Finding Sources for Problem Formation

What abstract concepts (for example, progress or justice) students should define and wrestle with

What text or genre features students can analyze or apply to address this problem

You can refine this initial list as you build the text set and then solidify it as you put the module together.

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.

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

intellectual problems emerge. Is Pluto really a dwarf planet (intellectual)? Upon examination of the initial photos that have come in, what are the key geological features of the planet (interpretive)? In consideration of NASA’s existing priorities, as well as new editorials on the subject, what should be the next priority for space exploration (issue)?

Instructional Materials As rich and rigorous content, the best of your existing or potential content and complex texts articulate some of the key issues, problems, and interests of your discipline. They help dictate the kinds of problems your students will take up. Strong texts, ones with rich and complex language, also present challenges in determining the relationship between the meaning of the text and the use of language to express that meaning—the stuff of good interpretive problems.

Self and Students You can draw problems from your own and your students’ experiences, interests and wonderings, and challenges. Such problems may come from your own questioning of the discipline coursework and engagement with the world (see the previous section) or interactions within the school or community; you may put yourself in the shoes of your students and think about the questions they are likely to have (or should have!) about course content, their community, and their own existence. Student-generated problems themselves may also serve as a source for curricular focus.

Consider our ninth-grade example from earlier in the chapter: if the ultimate concern or interest of the school is improving student engagement and learning (goal), and if the instruction is to take place at the outset of the school year (context), then the problems guiding instruction, it follows, ought to not only reflect these matters but actually take them up. That is, the school is hoping a change to instructional programming results in positive changes to student thinking and behavior—so why not make this relationship and its potential outcomes a course of study? Going meta gives us two lines of inquiry already: (1) on a causal level, there’s an opportunity to learn more about things like how schools work (or could work) and how people— adolescents, especially—think and act, and how various factors influence those concerns; (2) on an agentic and personal level, there’s also an opportunity for individual students to reflect on their own thinking and behavior, propose changes to said thinking and behavior, make plans of action, and so on. That fits in perfectly with both the goals and time of year. Teachers in all content areas are initiating students into the norms and routines of their classrooms, so this could serve as a significant