THE BILLY PROJECT
The Map
By renaming variables into potential stocks, I asked myself "How is it all connected?"...
How can I map these stories into one collective narrative? Through non-linear systems thinking, I started sketching out a stock and flow diagram that captured the story telling process and its subtle intricacies.
And through trial and error, a lot of confusion and brain explosions, I created a story. Not just a story of child success or child failure. Not just a story of over-accommodation or under-accommodation. This is the story of fixes that fail, escalation, and of how the system needs to be reflected and treated, not the symptom. With a system that is failing so many young students right now, it is imperative that we invest our time into researching how the specific system functions so that we can see our stories as one, single, balanced, narrative.
What this Narrative System Tells Us...
Proactive, Not Reactive
Although a parent or teacher cannot directly increase a child's academic success, they can invest in the child's disability management. The primary goal is to decrease the draining of a child's academic success by disability distraction, and instead, focus on disability management. This is a great example of "the tip of the iceberg", versus the invisible systemic structure beneath the surface. This is why "solving" a child's academic failure isn't an easy fix. It is a symptom with complicated roots, interactions, and flows that can go many different directions other than into disability management. The child's academic failure is a symptom. The child's constant disability distraction is the systemic issue, and the most prominent leverage point for intervening and promoting academic success.
It's a Balance
Both teacher and parent accommodation are stocks that can overflow into negative feedback loops. Teachers get exhausted, and parents fall into denial, resistance, and the same exhaustion that drain their ability to accommodate their child. And we want to completely avoid letting disability distraction feed the child's isolation. But, its a balance. Teachers and parents must find a healthy equilibrium of bearing these accommodations that can feed back into disability management skills. If either is carrying too much, they will overflow into negative experience, and exhaustion loops which continue to drain a child's academic success.
Education is Necessary, but Only Goes So Far
I was most surprised by where education ended up on the map. I was initially under the impression that education was the end all, but after finding it at the end of the system, balancing in a positive direction, but still so distant from the goal of a child's academic success. Education is a reactive flow, meaning that it can bring a negative experience and resistance back into the ability to accommodate, but it doesn't fix the problem. Instead, those reinforcing feedback loops, back to disability management, are the solutions. And those loops are the CST intervention and experience.
And this is All Happening Simultaneously
The beauty of this diagram, is that it is constantly moving, changing, flowing, stopping, clogging, failing, fixing, balancing and reinforcing. Constantly. And this is the hardest realization for the parents. This is a complicated system, and it is the new reality that they are entering. There will be days where the parents try to step in and directly impact a child's academic success, but are really getting caught up in a draining feedback loop that pulls from their ability to actually accommodate and be there for their child. And at the same time, the teacher may be trying their best to work with the CST team, but is just becoming exhausted. And meanwhile, the child is getting stuck in a systemic, escalation loop between disability distractions, and isolation, and distraction, and isolation that not only drains their academic success, but also feeds the fear, sense of rejection and frustration that festers in that place of isolation.
But likewise, this map could be the story of a student who's parents have been through this time and time before. They acknowledge that they were doing things that drained their child's accommodations and escalated their disability distraction. And now, instead, they are working with a CST team to learn how to support their child through disability management and that each time it makes a little more sense. They are seeing their child increasing this academic success, and social happiness. And on the days where they are feeling especially resistant, and catch themselves at their breaking points, they know that the teacher is there to take some of the weight, and likewise.
Donella Meadows lists "Driving positive feedback loops" as number seven on her list of places to intervene in a system. This is our leverage point. Bu focusing on those positive feedback loops back into the child's disability management, we have the power to avoid draining, non-productive balancing loops, or disability distraction escalating loops. Instead, focusing on experience and CST intervention can create a productive, reinforcing feedback loops that continue to support the child's disability management.