Who makes up the society? How are they connected? (e.g., whānau, citizenship, shared interests).
Prompt: How is our school a community? What connects us?
How are decisions made? Who holds power? What are the rules? (e.g., government, tikanga, school rules).
Prompt: Who makes decisions in your family? How is that different from school?
How does the society manage its resources? (e.g., money, trade, food, land, knowledge).
Prompt: What are the most important resources for our school to function?
What are the shared beliefs, traditions, and stories that give the society its identity? (e.g., language, religion, art, history).
Prompt: What is one value that is important to our school culture?
Students will engage with this resource to apply systems thinking to real-world civic and community challenges — analysing feedback loops, leverage points, and emergent properties within social, environmental, and governance systems in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Scaffold support: Provide systems mapping templates and sentence starters for entry-level access. Offer extension tasks asking students to identify a second-order effect or design an intervention at a leverage point within their chosen system.
ELL / ESOL: Pre-teach systems thinking vocabulary (feedback loop, leverage point, emergence, interdependence) using visual diagrams. Allow students to annotate systems maps in their home language first.
Inclusion: Use visual, spatial, and collaborative formats wherever possible — systems maps are inherently accessible for diverse learners. Neurodiverse learners benefit from structured inquiry steps and chunked analysis tasks. Ensure group roles are clearly defined.
Mātauranga Māori lens: Systems thinking has deep resonance with Te Ao Māori. Whakapapa is a relational map of systems — tracing connections between people, place, and time. Kaitiakitanga frames our responsibility within systems. Mauri provides a measure of system health. These indigenous concepts enrich Western systems thinking frameworks.
Prior knowledge: Students should have completed foundational systems thinking lessons (phases 1–2) before engaging with phase 3 inquiry tasks. No specialist prior knowledge required for standalone resources.