Individual "things" (plants, people, schools, watersheds) are themselves systems, and are not sustainable separate from the larger systems in which they exist. The Center for Ecoliteracy recognizes that learning to think systemically is critical to education for sustainability. One of the ways that teachers and schools teach systemic thinking is to model it themselves.

According to Fritjof Capra, systems thinking requires thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context. Thinking systemically also requires several shifts in perception, which lead in turn to different ways to teach, and different ways to organize society:

Systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. Their "systemic" properties are properties of the whole which are possessed by none of the parts. The nature and quality of what students learn is strongly affected by the culture of the whole school, not just the individual classroom. This shift in perception can also lead to moving from curricula based on single subject matters to integrated curricula.

An ecosystem is not just a collection of species, but is a community. Communities, whether ecosystems or human systems, are made up of sets, or networks, of relationships. In the systems view, the "objects" of study are networks of relationships. Organizations, including schools, that adopt this perspective are more likely to emphasize relationship-based processes such as cooperation and decision-making by consensus.

Shifting focus from the parts to the whole implies shifting from analytical thinking to contextual thinking. Since explaining things in terms of their contexts means explaining them in terms of their environments, all systems thinking is environmental thinking. This shift sometimes results in schools' focusing on project-based learning instead of prescriptive curricula. It also encourages teachers to serve as facilitators and fellow learners alongside students, rather than as experts dispensing knowledge.

Through much of the history of Western science, many of its practitioners have maintained that only things that can be measured and quantified can be expressed in scientific models. It has sometimes been implied that phenomena that can be measured and quantified are more important—and perhaps even that what cannot be measured and quantified doesn't exist at all. Relationships and context, however, cannot be put on a scale or measured with a ruler. In practice, this shift can lead to seeking more comprehensive forms of assessment besides standardized testing.

Living systems develop and evolve. Therefore, understanding them requires understanding renewal, change, and transformation. In practice, this shift can result in shifting emphasis to how a student solves a problem rather than on whether or not he or she gets the "right" answer. In communities, it can mean that the process for making decisions is often as important as the decisions themselves.

When we draw maps of relationships, we discover that certain configurations of relationships appear again and again. We call these configurations patterns. Instead of focusing on what a living system is made of, we study its patterns. This shift leads to discovering that understanding how a pattern works in one natural or social system helps us to understand other systems that manifest the same pattern.