Vol. 2, Issue 1, Jan - Feb 2004
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Systems Thinking "Choices" in 10th Grade Literature

Amy Lovin and Steve Kipp
Brunswick, Georgia

People who learn Systems Thinking often report that it sharpens and clarifies their entire world view. Confusing, disconnected "snapshots" of life start to make more sense when understood as patterns of change over time. The effects of undesirable patterns may be lessened and the influence of beneficial patterns may be increased by deeper understanding of "what is going on here." The sudden surprises, hidden resistance, and underlying harmony generated by feedback relationships become less mysterious. Experience with understanding the world in terms of stocks and flows leads to simple, powerful questions such as: "What is accumulating here?" "Why does it inflow or outflow" and "Where exactly does it come from...where does it go?" Systems Thinking develops the ability to see the forest AND the trees, and we start to understand how and why the forest AND the trees are changing over time. The tendency to blame decreases and the tendency to seek understanding increases. Best of all for teachers, our students learn Systems Thinking very quickly and immediately begin to benefit from their learning.

Steve Kipp taught middle school Science for ten years and is currently in his seventh year as a Waters Foundation Systems Thinking Mentor in the Glynn County School System, located on the southeast coast of Georgia, USA.

Amy Lovin is a graduate of Georgia Southern University and is in her fifth year as an English teacher in the public schools. She has spent the past three years at Brunswick High School, learning Systems Thinking and introducing these techniques to her 10th grade students.
With the generous financial and professional support of the Waters Foundation, we have developed a year-long Systems Thinking Unit called "Choices" for Amy's 10th Grade Literature classes. In this unit, students use "Behavior Over Time" graphs, simple "Causal Loops," and STELLA models to help them examine reasons for and outcomes of choices made by characters in works such as Sophocles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Golding's Lord of the Flies, as well as several others. We have found that it is less threatening for students to systemically examine the behavior of characters in stories before they do the more difficult work of examining their own choices!

One of the most engaging lessons in this series is when students participate in a STELLA-guided group conversation about the dynamics of mob anger in Julius Caesar , Act III, scene ii, in which Brutus calms the crowd down when they are upset over Caesar's death, after which Brutus departs and the crafty Marc Antony slowly whips them back up, culminating in a murderous mob frenzy. Students are captivated by watching their qualitative understanding about crowd mentality be transformed into stocks and flows, and then simulated. The STELLA exercise also unearths previously hidden concepts such as loop dominance; the reinforcing loop between the stock "Mob Anger" and "Angry Talking Among Themselves;" the difference between "Calming Leaders" and "Angering Leaders;" and the powerful effect of adjusting the "Crowd Volatility" converter. And there's just something really intriguing about watching those computer-generated graphs sketch out over the course of each run. It is a great visual experience of the concept of change over time. Throughout the lesson, we reference students' own experience with the behavior of crowds and ask questions about the choices and responsibilities of leaders and members within a group of people.

As much as we enjoy teaching the "Choices" series, some of the best evidence of the power of Systems Thinking lies in the reactions of the students. Here are a few sample student quotes about the unit:

"Man, I was a bad kid! I had never thought about how I acted when I was little until we had to graph our behavior. I need to apologize to my Mom!"

"That loop about death and revenge from Antigone is true. That's the way it still is on the streets."

"Really these guys (writers) didn't make up anything new. They just watched the cycles in everyday life and wrote about them."

"Systems Thinking helps us recognize patterns in behavior, society, and emotions. We can then study that information to help us cope with the same problems in the future."

This was the dream of Barry Richmond, inventor of STELLA, founder of High Performance Systems, and inspiration to a generation of Systems Thinkers. And in the end, Systems Thinking is what matters most. It gives students conceptual and visual tools to "recognize patterns in behavior," to "understand the cycles of everyday life" and to "cope with the same problems in the future." Perhaps they will even learn to do a better job than previous generations and to cope more successfully with the old problems, and with the new problems they will face going forward.

A note from the authors:
Special thanks to Jim and Faith Waters, you've changed our lives forever, and to all of our incredible Waters Foundation  colleagues and extended Systems Thinking/System Dynamics "family."
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