Why to use system thinking approach in teaching (learning)?

The easy response is that because it is important to see connections and interdependence.

That is true, but we can go much deeper to understand its real importance in learning – we can have a tour inside our body.

We are learning through experience. It is basicly true when we use experience-based teaching, but is is true any time – when we are in a classroom, listening to a lecture, or at our table at home, reading a textbook, these are also experiences.

Our body and our brain are constantly working – parts of our perception will not be switched off even when we are not conscious about them. It means that during reading a book still we perceive temperature with our skin, the textures of the materials we are wearing, sitting on, keeping in our hands. Our brain is getting impulses from all of our muscles, from our ears, mouth, and stomach. Our body is constantly working.

These momentary impulses activate neurons, neural structures – making up temporal neural nets. So our „first hand” learning from that textbook contains a lot of extra information about temperature, the feelings of our muscles, and the smell of the cookie our mother bakes in the kitchen. Definitely it is not very effective way, because the cookie usually has nothing to do with the history lesson we want to learn. No problem – this neural network is setting up only momentarily – next moment a new network develops on the basis of the old and the new perceptions.

Hebb’s rule in neurology is that those neurons which fire together, wire together. That means if the same neurons are firing together several times, their relations strengthen, and they more easily activate each other the next time. That is basicly the learning process – strengthening specific neural activation networks. So we never learn a single fact – we always learn the patterns of situations.

If you are learning maths several times when your mother bakes a cookie, then cookie smell will be a part of your “math network”.  For example when I was preparing for my term exam on history, I was learning about the First World War, and I was listening to the same Mike Oldfield album again and again. Even now, nearly twenty years later when I hear the song “Shadows on the Wall”, I start to think about the First World War and the trench warfare – the music actives “trench warfare” network.

So we learn patterns of perceptions that usually take place together. It is easy to see its importance from evolutionary aspect: an animal has to recognize a situation (a pattern of the environment) where it can find food or there is a danger of any kind. What is even more important for the animal is to recognize the differentiation of patterns: to be able to decide that those leaves on the right part of that bush are moving because of the wind or because of the carnivore.  Our brain is evolutionary developed to recognize patterns and pattern change, not facts.

One of the first things our brains learn in life is the recognition of human face, and the pattern of our mother’s face. Scientists proved that very young babies are already longer looking at patterns that resemble a human face – even if it is just a “symbolic” drawing that hardly resembles a face anyway. They can really make a difference between their mother’s face and other people. Even earlier – already “within” their mother – they learn to recognize voice patterns (=rhythms).  A new born baby’s brain actively reacts for non-rhythmic voices and show recognition for rhythmic ones (even if these are new for them).

When we use system thinking in education, we teach to see and analyze patterns in a conscious way. To see the facts and their relations, how these make up specific patterns and what is the way these patterns change. That makes factual knowledge more brain-friendly to catch, and also makes it convertible to real world use – to recognize the same, similar, or nearby patterns in our every-day lives.

It also develops creativity.  During arts or non-artistic kinds of innovations and research, usually pattern-recognition and re-use takes place. A painter sees a pattern, and emphasizes the parts s/he finds important or interesting. A composer composes a musical pattern and its changes. A natural scientist see a parallel and differences between two patterns, and based on these develops a new material or medicine. A politician sees a pattern of social life and based on this, develops a new strategy to approach it.

Patterns have a cross-domain characteristic as well: they can be transferred from one domain to the other. A pattern of nature can be used in engineering, or to understand social life (for example non-linear networks can be found within the body cell, in the electricity network and in Facebook).  If you see how these patterns are set up, and how they change, you also have an opportunity to manipulate them (which can be very important in arts, medicine or engineering, but for politicians as well).

We use patterns in our everyday life – to find our key, to make a coffee, to organize our things, to find the milk in the shop to buy. To recognize if something has changed. Definitely it is much more effective if we can do it consciously.

System thinking is not new approach to learning as we see now. This is the learning process itself. That is why in education we have to emphasize it, to empower our pupils to use patterns and their recognition more consciously and effectively.