Getting Started on Ambitious Instruction
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What abstract concepts (for example, progress or justice) students should define and wrestle with
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What text or genre features students can analyze or apply to address this problem
As the steps suggest, the problem-formation process is marked by mindful trial and error, making connections, generating ideas, and continual refining. In writing, it may appear to be tedious and time consuming; in action, however, the thinking—or dialogue with other teachers, if collaborating on the problem—usually takes only a few minutes at a time. It is important, though, that there are multiple opportunities for these few-minute-long discussions. The problem is constantly reconsidered and tweaked.
Finding Sources for Problem Formation Still struggling with how to get started? Just look around you! Multiple sources are present and ready to help: from societal concerns present and past; from our instruction materials, such as existing or developing syllabi, texts, essential questions, and so on; and from our own lives and the lives of students—the problems of community, school, and individual.
The World Around You Intellectual and issue problems frequently come from the world at large—current events, societal issues, and social and cultural matters that drive and define our society. Notice the scope here: problems with this focus look beyond the immediate school or community environs and toward national and global matters, or to humanity and humanist concerns. Such problems may derive from long-standing issues (What counts as life? What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?), or they may also arise from our everyday encounters with the world. On the summer day in 2015 when I write this sentence, Go Set a Watchman (Lee, 2015), a sequel of sorts, has just been published. The book has readers puzzling over several emerging problems. Is Atticus Finch—the empathic and progressive hero of To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee,1960)—actually a racist (intellectual)? How does the book affect the legacy of Harper Lee, its author (intellectual)? The first flyby of Pluto also occurred on this day. Given what we have learned about its size, shape, and relationship to one of its moons, Charon—which students can learn about from reading articles and looking at the initial images and data—new
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You can refine this initial list as you build the text set and then solidify it as you put the module together.
