Shape of Change

The Shape of Change including Stocks and Flows

By Rob Quaden and Alan Ticotsky with Deb Lyneis

In The Shape of Change, students engage in games and other classroom activities (teamwork, hands-on, learner-centered learning) to explore what changes over time. They draw behavior over time graphs to examine how these things changed, and they relate the patterns of behavior to other changes in their experience.

Step-by-step, students build stock/flow maps explaining each lesson activity. These stock/flow maps are tied directly to students’ earlier behavior over time graphs and to the underlying causal loop structures that drive the changes.

In this manner, students begin to build systems thinking skills – an understanding of how structure creates the behavior we observe all around us.

All of the lessons in these books are available for download below. We find that the layout and the compilation of the lessons book format makes them more useable.