Challenges of Learning About & Strategies for Teaching Complex Systems

Challenges

• Metacognition - how do you teach students to think about their thinking (about complex systems)?
• Important role of conceptual models
• Some students are not well grounded in establishing linear cause and effect
• Understanding levels of mechanisms - what are the relationships, mechanisms and components that are invisible?
• Nonlinearities don't always give the same result even when you put in the same starting points -- stochastic behavior is difficult in and of itself
• Finding ways to engage people with the behavior of complex systems
• Underlying concepts are essential --e.g. mass balance
• Lack of tools for understanding what students are learning, where we are succeeding
• Difficulty of explaining to deans, parents, students what they are going to learn -- systems thinking, earth system science are not terms that mean much to external groups.
• Transitioning from traditional curriculum to developing understanding of complex systems
• Push back from students regarding both content and teaching methods
• Moving students up from reactions to critical thinking regarding controversial issues
• Variation in quantitative sophistication of students -- making complex systems behavior and underpinning concepts accessible without relying on mathematical description
• Mismatch between expert approach to understanding complex systems and approaches that are accessible to students

Strategies

• Comparison between complex systems and linear systems
• Teaching metacognition about complex systems - modeling how the expert/instructor is understanding the system
• Insert in multiple courses so repeated exposure
• Use teacher prep to get into K-12
• Use complex system models as a mechanism for broad based problem solving
• Make the hidden levels visible
• Build on relative comfort with both linear and complex behavior in social settings to move to natural science settings
• Use physical and mathematical models and movies of these as entry way into understanding models/complex systems
• Viral YouTube videos
• Situate complex systems thinking as a form of critical thinking
• Teaching geosciences using grand challenges and issues in a safe and engaging way motivates students to learn complex systems thinking