PROBLEM SOLVING

From what I remember of my education when I was the age of the children I teach, which is to be honest pretty vague and largely shaped by concerns about my relationship, or lack thereof, with this cool girl Chelsea, I still recall a lot of time in class solving problems. My teacher was a man who I guess tried to inculcate in us a spirit of inquiry and forward thinking; of thinking hats and of new approaches. There was lots of group work solving problems presented by the teacher, there was more group work in that second form class than I have ever had for the rest of my life.  I imagine he probably got many of his ideas in the form of texts like the Van Gundy one to the left, in this incredibly ugly text, (why is that so many texts shaped for teaching professionals are so aesthetically vulgar? ) Van Gundy writes "We live in a world of turbulent change. New data. New people. New technology. New problems. We are bombarded every day with something new... Traditional problem solving approaches - the ideal of the Industrial Age - rarely work now... Above all we need new solution options, rather than relying of the "tried and true". "

If you put aside  the cliched concerns around technology, it's as if he hasn't read Gessner's 1565 treatise on the risks of books and the false dichotomy between Industrial Age problem solving approaches and the "new solution options, whatever this means is truly beyond me,  Van Gundy gives a range of different activities for teaching creativity and problem solving.It's just that they don't actually seem that different from what I was learning at school in the early 1990s. And if this is before the power of the MLE/MLP program, then I was probably learning in what should be seen as the Industrial Age mindset. 

You can, incidentally, read the Van Gundy text here. I would say a good model for the kind of problem solving that is indicated from this text is this game.

This is another great resource for building problem solving skills

Adaptive v Innovative Rules: This game can be judged either by the teacher or by a predetermined panel of student judges. The teams need to come up with two solutions for each problem — an adaptive one and an innovative one. A team receives a single point for a single response, as long as the judge or panel feels that the solution is appropriate. If the team offers a solution that the judges find particularly “amazing,” two points can be awarded for that solution. At the end of the game, the team with the most points wins.

But does this game adequately prepare students for the challenges of the modern world? Innovation and adaptation are key skills, but many of the challenges that students face that I witness are down to choices made. Some decisions that students make for their learning place make the learning task so much harder, and I feel that trying to facilitate their growth this presents a massive challenge, both for the student, their peers and their kaiako (teacher). 

Every single week TWO MILLION PowerPoints are presented. 

The mind boggles. This is more of the sort of problem that the rangatahi (future generation) are facing. How to make the most of outdated technologies? How to create an engaging presentation for an audience? That sort of outreach, where students are connecting their ideas to a much larger audience that is apparent on youtube and also almost confronting to an older generation, well it is for me as I am faced with a deep ambivalence towards the form. 

So when it comes to these problems what are the solutions? You often hear the whole "are we preparing these children for the problems of our past or the problems of their future" argument. Or the challenge of "giving students the real experience of solving challenges within and outside of the classroom".1 Or are we looking more generally at the issues of collaborating and letting everyone's voice be heard with the diverse identities in the classroom. I remember being the student in class for whom, no matter what challenges the kaiako threw at us, I will still much more concerned with whether Chelsea would want to hang out with me after class. Despite all of the "turbulent changes" that have occurred within education, I feel the constant will remain these pressing problems that need to be continue solved by kids.