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Podcast to promote system dynamics and systems thinking. The "What is your SDory?" series will be interviews of system dynamics and systems thinking practitioners. There may be more series on various topics depending on interest and time. Saeed Langarudi, PhD created the podcast artwork.

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“What is your SDory, Diana Fisher?”

January 23, 2022 • Diana Fisher • Season 1 • Episode 9

Dr. Diana Fisher is a retired mathematics teacher. She taught math and computer programming for over 30 years and System Dynamics modeling for over 20 years at the high school level.

Since 2014, she has been teaching a series of online SD courses for teachers. She earned a PhD in Systems Science from Portland State University where she also taught environmental math modeling using SD. She also earned a Graduate Certificate in System Dynamics from WPI.

Transcript: https://bit.ly/SD-cast-Ep9-Transcript

Videos about the importance of teaching SD modeling in high school algebra classes: https://youtu.be/xjGuZR4zehU
https://youtu.be/sulh0klDk_g

Learn more about Diana, her 3 sequential online SD courses that are 10 weeks each and run in the summer for those who want to teach system dynamics, her presentations and her high school student’s model presentations on her website ccmodelingsystems.com
https://ccmodelingsystems.com/courses/

Links to her books:
Lessons in Mathematics: A Dynamic Approach https://www.iseesystems.com/store/books/lessons-in-mathematics/
and
Modeling Dynamic Systems: Lessons For a First Course https://www.iseesystems.com/store/books/modeling-dynamic-systems/

And information on publications:

Lifetime Achievement Award (2011): Fisher, D. M. (2011). “Everybody thinking differently”: K-12 is a leverage point. System Dynamics Review. 27, (4): 394-411.

Fisher, D. M. (2017). Reorganizing algebraic thinking: An introduction to dynamic system modeling. The Mathematics Enthusiast, 14(1). Article 20. Available at: http://scholarworks.umt.edu/tme/vol14/iss1/20.

Fisher, D. M. (2018). Reflections on teaching system dynamics modeling to secondary school students for over 20 years. Systems Journal Special Edition: Theory and Practice of System Dynamics Modelling, 6(12). Available at: http://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/6/2/12/htm.

Fisher D.M. (2020) Algebra students build stock/flow models to study non-linear, dynamic feedback system problems. In: Stillman G., Kaiser G., Lampen C. (eds) Mathematical Modelling Education and Sense-making. International Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematical Modelling. Springer, Cham.

Dr. Diana Fisher

Made learning environments richer
With CC-STADUS and CC-SUSTAIN
Through which she helped train
K-12 educators in systems modeling
To facilitate student-centered learning
And autonomy and curiosity in students.
Focus on incremental improvements
When you first start teaching
And remember to be gentle with grading
Help students define the problem scope
And their models pass the units check
To tackle problems that are complex
But most of all inspire in them hope

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Email me, ctang@wpi.edu, if you would like to be on SD-cast or recommend someone.

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And the sign up link for the WPI System Dynamics Club mailing list:
https://bit.ly/WPIsdMailForm

Introduction

Hello, SD-cast listeners. My name is Christine Tang. I am a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). In this podcast, I will interview someone in the System Dynamics or Systems Thinking community.

This is Episode 9. Titled: “What is your SDory, Diana Fisher?”

Biography

Dr. Diana Fisher is a retired mathematics teacher. She taught math and computer programming for over 30 years and System Dynamics modeling for over 20 years at the high school level.

Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Diana Fisher.

Interview

Diana: Thank you for asking me.

Christine: When and how did you discover system dynamics or systems thinking?

Diana: So there was a conference, the Northwest Conference for Computer Educators in March of 1990. And it was held in Salem, Oregon so I took the train down to Salem and attended that conference and then there was a workshop in the afternoon I was going to have trouble attending but they managed to get me to the workshop because it was off the main campus of the main conference. And I could only go to half of it but I thought oh it looked interesting. It was on using Stella to build models and so I thought okay I'll go and take a look. And I could only stay for half of it but it grabbed me right away. So that's where I first was exposed to Stella modeling. I didn't know anything about systems thinking or system dynamics at the time.

Christine: Was the first model you encountered in that workshop?

Diana: It was. It was. It was just a simple population model with a stock and a simple inflow of births and a simple outflow of deaths and a graph of the population and a table of numeric values and I thought you know this looks pretty interesting for my math classes. Maybe this would be good to use in math.

Christine: I'm going to throw in another question because you mentioned Stella and that time frame...was that with Barry Richmond?

Diana: Well...Barry Richmond...so this [workshop] was [in] 1990. Barry Richmond developed Stella in 1985 via a National Science Foundation grant. So it was Stella 2. It was one of the very, you know, very beginning but it was pretty cool then. It's gotten better obviously but it was pretty great even back then.

Christine: Was he the one running the workshop?

Diana: No. It was a high school teacher from back east. Actually, I appreciate...Barry was a very dynamic speaker but he would not have been attending this kind of conference. It was really for teachers. I think he usually had a bigger venue for specifically what he could offer...and so I went home and I bought the software. It was kind of expensive at the time but I didn't ask my husband.

Christine: [laughs]

Diana: I just bought the software and I started playing with it. I always liked technology. I've always wanted to use technology in teaching math so I bought the software....now, this was in March that I went to the conference. And I wanted to use it in my algebra class that year but it wasn't until May that I actually felt confident enough to take this model into my algebra class.

I was trying to figure out where I put the exponential equation but you know that's not what it was about. I kept trying this and that to figure out what would be a natural way to develop this modeling class. And I figured out the key was differential equations was the way the stock-flow was set up so then I realized I have to think about this differently than I typically think about problems for my algebra class. I was not going to teach my algebra kids differential equations but for my own understanding I needed that.

So...I'm going to tell you what I did in a minute in that time between the conference and presenting it. But I do want to tell you that when I did present this in my algebra class, I had a student. He was a senior and a senior in algebra is probably someone who's not very good at math. He was failing my class and this was the end of the year right...so he said, “Why didn't we do this sooner? This I understand.” And I thought, you know, there's something here that I need to pay attention to because this spoke to a student who was not doing well in my class and of course you want to try to help all your students understand the math.

So in the meantime, between going to the workshop and doing this population lesson in my algebra class a couple of months later, I was always teaching programming and so I thought I'll try this on my programming kids. They were always game. Anything new with technology they were for it. So I practiced some things with my programming kids and of course where were the materials? There were no materials for teaching this at high school level. But Nancy Roberts had written a book called Introduction to Computer Simulation: A System Dynamics Modeling Approach and it was a really nicely written book and she went from a story scenario to a

[causal loop diagram] CLD to a model. So that's what I tried to do: story scenario to a CLD and to a model. Well I'll tell you...certainly going from a story scenario to a CLD is not trivial but going from a CLD to a stock-flow model is absolutely hard. It's not easy at all and I wanted my students to build stock-flow models so I thought, you know, I'm going to try going from the story scenario straight to the stock-flow model and that worked like a charm. And I never went back. We look at CLDs afterwards when we are analyzing feedback but I go right from the story scenario to the stock-flow model and you know what? That's the way Jay Forrester did it so I figured well if he did it that way it's gotta have some real reason and it worked for me.

So the next part of the story is that I looked everywhere to try to find somebody to talk to,

some other teacher who was using System Dynamics. Where would I find lessons to use in my math classes? I had a lot of trouble trying to find anything. I decided well I was just going to have to write these lessons myself. I was not going to find them. I couldn't find them anywhere and so I was just going to have to write the lessons myself. All those lessons I used in my math class eventually became a book. A book of lessons called Lessons in Mathematics: A Dynamic Approach and it's published by isee systems. Also, all the lessons that I wrote for teaching my

System Dynamics class at the high school level also were collected into a book [called] Modeling Dynamic Systems: Lessons for a First Course also published by isee systems. Also both still being published

Anyway, as I learned...you know I didn't know. I didn't have any training in System Dynamics. I was reading whatever I could find, trying to talk to anybody but as I was using System Dynamics in my math classes, I came to realize the immense value that I thought System Dynamics had for teaching mathematics. And I'd actually like to tell you those particular value items that I think are so important and why I think it's so important to use System Dynamics in math. It's a different way to mathematize a problem. So you read a story and if the story is dynamic instead of just having to put it into a closed form equation, which is so hard for so many people, you could represent it in a stock-flow diagram which was a lot easier for many of my students.

Besides, you know symbolic manipulation and the use of those symbols was never intended for the general population. It was always intended for elite math and science people. Never for the general population so it's no wonder people have trouble with equations in general.

It also...I like the fact that I could have two representations for standard functions that I was trying to teach about in math and one of them is like a blueprint diagram for how the function works and I really like that two-dimensional way of representing functions. It spoke to a lot of students and I would have students translate from the closed form to the stock-flow or stock-flow to the closed form so I thought that helped them understand the functions better.

And then of course everything with System Dynamics is reading and interpreting graphs. Well, that's huge. That's a big deal and a lot of people don't do that well so having a problem where understanding what's going on has to be done by reading a graph, really builds on the skill of reading and interpreting graphs.

The other thing is we often graph the flows on the same grid as the stocks so you're looking at flow behavior to interpret stock behavior. Well, that's a co-variational skill and that's really really important for understanding calculus and for understanding dynamics. And even though my algebra students were not doing the calculus piece of it, building their expertise in looking at how one graph is influencing the behavior of another graph is developing very important mathematical skills there. And they were learning some basic concepts of calculus. I mean the flows are first derivatives. The stock is an integral. And so without actually doing the vocabulary or equations of calculus, they were learning calculus concepts, which some of my students said helped them so much when they got to calculus. Then because the stock-flow diagram was so much easier to understand with the boxes and the pipes than the full words or phrases on each icon, students were able to start studying much more sophisticated problems, things they couldn't study with equations. So the problems got more interesting and their interactions with the problems was more satisfying, I think, to them because they were more realistic problems. They could use the stock-flow map as a way to kind of paint a picture of what was going on in their minds and having students explain their mental models is a big deal especially in mathematics now and I think the stock-flow diagram helps students a lot to represent and explain what they have in their mind as the potential solution to a problem.

It also points out misconceptions right there on the diagram so you can help students correct some...tweak a little bit of their thinking by looking at the stock-flow diagram. Then of course in mathematics at least I don't...I can't remember any course in high school that I taught that talked about feedback. You introduced feedback, another way of controlling dynamics which I think is really important and certainly transfers to some of their science classes where they do talk about feedback. And in my opinion, the stock-flow representation opens the bandwidth of student thinking. It allows their mind to be more creative and I think that's huge to really give students an opportunity to think about problems without the constriction of closed form equations. You know closed form equations don't talk to normal people. They just are so abstract. It's really really hard. Students feel like they're treading water. They're barely above water when using equa...most students, when they're using equations but with the stock-flow more students could become involved in the conversation which I really really liked. And then of course you can talk about the whole idea of non-linear behavior and it doesn't make sense if you're running a model for 200 years that the death fraction...we usually call that the death rate...is going to be the same decimal value for the whole 200 years. I mean it just isn't common sense. So...we can talk about that and the transfer of loop dominance. I mean it just brings such richness to mathematics. I think we have to update current high school algebra, precalculus and calculus curriculum to include the study of dynamic feedback systems. It's a serious disservice to our students. We are not preparing them for the world they will enter with what we're doing currently in our math classes at the high school level. We spend so much time having them manipulate equations but computers can do all of that now.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have them learn how to manipulate some equations. We just shouldn't spend all the time that we're spending on that particular skill. We ought to teach them some simple manipulations and then have them use the computer to do the really ugly manipulations and then teach them other things like translating from the real world to mathematize it so they can use mathematics to analyze what they have done in the mathematization of the problem they were trying to study.

Christine: Can you talk a little more about closed form equations for people who are not aware?

Diana: Well, if we study a problem that behaves over time in a straight line you're gonna say I'm gonna create a linear equation y = mx + b where m is the slope and b is the y-intercept. That's a closed form equation. If you're studying exponentials, often one of the problems you study is population change. And so that would be y = a (which is the beginning population) times base e. e to the power of the net change times time. And that's if it's continuous change which is often correct for populations. And so those are the...I mean we study linear, exponential, quadratic, logarithmic, sinusoidal, sine, cosine, tangent. We study all of those in closed form in a second year algebra class and it's hard. Second year algebra is a hard class for a lot of students. And it's just too bad and there's so much you can add to that class. That was always my favorite class to teach. One of the reasons was that all students were supposed to take it and so I had a chance to influence quite a few students who may not have taken that level of math years before because it was a required course then.

Christine: In high school when studying calculus, we study derivatives first. Do you think that is incorrect?

Diana: Oh, I don't know um...Jay would probably uh say yes it's incorrect because he said derivatives don't exist. Really only integrals exist if you want to measure something.

I think I probably always did derivatives first because that's the way the book did it and that's fine. Actually, I always started my class with motion detector because that was a relationship between position and velocity. I wanted them to get the relationship between the rate of change and the accumulation. That's what I wanted as the foundation of their thinking when they started and then as we went through the course, I would say well you remember this is just like the velocity we had in the motion detector or this is just like the position we had in the motion detector but I don't know that I have a real feeling about differentials or integrals first in teaching.

Christine: Okay and the last [question/comment] is you want to change mathematics education but I think a lot of it is teaching to the test and that test is the AP Calculus exam.

Diana: Well, so few of our students even take calculus. The last 20 years that I taught, I was in Portland Public Schools and I started in a middle to lower socioeconomic population school. The students were not really [from] high socioeconomic backgrounds and...I think it's those students, I care more about. In calculus, when you have an AP exam, yes that's going to drive what you do and until you get people to change the way the AP exam is structured you're going to have so much pushback but that's...I don't really care about calculus to tell you the truth. I care about the general population of students. I care about the students taking algebra because that's most of the students who are going to get through high school. And you can do so much more in that class that is so much more connecting math to the real world than what we're doing now. They are bringing in statistics which I think is a good idea but so much of what we've been doing in algebra and even in pre-calculus is, I think, not worthy of keeping because there are other things that are much more important to include.

But I have found the math community very resistant to change. Science, on the other hand, I found some open doors. But in mathematics not so much...and it really worries me because math is the foundation that we provide students for quantifying the world and we have so much better...so many better tools now (System Dynamics obviously being one of my favorite) but part of the resistance here is teachers. They were trained. They've gone through their whole education and were trained in the traditional method. It's hard to put that aside and say maybe there's a better way.

Well and there are other things when you talk about one of your questions later is going to be what do you recommend for teachers. There are a lot of things teachers can do but it amounts to a reteaching themselves while they're teaching their classes because I don't know of any teacher training programs for math teachers that have them learn System Dynamics and that's a huge barrier.

Christine: Thank you. Would you please tell us about your National Science Foundation grants and tips for grant writers?

Diana: [laughs] I don't have tips for grant writers unfortunately because I think I was fortunate to somehow connect serendipitously with someone at NSF who understood System Dynamics

when I got these grants. And if you don't have someone at the NSF who understands what you're trying to do, it's really hard to make it through so I was fortunate. I'm not sure that I'm one to give any kind of suggestions to people writing grants now but except that if you have a good idea for including System Dynamics in education, write a grant. Eventually they're gonna get it.

I can tell you about these grants. Actually, I can tell you what was involved in these grants but mostly I would like to tell you about the mistakes I think I made in the design of my grants that I would change now that I didn't change then. You have to understand [that] I got my first grant in 1993. So I'd been using System Dynamics three years, teaching myself without formal training.

I did not know a lot. I just knew I was trying hard to learn as much as I could but there were some other teachers and I. And it was very unusual for a high school teacher to get an NSF grant. It's actually the very first NSF grant that Portland Public Schools ever got and they had 10 high schools in Portland Public Schools.

So what we did...my first grant went from 1993 to 1997. We had a three week summer training on site which meant that people who wanted to participate had to come and if they were from very far out of town, they had to stay in dorms at...that we worked collaboratively with some universities that had dorms. I was interested in cross discipline, math science and social studies because I really think we need those teachers talking to each other because social studies is where a lot of the very important problems are. Science teachers have a foot in systems problems and another foot in mathematics so they're kind of like the perfect people to experiment with modeling because they're not really afraid of it so much. But the social studies teachers, they didn't want really to have anything to do with numbers and that kind of equations and stuff.

So anyway, it was three weeks. The first week, we separated the groups into the math group, the science group, the social studies group. And we had a math person, a science person, a social studies person teaching the groups so they knew what the classroom was about. They taught the basics of System Dynamics within the discipline where they were talking the same language and using a lot of the same models that the teachers would recognize the problems [to].

The second week we had some guest speakers. Ed Gallaher came in and did a day on pharmacokinetics. I think that was probably the highlight. Every year he got so many questions and they wanted to know everything about pharmacokinetics. He was very popular and then we had Jeff Potash and John Heinbokel will come in and talk about historical epidemics so that was another really popular guest speaking and then we had some others but they were the most popular and they came back every year.

And in the third week, we had the people develop cross-discipline teams of three or so: a math, a science, a social studies person come up with a problem they wanted to create a model for and a lesson they wanted to use in their class. So they developed that.

In a way, we were pretty pleased. We didn't know any better. You know we were high school teachers. We'd never had a big grant before. We'd had some grants before but not a big NSF grant.

Then I got a second grant, a subsequent grant from 1997 to 2001 essentially to continue the work. But these were the mistakes that I think we made then that I would not have made now. One was not building in an assessment piece to test improvement in student thinking, not just the teachers but the students of these teachers as they brought System Dynamics into their curriculum. What was different in the student thinking? We should have studied that because that would have been a powerful indication of the value of System Dynamics.

And then I was still teaching full-time when I was doing these grants except the second grant I wasn’t. I was teaching half time...so there were a lot of things that I just didn't have time to do and the people who were our formal evaluators didn't think much about doing. We didn't keep track of the teachers for a very long period of time, only the year after the training. That was a mistake. We should have kept track of them for a number of years and then we lost contact information with the teachers. So we couldn't even go back after a while. You know...teachers changed jobs and we couldn't go back and get some of that longitudinal information that we really really needed. I think that was a mistake. We could have really done more but we did the best we could under the circumstances.

I just think if you have a good idea you ought to try it. If you have access to a grant writer, you ought to use that grant writer. Luckily, Portland Public Schools provided us [with a] grant writer which helped a huge amount. She was really quite good.

I think that's about all I can talk about. I do think the assessment piece is a big deal. So I've tried to write some some NSF grants currently and I have not been successful and my focus was on assessing student understanding and we had a great assessment person who was going to work with us but somehow or other we couldn't explain the ideas well enough.

We know...and this is a problem...the group that has essentially been working in collaboration since 1990, since we kind of started this you know we got to know each other, whoever was working there eventually got to know some of each other and some of the people that we actually trained in our NSF grant...we know how to introduce systems thinking and system dynamics from Pre-K to 12. We know how to do that and we can't find anyone who will give us the opportunity to develop some of the lessons, particularly around global climate change that we think ought to be created now. And some of those lessons ought to have student agency. What students can do. I think it's really important to give them hope. I'm going to talk about that later. But the lessons need to be more than just here's the problem. It's how can we give students hope, otherwise we're just going to depress them and that's not emotionally fair to our students. We have to take responsibility forteaching them potential solutions so they feel like they have some hope for their future. Anyway, so that's my thing about the NSF grants. Do you have any questions? Sorry, I couldn't be more helpful about that.

Christine: It's okay. Just a comment.

Diana: Yes.

Christine: I just want to say the titles of your grants in case people are curious about it. Cross-Curricular Systems Thinking and Dynamics Using STELLA.

Diana: Right.

Christine: CC-STADUS? Is that how you pronounce it?

Diana: CC status. Yes. We wanted something that had a good acronym because that's so much to say. And we kind of built it in Cross-Curricular Systems: Training and In-service (CC-SUSTAIN) had a great acronym.

Christine: [laughs]

Diana: That's why my website is called CC Modeling Systems. It's kind of a play off of these two grants.

Christine: That's cute.

Diana: [laughs]

Christine: Currently, you're retired but you said you're writing grants.

Diana: Well, I tried.

Christine: What else are you working on?

Diana: I tried writing some grants. I'm not going to do that anymore because I don't have the money for a grant writer so I'm not going in that direction anymore.

I have about six things here that I'm currently working on. First of all...so I'm writing research papers so I'm building relatively small global climate change models dealing with like population and potable water, global temperature...some things that's like three stocks. A population food supply where you use some kind of a...you use something in place…you know a proxy for food supply.

I'm trying to build some small ones because I'm planning to do some presentations and some research papers on those particular models. I'm always trying to get some more science teachers interested so I tend to present at science conferences. Of course not this last year but I often have presented at regional and national science conferences in the US.

So I am specifically trying to gear some of my research articles to the math community. I've tried The High School Journal but they have no idea what I'm talking about. So I decided well where can I break down some barriers...so I am going to conferences and writing research articles and getting published in the community of math educators called the International Community of Teachers of Math Modeling and Application. I figured at least they're interested in modeling so that ought to give me a little bit of an inroad and um i am making a little bit of an inroad there. So I write some articles that they publish in their proceedings. Springer publishes their proceedings.

The next is trying to fill in some gaps for teachers. I started by writing lessons because there were no lessons, right? Well now I'm trying to collect Systems Thinking assessment questions because that's a big gap. People need good questions if they're going to try to assess what their students are learning with systems thinking. And then I continue to fine-tune my online System Dynamics courses for teachers. It's supposed to be a gentle introduction.

So you know that I got my graduate certificate at WPI and I'm very thankful for having had that opportunity and especially to have been able to do it remotely. That was huge but those courses were intense. I am not sure that I could have gotten through the first System Dynamics course without having had background that I already had in System Dynamics. It's not easy and so I wanted to provide something for teachers that was more gradual.

Essentially, I broke a first course in System Dynamics into three courses where the first course is just translating some of what they already use in class to stock-flow method and introducing feedback and making sure they're conscious of units. The second one is the whole idea of dimensionless multiplier because that is a really important concept and if they're going to build anything larger than one stock models, they're going to have to use dimensionless multipliers probably. So the second one really brings in a lot of System Dynamics concepts, and the third one is how do you build a model from scratch. So I use a lot of the lessons from my books chopped up (you know) here and there in the course. So they don't actually build up a significant original model until the third course. And by then, they've had a lot of examples and they've played around with a lot of Systems Thinking ideas and I think that they're pretty ready to do that.

Plus most of what I took at WPI...they were business or economics examples and really neither of those are interesting to me. Science, yes. But I wanted to have more topics that were problems that I could use in my classroom and most of the time those were not topics that I wouldn't use in my classroom.

So those are the things I continue to work on.

Christine: I also would like to make a comment...so WPI is aware of how unaffordable the current courses are and how dense they are. So in order to meet the demand for System Dynamics courses, Raafat Zaini cut up the Foundations Course, the first course, into three micro-courses that are self-paced so that's much more manageable for people.

Thank you for telling us about what you're currently working on.

What wiSDom do you have for students, for those new to System Dynamics?

Diana: Well, I have a few things to say. One is to start small. Give yourself time to learn the basics. Work on models that you care about. Build models. Find models to study in topics that you care about. Find models other people have done in topics that you care about. Never model alone. I think that was Barry Richmond's saying. I could be wrong but that didn't happen for me. I had to do pretty much everything alone but if you can find someone to work with that's great. Study the models the experts have done, especially if they're small models because you're studying good form and you can pattern after good examples and then take an SD course. There are lots of SD courses out there so that was not the case when I was starting and luckily it is the case now that you can probably find an online SD course to take.

Christine: Thank you...and [you] already mentioned wiSDoms for System Dynamics teachers.

Diana: Well...I have actually more than that. [laughs]

Christine: Yes, I'm also very curious...do you have any tips for teaching teenagers? I think parents would be very interested in this too. [laughs]

Diana: [laughs] I think that's a...every teenager seems to me to be different but I really like teenagers. They're interesting people and they're willing to learn new things. They just don't want to be bored. Now, you have to understand that I did not work with the most difficult kids to teach. I worked with kids either...mostly just average teenage kids [and] some really high functioning kids. But in algebra, you get all kinds of kids um and so I was really lucky and what I tried to do was find topics that were interesting. Interesting to me or that I thought might be interesting to them. And I would get excited and that would tend to spill over. If I got excited, they were kind of excited. But what I would say to teachers is, again, start small. Give yourself time to learn the basics. Find out where in your curriculum using SD models would help students understand concepts better because then you're not adding something new to the curriculum, you're taking out something that you feel has not been that effective and putting something in its place that could be more effective. I think it's really important to have students build models even if they only build small models at the beginning. It gives them a sense of how to read a stock-flow diagram and a sense that oh you know, I could probably build...

Building is a core learning strategy for children, so we ought to capitalize on the fact that kids just generally like to build things. The other thing I would say to teachers, and this is really important, [is to] use Systems Thinking or System Dynamics throughout your whole course. Don't put it in a one week or two week unit, otherwise students will think oh well that's just a special thing we did for that particular topic. You want them to understand that this is a new way of thinking about the world and the only way they're going to do that is to see you using it throughout their world while they're in your class. Another thing I'd say is be gentle with grading student System Dynamics work, especially at the beginning. As you're building your own skill you don't want students to be worried too much about their grades. You want students to start to love what they're seeing in class and expand their thinking. As you as a teacher get better at System Dynamics, you can make your grading a little bit more strict because then you've developed skills for helping to debug student problems. And if you can get students out of their troubling areas when they want to model something and it doesn't quite work then the students won't get frustrated. It's a balance between trying to keep the excitement that students will have but knowing they're going to be held accountable somewhat for what you expect them to do. There's a fine line of balance there...but as you're learning, you just don't know everything so you can be a little bit more gentle. And they, the students, will be happier if they're not panicked about their grade and then you don't know how to help them. Learn to be okay not knowing all the answers to questions students will ask. Now, in science, teachers already know that they can't answer all the questions students will ask because the science topics are too broad but in math we are used to knowing the answers. And we're used to expecting students to follow the procedures that we taught them to get the answers. We are scared to death that they're going to ask us something we don't know how to do because it's not part of our training and that's a mistake. It is also something that once you get over [it] is very transformative for a teacher to say “Well, you know, I don't know about this but we could try this or we could try that or I could do some more research.” Then students see that you're trying to help them learn, and I think it has [a] powerful influence on students.

I think it's important to give students hope. Too many of the topics that we tend to use System Dynamics on are topics like global climate change or all kinds of problems and it gets scary for kids. And I think we must give them some hope. We're teaching them the tool to understand the system better so they can do something about it. We want to give them a chance to figure out what they could do about it and to talk about social justice issues because when you're talking about hunger it's not going to hit every place in the world the same. If you're talking about loss of potable water it's not going to hit every place in the globe the same. There are real justice issues here that need to be addressed. And the other thing is if a teacher can do it (I haven't been totally successful at that) teach your own kids System Dynamics. Although both of my kids are pretty much systems thinkers, I haven't been able to have them do modeling that much but I am not giving up. [laughs]

So that's my advice.

Christine: Thank you. The final question is do you have any fun or funny SD stories that you're willing to share?

Diana: I have two stories...so I am...actually my culture is Italian and Spanish so I tend to talk a lot with my hands. I gesticulate a lot. And when I was first learning about System Dynamics and starting to become really excited about the possibilities for using it in class, I went to there was this Nerd conference that Portland Public Schools held for math and science people once a year. It was a science teacher who had won a...I think money he got from a presidential award. And so we would go out to this really nice camp area and we would do presentations of what we were using in class. And so I was supposed to do a presentation to the whole group on STELLA and System Dynamics and I was getting so excited and I was using my hands and all this sort of stuff. So the people who knew me were in the back of the group and they were just using...I didn't even realize that at the time...they were just putting their hands up and doing...it was just hilarious. I didn't even know they were doing it because I was so focused on the audience but the people back there who were with them were just laughing their heads off, so anyway, I was the butt of that joke a little bit but I didn't care because I just…it was okay with me I was just trying to get a point across.

The other thing that I thought was really pretty cool...so it was about 1991 maybe 1992, I was trying to get invited to some workshops on System Dynamics for teachers and there was this one called the STACI^N project and I begged to get invited to a one-week training in the summer that they were having at Stanford. So I wasn't very far into using System Dynamics but enough to know that I needed a lot more training. The project leaders were researchers and they didn't want me to come to the training because they thought that it would mess up their data gathering of the teachers who were involved in the training. Well, I begged and begged and they finally relented and said I could go if I didn't ask any questions so I thought okay. I'll do it. Anything you say. I will do that but I happen to meet one of the people who was going to be part of that training. One of the teacher participants happened to present at a conference in Portland the previous fall before that summer workshop. And I went to his session and I talked to him and I said, “You know, I'm gonna go to that session but I can't ask any questions.” His name was Paul Dye and I'll just never forget that he said, “Don't worry. You sit next to me. If you have any questions, you ask me and I will ask the question of the group.” And I thought never underestimate the power of teachers to do what is right, rather than what is expected. So I thought that was pretty darn cool and it may not be funny but it is kind of funny in the sense that teachers kind of stood together because we were each trying to be helpful to each other and I thought that was pretty cool. So that's my last story.

Christine: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview.

Diana: Oh, thank you so much for asking me. I always like talking about this and you've had some pretty cool people already who have done podcasts, so it's quite an honor.

Ending

I am grateful for Diana and the 2021 International System Dynamics Conference organizers for this episode. Some background information: I met Diana virtually in one of the parallel sessions and asked to meet in a breakout room so we could talk one-on-one…which led to this interview. Hope to see you at the next conference!

Speaking of conferences…see the links below for Diana’s plenary presentations for Latin American System Dynamics Conferences on the use of SD in mathematics.

One is a video about the importance of teaching SD modeling in high school algebra classes: https://youtu.be/xjGuZR4zehU
https://youtu.be/sulh0klDk_g

Below are links to her books:

Lessons in Mathematics: A Dynamic Approach https://www.iseesystems.com/store/books/lessons-in-mathematics/
and
Modeling Dynamic Systems: Lessons For a First Course https://www.iseesystems.com/store/books/modeling-dynamic-systems/

And information on publications:

Lifetime Achievement Award (2011): Fisher, D. M. (2011). “Everybody thinking differently”: K-12 is a leverage point. System Dynamics Review. 27, (4): 394-411.

Fisher D.M. (2021) Global understanding of complex systems problems can start in pre-college education. In: Leung, F., Stillman G., Kaiser G., Wong, K. L. (eds) Mathematical Modelling Education in East and West. International Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematical Modelling. Springer.

Galbraith, P., & Fisher, D.M. (2021) Technology and mathematical modeling: addressing challenges, opening doors. In: S. Carreira, & W. Blum. (Eds.) Mathematical Modelling in the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics: Part 1. Quadrante. 30, (1): 198-218.

Now, here is a poem I wrote about Dr. Diana Fisher:

Dr. Diana Fisher

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Music:

Intro and End

“Limelight” by Podington Bear is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License. I cut and moved the music track to fit the intro and ending.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Haplessly_Happy/Limelight
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/