Having learners (K7–10) acquire system thinking skills is challenging. Together with teachers we deploy qualitative representations of complex systems to enable this learning process. Teachers select their own topics for their leaners to work on which makes that lessons vary in content depending on the teacher’s preference. Within this setting we face the challenge of adequately coaching learners while they create their knowledge models. For this, we use norm-model based feedback, ignoring learner specific information. Here we report the working and effectiveness of this approach.