• Instead of asking “Where can I fit systems thinking into the curriculum?”, consider “Where are there natural opportunities to make connections more explicit?”. For example, when teaching equilibrium, kinetics, or environmental chemistry, small prompts about interactions, feedback, or system boundaries can introduce systems thinking without changing the content itself.

• You don’t necessarily need to change what you teach. Start by changing how you ask students to think about it. Add prompts such as: “What other factors influence this system?”. “How would a change here affect other parts of the process?”. “What are the broader implications of this chemical process?”. These small shifts can significantly deepen student reasoning while staying fully aligned with existing curricula.

• Many chemistry topics already involve systems implicitly; energy flows, equilibria, cycles, and interactions across scales. As part of your regular lesson/unit preparation, take the time to map where your current teaching already touches on systems ideas, and make these connections more visible to students. This helps reposition systems thinking as something you are already doing, rather than something entirely new.

• You’ll read this one a lot because it is true. Rather than attempting course-wide change, select a single lesson, case study, or assessment task and introduce a systems thinking element. This might include a simple system map/SOCME, either as a student, class or teacher-centred activity, which leads logically to a discussion of interconnections, or a short reflective question. Small-scale implementation builds confidence and provides a realistic foundation for further development.

• Access existing systems thinking materials related to your learning context (which you can find on this website, or others like gctlc.org) and adapt them to your own context. Treat these resources as starting points rather than fixed lessons, modifying them to suit your students, content, and teaching style. This reduces preparation time and helps bridge the gap between abstract ideas and classroom practice.

• This study shows that when actively challenged to identify topics amenable to systems thinking, educators are able to identify many familiar chemistry topics at both secondary and tertiary levels, which already offer natural entry points for systems-oriented teaching.

• This is important evidence to support incremental change (start with the content you are teaching) rather than implementing wholesale change.

Schultz, M.; Chan, D.; Eaton, A. C.; Ferguson, J. P.; Houghton, R.; Ramdzan, A.; Taylor, O.; Vu, H. H.; Delaney, S. Using Systems Maps to Visualize Chemistry Processes: Practitioner and Student Insights. Educ. Sci. 2022, 12 (9), 596. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12090596. 

• This research shows that educators commonly perceive systems thinking as difficult to implement because of limited familiarity, uncertainty about how it fits existing teaching, and the practical constraints of their local context.

Szozda, A. R.; Bruyere, K.; Lee, H.; Mahaffy, P. G.; Flynn, A. B. Investigating Educators’ Perspectives toward Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education from International Contexts. J. Chem. Educ. 2022, 99 (7), 2474–2483. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.2c00138.

• This study with experienced tertiary instructors suggests that perceived barriers often lessen with experience, especially when educators can see clear benefits and manageable ways to integrate systems thinking into familiar teaching contexts.

York, S.; Orgill, M. Experienced Tertiary Instructors’ Perceptions of the Benefits and Challenges of Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education. J. Chem. Educ. 2024, 101 (1), 10–23. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c01000. 

• This study proposes a practical systems thinking educational framework for planning, implementing, and assessing chemistry teaching from a systems thinking perspective, reinforcing that educators can work within existing units by reframing goals, tasks, and questions.

Talanquer, V.; Szozda, A. R. An Educational Framework for Teaching Chemistry Using a Systems Thinking Approach. J. Chem. Educ. 2024, 101 (5), 1785–1792. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00216.