Is Solution Fluency Alive and Well in my Classroom?
For our module two discussion we are tasked with learning and
writing about the topic of evaluating the strategies needed to implement the 6
D's of Solution Fluency. We also are assessing our current teaching strategies
as it pertains to the 6 D's of solution fluency and evaluating essential
questions.
Are You Teaching Your Students to Solve Real-World Problems?
During my time as an educator, I have come to realize that no matter what we do children will perpetually bored with doing schoolwork. You may come across the select few who enjoy school and work, but the majority would much rather be home doing something else. One way I try and combat the boredom or complaints is to always make the material I teach relevant to my students. I try and relate every topic to something they love or incorporate their interests into our classroom in some shape or form. By doing so, I am teaching my students how to solve real-world problems. I can build on their background knowledge and insert them into our daily classroom work which makes for a much interesting dynamic. My hope is that they take the information that I am teaching and apply it to their lives in some way in order to showcase that they really understand and have retained what I have taught.
Do your students know
how to design and ask essential questions?
Asking essential questions is important in education. Essential questions allow for deep conversation and a better understanding of the material being taught. "The best EQs are ones that people ask, discuss, and debate about outside of school" (McTighe & Wiggins, 2013). I currently teach a group of students who receive learning support from the special education department in order to assist them with succeeding in their grade level. Most of them have a difficult time formulating questions and fully answering open ended questions. They tend to not overthink what is being asked of them and are one dimensional in their problem solving.
What approaches do you use to help students as the essential questions?
Each week I put up an
essential question in hopes of encouraging them to provide me with a detailed
response that sums up what they have learned. I do get bits and pieces out of them,
and I compile the answers together in an easier way for them to process the
information. One fun tool that I use is Kahoot!. I use Kahoot! daily in the
classroom as our lesson ender. It is a review of what we have learned that day.
At the end of the week, I do a challenge for all my 1st grader and another
challenge for all my friends to check how well they have retained the information.
I tend to use cartoons or video game characters in my graphics to keep it
interesting for them.
The 6 D's of Solution Fluency
What are they?
Crockett, Jukes, and
Churches define solution fluency as a plan that is delivered into fruition that
makes a dream a reality and leads to a solution (Crockett, Jukes, & Churches,
2011). It consists of six major components:
- Define: written definition of a
problem
- Discover: how did we get here?
- Dream: exploring possibilities
- Design: what’s the roadmap between
discover and dream?
- Deliver: produce and publish
- Debrief: how did we do?
Of the 6 D’s, which do
you consider the most important? Why?
I
feel as though discover is the easiest to implement. During the discovery
stage, students can research and explore the world around them. The discovery
stage allows for new information to be absorbed, researched, and
analyzed.
Which of the 6 D’s do
you think is the most difficult to implement? Why?
I would say debrief is
the most difficult to implement. My learning support students have difficulty
articulating and conveying their ideas in complete thought-provoking sentences.
They have not quite mastered the art of having deep conversation. In a general
education classroom debrief may work well depending what strategy is used.
What are the benefits and the challenges of solution fluency and asking essential questions?
Solution Fluency can be applied to any task of any scale. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a grocery list or redesigning the universe (Watanabe, 2019). Solution Fluency is an integral part of being an effective educator and allows students to use problem solving skills to solve real-world problems. It provides a step-by-step approach to process information in a way that is critical to the 21st-Century learner. Overall, I believe it is a useful tool to use in the classroom. It allows students to dissect information in a thoughtful way that they can understand.
Conclusion
Solution fluency is a useful tool for an classroom. It allows for critical, meaningful thinking to take place and it diverts student learning from the older way of learning where information is fed to them and students are made to memorize and mimic what is taught. Open ended questions, self assessments, and explorations are just a few of the aspects of social fluency that allows for meaningful learning to take place.
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