{"id":13432,"date":"2020-09-28T11:57:39","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T15:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/?p=13432"},"modified":"2020-09-28T11:59:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T15:59:43","slug":"systems-thinking-can-help-spark-and-sustain-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/systems-thinking-can-help-spark-and-sustain-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Systems Thinking Can Help Spark and Sustain Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
Transitioning education systems to be competency-based represents a massive shift from established ways of doing things. It involves shifting practice, reorienting outcomes, and building understanding and shared vision among educators, learners, families, community members, and other stakeholders. Teachers have to facilitate and assess learning differently. Students have to take more ownership of their learning journeys. Families have to develop new lenses for understanding children\u2019s development. Community members have to shift their expectations of what learning looks like, where it happens, and what supports the school’s need.<\/p>\n
Even though competency-based education has gained significant traction over the past several years and has been getting a boost through some responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the path forward with any transformation of its magnitude is rarely linear. For the approach to spread and put down roots, many people and organizations need to become champions and take action. Even after successful growth, on the ground can be lost, as what happened in Maine.<\/p>\n
The movement to spread competency-based education represents a form of systems change. Any systems change requires committing to doing something differently and then sustaining that effort over time, even after the initial swell of enthusiasm has waned. Transforming systems in this way is hard, long-haul work. However, the path can be eased by using aspects of systems thinking to shed new light on how education systems are operating today, where change efforts are intersecting with long-established patterns of behavior and systemic structures, what assumptions the people involved bring to the work, and the gaps between desired and actual outcomes.<\/p>\n
Systems thinking is a set of theories, tools, language, and mindsets that can help people grapple with the complex and interconnected world around us and make visible our perceptions of how it works. It can help us deepen our understanding of what stands between our aspirational visions and us and articulate what it might take to bring those visions to life.<\/p>\n
Some systems thinking\u2019s key tenets appear below.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Systems thinking are a complex and sophisticated field, with many tools and processes available to help people understand and change how systems are operating. To help simplify the process of applying this way of thinking to education, KnowledgeWorks\u2019 Looking Beneath the Surface: The Education Changemaker\u2019s Guide to Systems Thinking<\/em><\/a> introduces education stakeholders and changemakers to the field\u2019s theories, language, mindsets, and tools. It introduces the core concepts of systems thinking and offers practice questions and exercises. Its four lessons focus on identifying the systems behavior that stakeholders wish to change, visualizing the structure of current system behavior, identifying possible actions and their depth of impact, and evaluating the effects of various interventions and events.<\/p>\n The tools and processes described in KnowledgeWorks\u2019 systems change guidebook can help groups pursuing competency-based education and other forms of systems change:<\/p>\n In using them, education stakeholders can engage in new ways of thinking and collaborating, exposing what is often unseen and articulating what usually goes unsaid. That engagement can in turn lead to new ways of being and acting. Those shifts in people’s interactions, perspectives, and pursuits can help groups begin, nurture, and sustain the movement toward competency-based education.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n