I just spent two days in Tucson at the Waters Foundation (http://www.watersfoundation.org) training for teachers in the Catalina Foothills Unified School District. They started with an interesting exercise of having each person in a circle establish a random relationship with two other people in the circle and then always remain equidistant from those two people. It was interesting to see the chaos at the beginning transform into a relatively stable structure.
The relationships were analogous to systems control mechanisms and when a person you were linked to was linked to someone else who was linked to you, there was feedback that demonstrated how changes rippled through the system.
There were other lessons and coverage of terms and techniques leading to the use of Stella for modeling dynamic relationships. There is a book, "Modeling the Environment" by Ford which covers much of what they do. But it is intriguing to see that they are teaching elementary children to think and experience systems dynamics.
Another modeling program is available called "Vensim" from http://www.vensim.com
If children do have "systems of thought" within their brains, how do you go about overcoming their preconceived misconceptions that interfere with learning? One obvious answer is to enlist the students in finding and confronting those misconception. Conversation is one technique.
I am researching several topics that revolve around General Systems Theory and its implications for education. There are four significant areas. First, Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory established that systems establish a "steady state" that Bertalanffy called "equifinality" which the system resists changing. Deming taught corporations that the organization system determined the output quality rather than employee efforts. Thus Deming also taught about equifinality. Rosalind Driver established research into learning science at the secondary level often encountered students with preconceived ideas that were resistant to change. These also behaved like "systems of thought" within each student. Finally, Esther Thelen established that the development of cognition in infants could be explained in terms of systems theory. Thus the concept of a "system of thought" has been established in the fundamental development of human cognition.
