Subject: It's About the Model

Posted by Pedro D. Almaguer Prado on 12/22/2010
In Reply To:It's About the Model Posted by Tim Joy on 12/22/2010

Message:

Tim

I read with great interest your blog, interesting what you posted, I draw much attention the last paragraph that Annex.

"Schools and education are perilously far away from this. We ought to be about model-building, experimentation, refinement, experiencing."

Some years ago I studied the work of Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline for the first time it became clear the importance of development of the strengths and alignment of the vision of the institution's mission and personal vision, sobe all to have a course , Then in his third point to develop communication between teams better understand the work of Daniel Goleman with the importance of developing emotional and social competence predictors of success in personal and professional development of young, that covers not only communication but the ability to influence others, team development and collaboration, leadership, etc.

Senge's fourth point of the mental modeling it became very clear what you mention in your blog that the map is not the territory and that each of us have filters that make us see different realities and learn to visualize underlying cause-effect cycle for each real problem, help much to young to enrich the other point of view of those territories and to contribute their ideas to develop a better more accurate map with feedback loops and reinforcing balance .

And finally I found an enormous impact on step (5) of Senge, to be able to spend the cycles found in (4) a computer simulated models to create better policies and procedures to visualize the impact of our decisions in time andand achieve our desired goals and thinking about solutions to real problems where economic, social and environmental issues go together if we are teaching the subject of sustainability.

No doubt this path will help develop skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation as needed to develop better citizens, system can better understand the complex world they will live and if you also use these methods help develop better emotional and social intelligence, it imagines that it is the dream curriculum, especially the use of participatory methods where the young have the opportunity to see the faces of their colleagues and practiceand practice social and emotional skills also are needed to to develop this part of the brain that can not be taught in the traditional way, but must develop new habits so you can better understand the pervasiveness of interdependence and that everything is interconnected, we want to see or not, we aware of it or not.

Finally I mention that for me was tremendous learning these concepts of Senge and the dynamics of systems and models was something thatconnected my time associate professor of Chemical Engineering at the ITESM when subjects taught chemical process simulation, numerical methods and modeling of transport phenomena, this happened to me in the years 1980-1985, so I loved this topic because of the importance that this also has to improve the educational process of my country and any other of the world.

No doubt we could create an educational revolution, as the models and system dynamics can be integrated into any area and can serve as a "Lingua Franca" given the separation of specialty areas to communicate among themselves, so it is very important to work do with your blog, to help many colleagues to participate actively in discussions and analysis of this issue, statistics that show us to participate in this discussion forum indicates that there is much to be done , it requires the active participation of all to generate new knowledge of SD applied to the curriculum in all areas.