Why Systems Thinking?

A close mentor, friend, thought partner, and my student’s favorite substitute and visiting artist Gayle Dickson frequently tells me a story of a teacher she once had at Castelmont High School who made a statement that stuck with her for life. The teacher drew a circle on the board and began dividing it into pie-like sections. In each section she named an empire, and like a circular timeline, gave one leg of each pie piece a beginning date and the next leg an end date.

She then labeled one of the pie pieces the ‘American Empire’ and told the class that just like all empires have a beginning, they too have an end.

This imagery stuck in Gayle’s head throughout a lifetime of work as an artist, through her service in the Black Panther Party as a young adult, and into her older adult life as she continues to plant seeds of resistance in the minds of young children. While her teacher’s diagram is still incomplete…still lacking another date to be added in memorized in future history lessons, Gayle still moves with the understanding and faith that in time, this American empire too will come to an end…this empire built on and sustained by systems of racialized subjegation, by systems of capitalist exploitation of all creation, and by systems of attempted neutralization of those who are willing to think, act, and organize in pursuit of a wholly different reality.

This story she tells keeps returning to the forefront of my consciousness as I plan for my 4 and 5 year old students. It reaffirms that as educators, whether we embrace, study, and explicitly strategize around this or not, we hold positions of immense power. While there is surely power and importance in being tasked with facilitating a student’s ability to perform discreet, abstracted language and numeracy skills, this is not what I am referring to. Regardless of the amount of actual respect or autonomy we have within our specific positions, the system at large position teachers in front of students as knowledge keepers, as authorities, experts and as filters of information. The framing, the language, the format, the style we use for every unit we plan, every lesson we teach, every conversation we have with our students influences and shapes explicitly and implicitly entire epistemologies, schemas, and metacognitive frameworks in students minds.

In short, what we allow into the teaching space shapes student’s understanding of what is and what is possible.

We are not just teaching students what to think, we are also teaching students how to think, whether or not we do so explicitly or intentionally. In that short moment many years ago, the diagram drawn by Gayle’s high school teacher and the singular comment she made, was not memorable because it was simply a fun new way to remember discrete testable facts. It was memorable because it situated her within history, and in offering both a simple frame for analysis an invitation for dethroning the imaginary of an invincible and omniscient American empire, it forever shaped her understanding of what is, and what is possible.

Knowing the immense responsibility and opportunity we have within this role to nurture ways of seeing and understanding ourselves and the world, we have to begin interrogating ourselves, our curriculum, our classroom culture at large. How are we implicitly and explicitly teaching students to think?

In comes Systems Thinking.

Just as any ‘subject area’ can be taught through a lens that confirms and improves on rather than analyzes and challenges oppressive systems, the term ‘Systems Thinking’ has been used in many different ways, often within the business world and nonprofit sector seeking to make their corporation or organization run more smoothly or effectively or less often within the rare high school humanities classroom where teachers and students seek to analyze and critique systems of oppression and domination. At the elementary and especially, the early elementary levels, conversations around how to bring Systems Thinking into the classroom are more challenging to find.

As I struggled over the years with the responsibility of teaching science (knowing the ways that science as a discipline has been used not only as a tool for those in or seeking power to attempt to author reality,  justify their position within it, and deny any ‘other’ the health and safety they deserve in this life) I looked for a frame to ground in that could help me in historicizing science, while also freeing me and my students from relying on taxonomical ways of thinking and seeing, understanding our world out of context and glorifying ‘science’ as something above or superior to nature, to creation. Teaching and learning about systems, and developing the mindsets and frameworks for thinking in this way, has formed the core of everything we do in my classroom, from how we respond to conflict to how we take care of our classroom to how we learn about history, ‘nature’, and the economy.

Above all its proved to be a really powerful framework for guiding me as I build every unit from scratch with the primary intentions of engaging, honoring, and strengthening my young students’ genius. We use the concept and image of a system to form the overarching, or underlying framework for everything else we learn about...helping us avoid simply naming the parts of the world without understanding the importance of their interactions, and helping us to see where we fit in to it all.

The beauty of systems thinking is that it is as simple as it is complex. The lens can be applied at any scale, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, always implicating and including each of us in the story. 

‘System’ is one of the first words we explicitly learn in my classroom, and works its way into everything that we subsequently learn and do.

A snapshot of our systems definition from one of our living walls

We use a simple GLAD hand gesture strategy, also known as Total Physical Response, to put hand motions to the word in order to signify and help us internalize the definition. Here one of our TK students demonstrates the gestures we came up with for “system” while he was adjusting to being home during quarantine:

With this simple foundation and starting point, we begin building language and schema simultaneously, constructing a framework for understanding and learning the words we need to describe, build on, and edit that frame. For example we might start looking at our classroom, framing it as a system. It gets the conversation going around our collective purpose…what is our class system working to do? What are all the parts? How do they relate to each other? From there we can build out, looking at the social systems we operate within or want to change in the classroom and then at the school and community level. We can also dive into the material world, looking at the systems that we use and rely on (pencils, paper, books, clothes), or zooming out to see how those systems made it into our room, all the while critiquing, analyzing, and questioning whether the system we see is the only option.

Throughout the past two years of Action Research and curriculum building centering Systems Thinking and designing and testing strategies with my students, I learned that the deepest, most applicable and transferable learning happens when we consciously put effort into infusing systems level, relational epistemologies into every aspect of our time together inside the classroom (looking at how do all components of a system relate, interact, and affect one another), when we build explicit bridges between our learning within the classroom and our lives outside of it, and when we use literacy and schema building strategies to explicitly build cognitive models.

Below are some of the frameworks and strategies that have informed the foundation of our work in systems thinking. Each supports and deepen the systems lens in its own way:

GLAD: Guided Language Acquisition Design, or ‘GLAD’ is a system of a wide variety of research based strategies that can be applied and adapted in any content area, grade level, or literacy level to build students metacognitive literacy skills. We decided to use GLAD as a Tk-2 team as an entry point for justifying cracking open the homeroom skills based agenda and making space for real, relevant content.

Agency By Design Thinking Routines: “Thinking routines are short, engaging, two-or-three-step patterns of intellectual behavior that are highly transferable across contexts. They are designed to be easy to use, easy to remember, easy to transfer, and to be vividly effective when used on a wide variety of topics. The idea is that…. [students] will develop dispositions related to the patterns of thinking the routines promote”

Culturally Responsive Design: Zaretta Hammond’s Design Principles and Lesson building blocks come straight out of her research on cognition. In designing curriculum at the level of the unit, week, and individual lesson, these principles and building blocks gave language and focus to the most essential parts of my backwards planning process, from the conceptual to the logistical

Ethnic Studies Pedagogy: In connection to CRTL Design Principles, Ethnic Studies pedagogy centers study, analysis, and transformation of systems of racial and economic domination and oppression. In collaboration with The Elementary Ethnic Studies Project, my action research has looked into how to infuse systems level epistemologies into all aspects of our classroom culture and curriculum.