Something I never really thought twice about was asking questions and problems that come up along the way. Learning about different types of problems- well-structured problems, ill-structured problems, and wicked problems- has really opened my eyes to a new viewpoint on education. My recent exploration has been primarily focused on a wicked problem. However, as I was creating a presentation to showcase my journey of exploring and potentially coming to a solution, I came across an ill-structured problem as well. Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich and Anderson (2004) have described ill-structuredness in problems as times when, "many concepts (interacting contextually) are pertinent in the typical case of knowledge application, and that their patterns of combination are inconsistent across case applications of the same nominal type" (p. 641). When I posted my presentation on YouTube, they decided to block it due to a “copyright claim”! Seeing this I first got nervous as I have never seen anything like that before pop up on my videos, then I got anxious because my colleague was waiting to give me some feedback, and then I began feeling all kinds of mixed emotions on what my instructors would say! So I took a deep breath, took down the video and emailed my instructors for advice. In the end, I had to remove a TEDtalk along with a song. This bummed me out, however, my colleague gave some great feedback reassuring me that the video and music did not make up the presentation, she didn’t even notice it was missing. This ill-structured problem got me thinking about media use and privacy in general, a skill everyone could always use a little refresher on. So, back to my wicked problem… Since I had to remove the TEDtalk from my presentation, let’s discuss it here! Headlee talked about how to have a good conversation with another individual. She said that, “even the most trivial issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it” (Headlee, 2015). Now why is this? She goes on by talking about how people in society have stopped listening to each other and make life decisions ahead of time based on previous knowledge. One of my favorite quotes she said was that, “a conversation requires a balance between talking and listening and somewhere along the way we lost that balance” (Headlee, 2015). This is all so true! In the classroom, you never know when one of these controversial conversations is going to come up nor what it will be about. For all we know it could range from politics to a color of a crayon. These aren’t things we can plan for, you just have to live in the moment and LISTEN. If we find this balance between talking and listening during these conversations, maybe we will be more open-minded to new ideas and viewpoints. Is that one way to tackle this problem? Listening? Looking at another possible solution, while reviewing my final survey results, the biggest “ah-ha” moment I had was making the connection of the few responses saying they were comfortable having these conversations matched up with the responses saying their district has provided them support. This got me thinking as to what type of district support- newsletters, PD training, meetings? This thinking then led me to a personal creation of my own- an infographic of tips and advice on how to tackle these conversations. By creating this infographic, I hope to provide that “district support” to teachers who are lacking it. Moving forward with this all, I would love the opportunity to share my presentation, along with my personal creation, with other teachers in my building. I also plan on implementing some of these strategies in my own classroom starting on that first day of school coming up in September. Creating this infographic might be one possible solution on how to tackle this problem, but as they say, wicked problems are wicked for a reason… so keep on solving! References:
Headlee, C. (2015, May 7). How to have a Good Conversation. Lecture presented at TEDxCreativeCoast. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6n3iNh4XLI Spiro, R. J., Coulson, R. L., Feltovich, P. J. & Anderson, D. K. (2004). Cognitive flexibility theory: Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. In R.B. Ruddell, N.J. Unrau (Eds). Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th Ed., pp 640-659). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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