about how we can help support the teaching of systems thinking in our state's classrooms.
In February, we visited the remarkable team at the Waters Foundation in Tucson, Arizona: Tracy Benson, Anne Lavigne, Sheri Marlin, and Joan Yates. They took us to various schools where they have been working with teachers and students to weave systems thinking (ST) and system dynamics (SD) throughout the curriculum.
What an inspiration! We saw:
- Eighth-grade social studies students learning about World War II through the lens of mental models and using the ladder of inference;
- Fifth graders assessing ideas about slavery during the Civil War using stock/flow diagrams; and
- Kindergarteners using behavior over time graphs to look at the changing behaviors of the characters in the story of the gingerbread man.
Perhaps one of the most inspiring sights for us was at Borton Primary, a K-2 magnet school, where systems thinking is integrated where appropriate into the school's curriculum. First- and second-grade teacher Molly Reed has a beh
avior over time graph on her whiteboard that the students fill out each day about their own patterns of learning. Above the graph hangs a sign that reads, "What do you notice?" This query invites reflection and inquiry, a stepping back to observe patterns and trends--a challenge for adults, too!
Click here for the lessons Nalani and Colleen learned about teaching systems thinking and system dynamics to any audience.
Nalani Linder is an independent consultant and workshop facilitator who works with change agents of all ages to help them learn, practice, and apply systems thinking ideas and tools in their schools/organizations, communities, and personal lives. She is currently co-principal of a research study exploring connections between systems thinking and learning preferences.
Colleen Ponto, Ed.D., teaches at Seattle University, where she is a core faculty member of the Organization Systems Renewal Graduate Program. OSR specializes in helping adult learners to become designers and leaders of systemic organizational change. Colleen is also an independent educational and organizational consultant; one of her current passions is helping learners of all ages develop their systems thinking skills.
by Janice Molloy
As we reported in a previous blog post, the MacArthur Foundation is funding a research project on the development of systems thinking in middle-school students called "Grinding New Lenses: A Design Project to Support a Systems View of the World
." Indiana University professor Kylie Peppler, one of the principal investigators along with colleague Melissa Gresalfi, generously took time from her whirlwind schedule to answer questions about the project by email.
JM: How did you become interested in systems thinking?
KP: I became interested in systems thinking because of my interest in design, games, and learning, and particularly the work of Katie Salen and Mitchel Resnick. Systems thinking appeals to me because I'm interested in the interconnectedness of ideas, building bridges between seemingly different domains, and finding ways to be a vehicle of change in a time when it's badly needed. Systems thinking prepares us to see and act on the world around us.
JM: Why do you think it is an important area for students to learn about and experience?
KP: The 21st century requires youth to think across the disciplines. While schools are set up to teach disciplines as separate and distinct, as adults we are asked to think across and apply these skills, knowledge, and dispositions in our everyday activities. Schooling is increasingly fragmented and doesn't allow young people to develop the type of interdisciplinary thinking necessary for today's workforce. Systems thinking then becomes one way to unify the curriculum and to encourage youth to see patterns in all disciplines but especially science, mathematics, history, literature, and the arts. Additionally, as youth come to understand systems and how they operate, they are well positioned to act on them for change.
JM: Can you talk a little about the idea of having kids create their own simulations? How do you see this developing and why do you think it's important for students to learn through "play"? What do you think they will take away from the process?
KP: Much of the prior work on complex systems has focused on kids playing with variables on a pre-designed system, including termites, traffic jams, or other systems that are of interest to kids but with which they have little first-hand experience. As we move into new media and begin to use some of the latest tools available, we can now allow kids to create their own systems and teach them the language of systems thinking. This is an important distinction, mostly because kids can build simulations of systems that are important to them, but they can also "play" with the entire system, which is the case in game design. Games are really systems that kids have deep experiences with in their entirety. With these other systems, kids have little to no experience. I'm hoping that this is a generative distinction in our upcoming research. We're very interested in understanding the contribution of games and design to the development of a systems thinking disposition in young people.
JM: I notice from your website that you are a visual artist. What do you see as the connections between art and systems?
KP: In my view, the arts, design, and systems are interrelated in important ways. Artists and designers tend to have a good sense of the "way things work" precisely because they have built, tested, and evaluated their ideas many times over. In a sense, they are constantly building models of the world around them and finding ways to communicate their ideas to large numbers of people in a visual language. I am also interested in environmental art, media art, and other artistic forms that have addressed the notion of "systems" in their work directly, whether that be an environmental system or in highlighting digital media as a complex system.
JM: What kind of response have you received from colleagues and others about this project?
KP: There has been an overwhelming amount of excitement and enthusiasm for the work. There is a clear need; many teachers, schools, and after-school centers are anxious to be beta-testers of the curriculum.
JM: What is your hope for this project over the longer run, in terms of the implementation of the curriculum standards and beyond?
KP: We have pretty modest goals at the moment but are hoping that our designed curriculum modules will connect to a variety of curriculum standards, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines, language arts, and the arts. In the longer run, we're hoping that the curriculum modules will be taken up in classrooms and after-school centers across the country, leading to a greater understanding of systems at an early age in this next generation of youth. We're also hoping that teachers are inspired to adapt the curriculum modules to their local context, incorporate new tools and platforms as they become available, and share these ideas with others in the teacher wiki that we will be setting up.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
Photo of Kylie Peppler courtesy of Indiana University
by Vicky Schubert
It was at an Astoria, Oregon inn, under a massive bridge that crosses the Columbia River, that Ruth Stiehl and Marilyn Lane first decided to teach people about systems by taking them on a raft trip. "As we talked," explains Ruth, "the imagery of the river was
right there, shaping our conversation. In its own emergent way, the river presented itself as an experiential tool to help people see the systems they were part of."
In her work with community college curriculum developers, and in her book The Assessment Primer, Ruth had frequently used the river as a metaphor for illustrating useful systems concepts. Recently hired by Clatsop Community College to support its accreditation initiative, she impressed Marilyn--a 12-year board member for the college--with her deep, yet simple, approach to defining institutional outcomes. As the curriculum director for a K-12 school district, Marilyn saw an opportunity to expand the impact of their work to include a broader system.
The two brought together a group of faculty and administrators from pre-K through community college for an experiential training pilot. After an exciting run on the Deschutes River--a Columbia tributary 100 miles to the north--the rafters returned to a classroom for some reflection. Ruth laid down a rope and put segments across it to illustrate how the group related to each phase of the education process as separate and distinct--early childhood, elementary, middle school, high school, community college.
Ruth asked the group to show what it would look like if the learning were more systemic. The participants drew the rope into a circle, a perfect segue for talking about the river. "If you ask most people to draw a picture of a river," notes Ruth, "they will draw a line. It might squiggle a little bit or have some bands, but it will just be a line. And when you actually look at a river system, it's not a line at all. It's a matter of streams and tributaries--a complex basin."
Additionally, a river is dynamic; it goes someplace. Unlike a pond, it has energy, it has engagement, and it recreates itself. When you stand way back and take a macro view, the whole hydraulic system keeps the earth alive. "We invited the group to think about education in those terms," Ruth explains. "Education is a vital, dynamic resource that keeps our communities alive. If you have a nursing program at a community college, the educational basin includes all the feeder schools, hospitals, doctors' offices, social service agencies, and people who contribute to the education, while the college provides that primary stream that connects it all together."
The successful pilot led Ruth and Marilyn to establish the White Water Institute, a nonprofit organization that brings a river-based experiential systems thinking curriculum to community college administrators, community groups, and individuals seeking deeper connections between their personal and professional lives. The Institute uses professional guides to help groups navigate a twelve-mile stretch of the Deschutes, through rapids rated from class two to class four. In the process, participants learn about teamwork and gain awareness of the nature of organic systems, particularly in terms of flow and change.
Key to teaching about systems, Ruth believes, is helping people shift their perspective to look for patterns. "When you look at a river, you're looking at processes. In processes there are patterns that you can learn to observe. We're terribly deficient, particularly in our educational systems, in recognizing patterns, because we don't make the effort to get far enough away from things to see the patterns that exist." The river experience gives participants the distance they need to recognize how prevailing educational and organizational paradigms prevent schools from operating as healthy, living systems.
Neither easy nor quick, the lessons of the river can take a long time to implement. Participants come to recognize that real transformation requires patience and persistence. As one rafter observed, "Patterns of behavior are difficult to alter. Ways of thinking after years of practice are not as flexible as I may wish. I feel supported by systems thinking skills. However, when I'm under stress I fail to remember them, so I need to go and remember what I learned on the river."
Vicky Schubert is marketing director at Pegasus Communications.
By Janice Molloy
In this time of budgetary constraints and funding cutbacks, the news that the MacArthur Foundation is funding research on the development of systems thinking in middle school students is a heartening turn of events. According to a press release from Indiana University, professors Melissa Gresalfi and Kylie Peppler will be principal investigators on the three-year study called "Grinding New Lenses: A Design Project to Support a Systems View of the World." They are partnering with Nichole Pinkard, visiting professor at DePaul University, and Katie Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play, to create curricula to help sixth graders see and interpret the world with a "systems thinking disposition."
Peppler and Gresalfi are working on two projects. In the first, they will design teaching materials for sixth graders that integrate systems thinking in areas such as science, art, and literature. The researchers' focus is on providing students with technology to play and experiment with to create their own systems. Commented Peppler, "A lot of what's been out there about kids understanding systems 
has been playing simulations and then playing with the variables of those simulations. Instead of starting with somebody else's creation, they'll be creating their own simulations, in a sense."
During the final year of the grant, the researchers will try to understand how teachers use the curriculum modules they've introduced. The goal is to offer teachers new ways to promote systems thinking in the classroom. "Indiana's technology standards centrally focus on systems thinking and there just is not very much curriculum out there," Gresalfi said. "I'm very optimistic that we'll get some Indiana teachers at a minimum who are looking for something to use to address some of these standards."
According to the press release, some of the inspiration for the curriculum will come from the Quest to Learn School in New York City, which was created by Salen's Institute of Play. The combination middle school/high school describes itself as "designed to help students to bridge old and new literacies through learning about the world as a set of interconnected systems." The "Grinding New Lenses" project looks like a strong step toward advancing systems literacy more broadly.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
Graphic source information
By Janice Molloy
Educator Linda Booth Sweeney wants you to build your "systems thinking muscles." The coauthor of The Systems Thinking Playbook and author of Connected Wisdom: Living Stories About Living Systems and When a Butterfly Sneezes, Linda 
has spent her career looking for creative ways to share the concepts and tools of systems thinking across generations, learning styles, and professions. From developing experiential activities that bring systems lessons to life to redesigning signs at a nature center to better capture interdependencies, her goal is to help people, organizations, and institutions stop operating from crisis to crisis by using systems as the context for their learning, problem solving, and design efforts.
Earlier this year, Linda launched what she calls "The Friedman Project," based on the work of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. She said in the first entry in February, "I became a fan of his writing early on when I realized he writes from a systems perspective. What does that mean? You'll rarely find Friedman focused on just a part or a fragment. To Friedman, nothing stands in isolation. Instead, he writes about systems--interrelated parts and processes that continually affect each other over time. And he sees systems patterns everywhere--in escalating gas prices, in financial markets, in the dynamics related to female literacy, in wildlife management--and he wants his reader to understand these systems as well."
The latest installment of "The Friedman Project" focuses on Friedman's December 27, 2008 op-ed, "Win, Win, Win, Win, Win . . . ." In this article, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist describes a recurring dynamic in which "gasoline prices go up, pressure rises for more fuel-efficient cars, then gasoline prices fall and the pressure for low-mileage vehicles vanishes, consumers stop buying those cars, the oil producers celebrate, we remain addicted to oil and prices gradually go up again, petro-dictators get rich, we lose." He continues, "I've already seen this play three times in my life. Trust me: It always ends the same way--badly."
To illustrate this pattern of behavior, Linda and system dynamicist Chris Soderquist teamed up to create a Netsim--a web-based simulation model. Users can run the simulation using different parameters to gain a deeper understanding of the system's behavior, including the consequences--intended or not--of various interventions. The "Win, Win, Win, Win, Win . . . ." Netsim explores the relationship between fuel efficiency, gas price, and driving habits. (For another example of a Netsim, see this blog post by isee systems about modeling the H1N1 flu outbreak. Using the model, you can experiment with vaccination and "stay at home" policies to limit the spread of the H1N1 flu.)
By visually depicting possible behaviors in a system under differing circumstances, tools like a Netsim can help us exercise our systems thinking muscles. And the stronger those muscles, the better we'll be at evaluating policies, designing effective interventions, and working toward sustainable change. It's the best kind of win, win, win, win, win.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference.
By Adriano Pianesi
At the beginning of my session at the 2009 Pegasus Conference, "The Learning Construction Site: Unlearning and Rebuilding New Knowledge," I asked attendees to write down the name of a teacher who had made a difference in their lives. Because the
session focused on good practices for making learning relevant to learners, I wanted participants to reflect on their experiences and share what they perceived as the observable behaviors that made that person successful. When we separate behaviors from personality, we realize that anyone can learn effective teaching practices. People's reflections are captured here.
One participant from China mentioned "Albert Einstein" as his most significant teacher. He went on to say, "In a dictatorship, I never had a teacher who made a difference in my life. So my inspiration to learn came from reading the books of Albert Einstein."
I had done this learning task in my workshop for years. This was the first time that I was confronted with the fact that the horror of a totalitarian regime might rob people even of the basic nurture for the soul that is the inspiration that comes from a great teacher. It takes courage to learn under those conditions. I never realized how this learning task was in fact asking people to share how courageous individuals can shape and inspire our own courage.
Adriano Pianesi is the principal of ParticipAction Consulting, Inc., and has more than 15 years of experience in facilitating organizational change. He can be reached at apianesi@participactioninc.com
Graphic recording by Dierdre Crowley
By Vicky Schubert
In his opening remarks to a 2002 gathering of school reform advocates, Dr. Theodore Sizer expressed with characteristic clarity the challenge they faced: "We stand behind an old, but enduring idea, a conservative idea in the best sense, that the American dream of a democracy driven by informed and committed citizens is both an aspiration and a necessity. We believe that we are currently falling short in meeting this end, and that we must think anew about how to achieve it."
Sizer, who died last week, was a role model to many systems thinkers and one of the most influential voices in the movement to find and apply new educational approaches in the U.S. A former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sizer founded the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national network of schools and individuals devoted to "creating and sustaining personalized, equitable, and intellectually challenging schools."
Throughout his career, Sizer challenged traditional notions of what constitutes excellence in education. He rejected large systems and a reliance on excessive standardization as mere "crowd control." Time and again, Sizer stressed the importance of personalization and rigorous academic engagement for both students and teachers.
Schools, Sizer believed, should be most concerned with igniting students' passion for learning and helping them develop the habits of mind necessary to respond to real-world challenges. "The real world is not a series of set, pre-digested answers," he said in an interview with John Merrow, "the real world is a set of questions. One of the most important things kids can learn in school is that there aren't always nice clean answers to good questions."
Key to engaging students' deepest interests, Sizer believed, was the principle that "less is more," and that curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content. In other words, as Howard Gardner explains, "Rather than try to cram thousands of facts into a kid's head, decide what's really important and spend more time on it, on powerful concepts, rather than trivia that they forget after the test is over." This idea, along with nine others central to the philosophy of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), are captured in a list of "common principles," a set of shared beliefs about the purpose and practice of schooling.
In the fall 2009 issue of the CES journal, Horace--named for the composite high school teacher Sizer had created for a series of influential books he published in the '80s and '90s--author Kathleen Cushman shared her thoughts about the impact of Ted Sizer's life and work: "His lucid words, which changed the way people all over the world now think and speak of school, cut through the rhetoric of 'reform' and trained our gaze acutely on the students at the center. What are these interesting young people doing, what are they thinking, what can we learn from each other? I can see him now, belief and expectation lighting his face as he went right to the kids in the room, to commence another conversation that could change the world." The many important conversations initiated by Sizer will be only part of his lasting personal and professional legacy.
Vicky Schubert is marketing director of Pegasus Communications.