28  |  Solutions  |  November-December 2015  |  www.thesolutionsjournal.org

Perspectives

Wouldn’t it be great if students arrived to class each day 

cheerful and eager to learn? Teachers could simply open their mouths to bestow wisdom and knowledge, and students would listen, absorb, and then dazzle everyone in earshot with their brilliance. Though teachers’ lives would be easier if the good, old-fashioned direct instruction approach worked every time, this simple model of education does not suffice for one important reason: students are not simple. Sure, they want to learn, but about the Russian Revolution? Students can’t see how it relates to them. What about the rich ecosystem just beyond the school walls? Are there power outlets out there? Students are hard-wired for learning, but they can fail to retain what they’ve been taught if they don’t see why it is important to them.

So, what is important? Friends, sports, music, the environment, human or animal rights. . . and some-times they do get excited about school, too. I’ve seen many students engage actively when confronted with sub-jects like the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, or issues that hit close to home. When students are fully checked in, teachers can read it all over their faces, not to mention their work. When school topics connect to their personal experiences or challenge them to grapple with questions they feel are important, they react and respond.

Still, some students evade all hooks. Despite teachers’ best efforts, some kids will still text message on their phones when they should be listening, hide ear buds under hoods, and pass long notes that ignore every grammar lesson they’ve ever had. But, they do 

care. Maybe it’s about a band they’re starting up, a new game they’re play-ing, or a new love. Maybe it’s a struggle they’re having with body image or a home without heat. Students are complex beings, and that complexity influences their learning.

Students’ learning is affected not only by the strengths and limitations they bring with them—as well as the strengths and limitations of their teachers—but also by the school, its community, and all of the relationships within it. In these days of mass media and information being a click away, learning is affected by an increasingly broad scope of global events and reali-ties. Education is a complex system.

This all seems fitting. We are, after all, educating our kids so that they may thrive in a diverse and ever more interconnected world. Teachers have heard that by the time their students graduate from college, they will be assuming jobs and careers that don’t even exist yet. They will be living in a complex world full of complex systems—biological, ecological, politi-cal, economic, and social—all nested, overlapping, and interdependent.

Many authors have made the case that systems thinking is critical for addressing modern problems that 

cross traditional disciplinary boundar-ies—problems like climate change that exist at the intersections of politics, religion, economics, and con-servation.1-5 Several have argued that if we want to prepare students to thrive in a complex world, we need to teach them systems skills, which include the ability to see connections between diverse subjects and contexts, view any given situation from multiple perspec-tives, and recognize patterns of change over time.6-9 However, teaching about complexity is not just about prepar-ing students for future challenges or opportunities. It is also about helping them to orient themselves in their world today.

The language of systems can illumi-nate direct connections between the curricular content of schools and the world that surrounds them. Meadows and Wright define a system as “a set 

of things—people, cells, molecules, etc.—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”10 There are simple, linear systems in which “each part works in a lockstep way with the other parts.”11 Think of the coffee pot sitting on your counter at home. Add coffee grounds and water, turn it on, and you can pretty much predict what it will do. That is one of the primary characteristics of a linear system. It is predictable, and so it is controllable.12

Teenagers, of course, aren’t linear systems. They are complex. Unlike 

Kids Are Complex: Connecting Learning to Lifeby Caitlin S. Steele

Teaching students the language and skills of systems offers them new ways to understand not only traditional school content, but also themselves and the complexity of the world around them.

Steele, C.S. (2015). Kids are Complex: Connecting Learning to Life. Solutions 6(6): 28–30.https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/kids-are-complex-connecting-learning-to-life

www.thesolutionsjournal.org  |  November-December 2015  |  Solutions  |  29

Perspectives

the coffee pot, students don’t behave predictably at the press of a button. They have the capacity to learn and grow, and to respond to feedback from teachers, their peers, and the greater systems of which they are a part. The complexity of each individual’s lived experiences is an example of complex systems in action.

A complexity-oriented perspective is both an academic and intuitive way of looking at the world, a way of studying patterns of behavior and relationships over time. In research and in practice, complex systems approaches have been used to advance knowledge across a range of disci-plines from computer science and engineering to archeology and public 

administration.13,14 Systems concepts have surfaced in the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities.15 They have made their way into education standards as well. The Next Generation Science Standards, developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, contain several references to systems in both their Crosscutting Concepts and Disciplinary Core Ideas.16,17 Furthermore, the Cloud Institute, which aims to inspire K–12 students “to think about the world, their relationship to it, and their ability to influence it in an entirely new way,” includes the Dynamics of Systems and 

Change as one of nine core standards in its Education for Sustainability framework.18

Imagine if we integrated school subjects and taught through a complex systems lens. Shakespeare’s works could help students understand common patterns in human behavior. What reinforcing feedback loops, “in which an action produces a result which influences more of the same action,” led to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet? What balancing feedback loops, where a current state changes to a desired state through some action, have kept Shakespeare’s writing from going out of fashion for hundreds of years?19 Teaching students the language and skills of systems offers 

Innovation School Students at Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation in New York City work on a group project. Today’s students are complex beings living in a complex world comprised of complex systems.

30  |  Solutions  |  November-December 2015  |  www.thesolutionsjournal.org

Perspectives

them new ways to understand not only traditional school content, but also themselves and the complexity of the world around them.

As educators struggle with how to teach students to thrive in a future we cannot imagine, teaching through the lens of complex systems offers great promise. At its core, complexity in the classroom is about illuminating common patterns in history, science, mathematics, the arts, and humani-ties; helping kids to see connections between them all; and showing them how to discover for themselves how one thing impacts another and how each individual might impact her or his world. 

References1.  Meadows, D.H. and D. Wright. Thinking in Systems:

A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River 

Junction VT, 2008).

2.  Fisher, D.M. “Everybody Thinking Differently”: 

K–12 is a Leverage Point. System Dynamics Review, 

27(4), 394–411 (2011).

3.  Richmond, B. Systems Thinking: Critical Thinking 

Skills for the 1990s and Beyond. System Dynamics

Review 9(2) 113–133 (1993).

4.  Senge, P.M. Creating Schools for the Future, Not the 

Past for All Students. Leader to Leader, (65), 44–49 

(2012).

5.  Metz, S. Systems Thinking. The Science Teacher, 79(7), 

6 (2012).

6.  Wessels, T. The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable

Future (University of Vermont Press, Burlington VT, 

2006).

7.  Sweeney, L.B. Learning to Connect the Dots: 

Developing Children’s Systems Literacy. Solutions. 

Vol 5, No. 3. pp. 55–62 (2012).

8.  Cassell, J.A. and T. Nelson. Visions Lost and Dreams 

Forgotten: Environmental Education, Systems 

Thinking, and Possible Futures in American Public 

Schools. Teacher Education Quarterly, 37(4), 179 

(2010).

9.  Dubberly, H. A Systems Literacy Manifesto. RSD3 2014 

Symposium—Relating Systems Thinking and Design 

3. Conference address. [online] (2014) http://www.

dubberly.com/presentations/system_literacy.pdf.

10. Meadows, D.H. and D. Wright. Thinking in Systems:

A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River 

Junction VT, 2008).

11. Wessels, T. The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable

Future (University of Vermont Press, Burlington VT, 

2006).

12. Wessels, T. The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable

Future (University of Vermont Press, Burlington VT, 

2006).

13. Michell, M. Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford 

University Press, New York NY, 2009).

14. Bar-Yam, Y. Making Things Work: Solving Complex

Problems in a Complex World (NECSI Knowledge 

Press, Cambridge MA, 2004).

15. Byrne, D. and G. Callaghan. Complexity Theory and

the Social Sciences: The State of the Art (Routledge, New 

York NY, 2014).

16. The Next Generation Science Standards: 

Development Overview [online] http://www.

nextgenscience.org/development-overview.

17. The Next Generation Science Standards: 

Executive Summary [online] (NGSS Release, 2013) 

www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-

standards.

18. Cloud, J.P., ed. Education for Sustainability: EfS 

Standards and Performance Indicators. [online] 

(2012) http://www.cloudinstitute.org/cloud-efs-

standards/.

19. Bellinger, G. TheWay of Systems [online] (2004) http://

www.systems-thinking.org/theWay/sba/ba.htm.

Devon Christopher Adams A high school student reads Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the classroom.