Overview
How to incorporate “Systems Thinking” into chemistry teaching?
Our framework delineates the major steps chemistry instructors can take when planning, implementing, and assessing a lesson or module with a systems thinking perspective:
Contextualize: Select a relevant context
Identify a relevant socioenvironmental or socio-scientific problem that is important for students to analyze and demands the understanding of central ideas in chemistry.
Focus: Identify subsystems in interaction and define scope
Identify what aspect of the system you will focus on in your teaching as well as the different subsystems (e.g., chemical, physical, biological, environmental, social, political, economical) whose interactions will be analyzed and discussed as part of the lesson or module.
Define: Delineate multidimensional learning outcomes
Identify the central chemical ideas students will learn based on the selected context.
Select the core science and engineering practices in which students will engage.
Identify the systems thinking skills that students will practice.
Define the socio-environmental literacy and responsibility competencies that students will develop.
Design: Build an engaging instructional sequence
Design a sequence of collaborative learning activities that create opportunities to share their interests, knowledge, and experiences and that actively and meaningfully engage them in
the analysis of data about the system of interest,
the identification of major patterns in properties and behaviors,
the construction of different representations that help manage the complexity of the analysis,
the guided application of systems thinking.
Map Out: Engage students in activities that help them develop understanding of the nature and scope of the system under analysis
Introduce the selected socioenvironmental problem or phenomenon and engage students in a first analysis of the subsystems (physical, chemical, biological, environmental, social, political, economic) in interaction and the factors that affect them. Use this work to create an introductory overall view of the nature and complexity of the problem or phenomenon to be analyzed.
Zoom In: Engage students in activities that help them identify main components and characterize major interactions between them
Engage students in the identification of relevant physical, chemical, and biological components in interaction within and across subsystems.
For the identified main components, engage students in the characterization of major physical and chemical interactions between them.
Zoom Out: Engage students in activities that help them recognize system level properties and behaviors that emerge from the interactions between components and examine major factors affecting them
Involve students in the analysis of system properties and behaviors that emerge from interactions between main components and their activities and organization over different scales in space and time (causal mechanisms).
Help students identify physical and chemical factors that affect major underlying causal mechanisms and their impact on the properties of the system.
Connect: Engage students in activities that allow them to explore the effects of interactions between different subsystems
Engage students in the identification and analysis of the effects of interactions between major Earth and human subsystems relevant to the problem or phenomenon under analysis.
Create opportunities for students to apply their knowledge in making decisions and suggesting or implementing individual or collective actions directed at addressing the societal and/or environmental problem under consideration.
Evaluate: Engage students in activities that help you and them to evaluate their understanding
Involve students in formative and summative assessment activities to ensure they have met the targeted learning objectives and have developed the core understandings needed to productively engage in all components of the learning sequence.
Reflect: Critically reflect on how instruction supports student learning
Systematically collect data on student learning during the lesson and use it to evaluate and reflect on the effectiveness of the instructional sequence and to make decisions and take actions that strengthen its major components.