Scenario
How would you create a learning activity that develops systems thinking?
Please read the following scenario and consider how you might create a learning activity surrounding this topic.
You teach a course in a community development program and want to help your students understand the connections among factors in communities that perpetuate poverty and low performance in schools. You decide to explore an exercise known as feedback loops. A feedback loop is a “closed set of cause-and-effect relationships, each element of which can be viewed as having a partial influence on its own behaviour” (Sweeney et al., 2011, p. 8). Feedback loops highlight a circular pattern of causation where elements in a system create a change (or chain of changes) in one or more other element(s), which then comes back to affect a change in the original element(s). So, there is a chain of relationships that end up feeding information back into a system.
Together in class, you come up with the following feedback loop:
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How could you engage students in developing a sustainability mindset using this information?
Come up with an idea of your own, and then click the button below to view one suggestion.