D-4337 1 System Dynamics and Learner-Centered-Learning in Kindergarten through 12th Grade Education Jay W. Forrester Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA December 21, 1992 Abstract: Pre-college education is under attack for poorly serving the needs of society. Unless a superior concept for improving education emerges, public displeasure is apt to result in still more of what is already not working. But now, a fundamentally new and more effective approach to education is emerging from advances in system dynamics. System dynamics offers a framework for giving cohesion, meaning, and motivation to education at all levels from kindergarten upward. A second important ingredient, “learner-centered learning,” imports to pre-college education the challenge and excitement of a research laboratory. Together, these two innovations harness the creativity, curiosity, and energy of young people. System dynamics allows reversing the traditional educational sequence in which deadening years of learning facts have preceded use of those facts by introducing synthesis (putting it all together) at an early stage in a student’s experience. Such synthesis can be based on facts that even elementary school students already have gleaned from life. Learner-centered learning reverses the process of a teacher lecturing facts to resistant students. Learners have the opportunity to explore, gather information, and create unity out of their educational experiences. A "teacher" in the new setting acts as a guide and participating learner, rather than as an authoritarian source of all wisdom. Copyright © 1992 Jay W. ForresterD-4337 3 Table of Contents 1. SOURCES OF EDUCATIONAL INEFFECTIVENESS 5 2. CORNERSTONES FOR A MORE EFFECTIVE EDUCATION 7 2.1. Precursors of System Dynamics 7 2.2. System Dynamics in Pre-College Education 8 2.3. Learner-Centered Learning 10 3. THE GORDON BROWN INFLUENCE 11 4. THE PRESENT STATUS 14 5. THE FUTURE 18 6. REFERENCES 21D-4337 5 System Dynamics and Learner-Centered-Learning in Kindergarten through 12th Grade Education by Jay W. Forrester Secondary education is under increasing attack for not preparing students to cope with modern life. Failures appear in the form of corporate executives who misjudge the complexities of growth and competition, government leaders who are at a loss to understand economic and political change, and publics that support inappropriate responses to immigration pressures, changing international conditions, rising unemployment, the drug culture, governmental reform, and inadequacies in education. Growing criticism of education may direct attention to incorrect diagnoses and ineffective treatments. Weakness in education arises not so much from poor teachers as from inappropriateness of material that is being taught. Students are stuffed with facts without having a frame of reference for making those facts relevant to the complexities of life. Responses to educational deficiencies are apt to result in public demands for still more of what is causing the present educational failures. Pressures will increase for additional science, humanities, and social studies in an already overcrowded curriculum, a curriculum that fails to instill enthusiasm and a sense of relevance. Instead, an opportunity exists for moving toward a common foundation that pulls all fields of study into a more understandable unity. 1. Sources of Educational Ineffectiveness Much current dissatisfaction with pre-college education arises from past inability to show how people interact with one another and with their physical environment, and to reveal causes for what students see happening. Because of its fragmentary nature, Copyright © 1992 Jay W. Forrester6 D-4337 traditional education becomes less relevant as society becomes more complex, crowded, and tightly interconnected. Education is compartmentalized into separate subjects that, in the real world, interact with one another. Social studies, physical science, biology, and other subjects are taught as if they were inherently different from one another, even though behavior in each rests on the same underlying concepts. For example, the dynamic structure that causes a pendulum to swing is the same as the core structure that causes employment and inventories to fluctuate in a product-distribution system and in economic business cycles. Humanities are taught without relating the dynamic sweep of history to similar behaviors on a shorter time scale that a student can experience in a week or a year. High schools teach a curriculum from which students are expected to synthesize a perspective and framework for understanding their social and physical environments. But that framework is never explicitly taught. Students are expected to create a unity from the fragments of educational experiences, even though their teachers have seldom achieved that unity. Missing from most education is direct treatment of the time dimension. What causes change from the past to the present and the present into the future? How do present decisions determine the future toward which we are moving? How are lessons of history to be interpreted to the present? Why are so many corporate, national, and personal decisions ineffective in achieving intended objectives? Conventional educational programs seldom reveal the answers. Answers to such questions about how things change through time lie in the dynamic behavior of social, personal, and physical systems. Dynamic behavior, common to all systems, can be taught as such. It can be understood. Education has taught static snapshots of the real world. But the world's problems are dynamic. The human mind grasps pictures, maps, and static relationships in a wonderfully effective way. But in systems of interacting components that change through time, the human mind is a poor simulator of behavior. Mathematically speaking, even a simple social system can represent a tenth-order, highly nonlinear, differential equation.D-4337 7 Mathematicians can not solve the general case for such an equation. No scientist, citizen, manager, or politician can reliably judge such complexity by intuition. Yet, even a junior high school student with a personal computer and coaching in computer simulation can advance remarkably far in understanding such systems. Education faces the challenge of