Problem Finding

As a teacher of gifted students, I prepared my class every day by offering them opportunities to find problems.  I did not give them a question to answer or a list of problems to solve.  I gave them a spark, an uncomfortable idea to ignite that relentless itch that wriggles under their skin and begs for attention.  It was up to them to find the problem, articulate it, attack it, and explore the wreckage of their onslaught.  That may sound a bit dramatic, but gifted learners are particularly adept at and drawn to finding problems as much as solving them.  What many educators may miss, however, is that almost all learners, gifted or not, retain far more content when they have to find a problem and truly experience it first.

Many of us grew up in the tradition of lecture, notes, test, essay, and reams of questions laid out for us to answer.  All hail the Scantron sheet!  If we were lucky, we resisted the temptation to doodle or write notes to our friends while the teacher spewed his vast catalog of facts and homework questions and we wrote down what we thought was important in order to memorize it later and vomit it all back up on our beloved scantron sheets to earn a passing grade.

Ideally, however, grades are not the motivating factor, particularly in higher education.  We would all hope that learning is the goal, though the reality of our students' mindsets and social/academic pressures may suggest otherwise.  For now, we'll leave the issue of motivation for another post.

So how do we break away from the old receptacle notion of students as empty vessels into which we pour knowledge?  This is the point in such conversations when I often launch into pointing out the Latin roots of the word "educate" and remind everyone that we are drawing our students "out" rather than filling them up.  But let's start with shifting our perspective a little.

• Invite them to find problems

Okay, who read that as invite problems?  Raise your hand... Now take my hand and don't be afraid.  Problem finding does tend to be what pedagogical theorists like to call a "higher order learning skill" but why not at least try it with all of your students. When I taught Ayn Rand's THE FOUNTAINHEAD to gifted high school juniors, I often started class by posting a quotation from one of her many controversial texts and asking them to free write for 15 minutes or so.  These brilliant nuggets of philosophy often addressed difficult ideas like morality or love or selfishness.  The students had to respond to it from wherever they were in their intellectual evolution.  Then we discussed what they came up with, which mostly involved their own questions as well as the answers they came to.  Now we were ready to tackle the text.  The true learning had already begun.

• Promote Experiencial Learning

You may be familiar with the educational models of David A. Kolb, Maria Montesorri, Jean Piaget, and Rudolf Steiner.  They all looked at learning as an experience rather than an event.  It is a process that takes its roots deep inside the student and continues to grow as long as it is fed and nurtured. Both writing and experimentation are activities that engage a student with the topic.  By writing, I don't mean jotting down notes from a lecture.  I mean truly thinking on paper, manipulating ideas, possibilities, questions, problems in new ways that make the topic more meaningful to the learner.  Those who teach hard sciences rely on lab experiments to solidify information or problems presented in lecture.  But consider using writing to launch their inquiry instead of reserving that solely for grade assessment.  Even mathematics is primed for experience and questions.  Reflecting on their initial ideas and early attempts at finding and solving problems nurtures those concepts and keeps the learning growing.    

• Model it and never underestimate the power of a question

No matter how basic a student's initial perception of the subject is or how simple his questions may seem, that is his starting point.  You have to allow him to find himself in the problem. So you may present them with a situation or a statement to consider, but you can also ask a question to get them thinking.  But it is a particular kind of question: ONE THAT HAS NO RIGHT ANSWER.  This is how learning happens.  It's not a plug-in to keep the operating system moving; it's writing the software and hard-wiring the real knowledge, the experience. 

As a QEP Writing Specialist, of course I encourage educators to use writing to facilitate learning.  Asking students to find problems and write through their experience not only teaches them about the course content, but it also teaches them how learning works.  It invests them in the process and makes it more meaningful to them by allowing them to work from the inside out. 

If we use writing only as a means of evaluation, then we are wasting its tremendous potential as a learning tool and it becomes nothing more than the hammer that pounds another nail in either the coffin or the scaffold.  Research has shown that writing is an integral part of the process of learning, yet many educators continue to use it only as a measure.  Consider it as the essential tool that helps students find problems and truly experience their learning, which sows those seeds of knowledge we really hope will grow.  And that, after all, is the whole point of education.