My toddler daughter loves to paint. She goes wild with the brush, creating a colorful tangle of strokes. She also likes using stencils so she can paint a star or a dinosaur or a tree.
Our minds have stencils, too. They are called mental models. These are the beliefs that serve as filters for how each of us understands and acts in the world. Mental models are born from our experiences and also help us make sense of them. Like my daughter’s stencils, they give tangled reality a shape we can recognize.
Mental models are necessary. We would be perpetually overwhelmed without them, and they often reflect the learning and wisdom we have acquired over time. However, they can also cause us to become stuck in our thinking unless we notice, examine and sometimes challenge them. KnowledgeWorks’ systems thinking guidebook makes the case that we must transform our mental models in order to transform education systems.
Testimonial
Brooke Charter Schools, Roslindale, MA
For example, the guidebook features the hypothetical systems thinking journey of a fictional group of educators, students, parents and community members who are working to address their school’s disproportionate suspension of Black students. After much discussion and applying the tools of systems thinking to understand the wide variety of experiences and beliefs related to the problem, the group members find themselves asking:
- What is the purpose of the behavioral expectations we hold for students?
- Why do we have this set of rules?
- Do those rules support or detract from a just and equitable school culture?
The group questions not only the procedures and features of their system, but also the foundational assumptions and beliefs that inform the ways their school operates. In so doing, they are trying out new stencils. The result could be a system that works in entirely new ways.
We all have mental models that affect our beliefs and our actions. That means they also shape the ways our systems operate. Once we recognize this fact, we can no longer allow those mental models to remain hidden. Systems thinking offers tools for making mental models explicit, and simple conversation can also uncover the ways in which different people see reality. We must reflect on our own mental models, share them, seek to understand others’ and, where possible, align our collective mental models with the future we hope to see.
In times of uncertainty, when we often feel like we have no control, we can remember that we always have the power to notice our own mental models and shift them if we want to. We can ask ourselves and others:
- How might our mental models be getting in our way?
- How willing are we to let go of our sense of certainty about how the world works and examine our opportunities, challenges and solutions through a new set of filters?
Our collective answer to those questions will determine whether our education systems can transform to be just, joyful and life-affirming or whether they will end up as a slightly different version of what they have always been.
