The innovation was originally developed for corporate and government implementation. In 2010 a group of educators received permission to adapt the tools for educational use. They recognised the importance of integrating systems thinking habits and practices in schools if we hoped to truly prepare students for the future, accomplish systemic change and contribute to a more sustainable world.
The Sustainability Compass is a systems thinking tool that supports educators with the integration of holistic sustainability into their curriculum rather than a knowledge set or data-backed curriculum. The Sustainability Compass uses four Compass Points (NESW) - Nature, Society, Economy, and Wellbeing- to identify systems elements and map their interconnections to support students to visualise complexity and identify leverage points for change.
In the classroom, the practice of systems thinking fosters vital social-emotional competencies such as self-awareness, relationships with others, and connectedness to the broader world. As learners recognize their innate interdependence with their communities, they are increasingly motivated to act to sustain them. The Sustainability Compass integrates easily into existing K-12 curricula and is already being used by thousands of educators around the globe. The Sustainability Compass is a copyrighted tool, free to use in nonprofit education.
Compass Education is a movement of committed volunteer educators dedicated to building a better world through teaching skills for systems thinking and sustainability in schools. The movement has spread to 96 countries, 200+ schools and boasts 2800+ trained educators. In the last two years, Compass Education has worked to create the organisational structure and digital platform to support the rapid dissemination of systems tools in K-12 education and in multiple contexts.
Today, Compass Education is positioned to grow exponentially and in the next 2-3 years we hope to accomplish scale through partnerships and foundation funding that allows us to make available our learning resources in multiple languages and provide training in socio-economic-cultural diverse contexts.
The Compass Education website provides easy access points to begin to use the Sustainability Compass, including a free introductory course as well as hundreds of crowd sourced resources and lesson plans. Educators who would like more formal training of the full suite of systems thinking tools can contact Compass Education through their website or reach out directly to team@compasseducation.org.
