Teaching Kids to be Problem Solvers

Mark Lang, Steve Rivera, and Nikki Smith

Today we hear a lot about 21st century skills, but what does that really mean? When our education system was designed, business was pretty predictable. For example, we looked to a limited number of known providers in a given market for most of our purchases. The goal of education was to have students understand the key knowledge and practices that someone else had already worked out.

But today, one decade into the 21st century, information is a commodity available on any smartphone or computer. Competitors all over the world regularly create new options for consumers and companies, making business increasingly complex and highly unpredictable. Students must be prepared to deal with constantly changing situations. To be leaders, young people must also be innovators, and they must learn to drive those new products and markets that surprise everyone.

The most common learning approach associated with 21st century skills is project-based learning. In this approach, students work on their own or in teams to research an issue, compare alternatives, and formulate effective answers. To develop true leaders, we wanted to see if our high school students could take the next step: not just researching and judging good answers but discovering and developing innovative solutions. This led to a partnership based at Lincoln Leadership Academy Charter School.

Students Learn to Solve Problems

Lincoln, a public charter school in Allentown, Pa., that formed in 2009, currently serves about 360 students in grades 6–11, and more than 85 percent of these students are Hispanic students whose families live below the poverty line. This demographic drops out of the regular public high schools in Allentown at a rate exceeding 60 percent. From day one, Lincoln has challenged these traditionally underserved urban students to excel in a safe, high-integrity environment that addresses the whole child.

For help incorporating the advanced 21st century leadership and innovation skills that existing curricula and professional development services did not support well, Lincoln partnered with Charter Partners Institute (CPI) in summer 2011. CPI is a small nonprofit organization formed by entrepreneurs with the goal of helping students learn to think, collaborate, and innovate just like the most creative entrepreneurs. Through programs such as summer camps, CPI has developed effective approaches that help high school students learn to initiate and innovate, but the organization wanted the opportunity to test and adapt its experience to the core curriculum of a school environment.

For the first year of our collaborative pilot, all the juniors at Lincoln (51 students) spent two days a week in one class, Junior Seminar, on a project-based leadership effort. We had the students pick the issue they would address (any serious issue in the school or community) and who they wanted on their team.

Examples of current projects included developing programs to teach social and life skills to orphans in the extremely violent country of Guatemala, educating immigrants about their rights and responsibilities in our country, creating new history curricula that turn boring facts into exciting stories told through comic book–style graphics, and creating the first dedicated park on the eastern U.S. coast for Parkour (sport) enthusiasts so that they don't get in trouble doing it in people's back yards and businesses.

Looking at Lessons Learned

Here are a few lessons we have already learned:

1. Help students identify problems from their own experience that are meaningful to them. This often takes much time and effort because so many students don't understand their likes, abilities, and interests.
2. Create a safe environment to try and fail. Give students enough time and chances to pursue a given idea and team, then shift or abandon those choices—sometimes several times—for another. A few students will latch onto something quickly and jump in, but most need several chances because the experience is so new.
3. Provide regular reinforcement. Teachers encourage students and provide feedback. We also invite a variety of successful business and community leaders to sit with individual student teams during class or sometimes at the business location. The business leaders ask students good questions and help the teams identify useful resources. This kind of interaction proves to be a tremendous confidence-building and learning experience for students.
4. Provide tools to frame, without specifying direction, the work that is needed. Most students have never tackled a complex problem that will take months of planning and effort to solve. We provide guidelines and rubrics related to the project and skills, and we are creating tools as we go. We have recently incorporated a tool called the Business Model Canvas (actually used in graduate entrepreneurship classes at Stanford University) that calls attention to all aspects of the project and helps track progress.
5. Constantly nudge students to be innovative, because the challenges and ambiguity will keep driving them to accept a proven answer.
6. Make sure you have a supportive team of instructors who meet periodically to evaluate how best to maintain progress, particularly when students face challenges or setbacks.

This approach is very challenging for students and teachers. Students, who are used to finding the "correct" answer in school, can get scared and frustrated when they must embark on an ambiguous path with an unknown outcome. Nevertheless, once students get over the fear and start to act, a new level of engagement and thinking emerges. Teachers are also stretched to embrace a classroom environment that is driven by student creativity in group work, as opposed to direct instruction. They must let students take charge and even learn from mistakes, and teachers are constantly responding to issues they did not anticipate.

In our experience, this process of innovation seems to tap reaches of the brain that have been suppressed by years of learning the right answers. Many students need extra guidance along the way because they don't have the maturity to focus on such a complex endeavor, but that maturity grows once students begin to see that they are doing something they never thought they could. Students demonstrate new patterns of initiative and thinking they learned without recognizing it.

Building 21st Century Skills

The project is still evolving. What we are observing gives us a new perspective on what to expect from our students. It is promising to see these regular high school students begin to take charge of solving complex issues, manage team interactions, discover new insights, develop creative new solutions, and demonstrate leadership abilities they did not know they had. These are exactly the skills that have become so crucial for success in the 21st century.

In addition, we sense that these lessons are showing new ways to deal with our toughest issues of low engagement and high dropout rates. You can learn more about the pilot at www.charterpartnersinstitute.org, and we hope other educators will join us in evaluating this new paradigm of schooling, which seems to provide great promise to prepare students who can truly make a difference even in today's complex, hypercompetitive, global economy.

Mark Lang is the executive director of Charter Partners Institute, a small, independent nonprofit organization in Bethlehem and Easton, Pennsylvania. Stephen Rivera is the college/career coordinator at Lincoln Leadership Academy Charter school, which is located in Allentown, Pa. Nikki Smith is a high school teacher at Lincoln Leadership Academy Charter School.

ASCD Express, Vol. 7, No. 20. Copyright 2012 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.