Chapter 1. Wicked Solutions for Wicked Problems

Simply put, teaching isn't for the weak. In fact, I suggest that highly effective teaching is one of our society's most wicked problems. Truly wicked problems (sometimes referred to as "sticky problems" or "Gordian knots") don't have easy solutions, and no manual exists to definitively resolve them. There is no pill you can take to surmount learning differences, achievement gaps, differing life experiences, and so forth. Just as with other wicked problems like poverty, homelessness, inadequate health care, climate change, and violence, educators seeking to foster highly effective learning for all students are in search of wicked solutions.

So much of what educators do is evaluated and measured despite having little effect on achievement. Requiring that lesson objectives or curriculum standards be posted on the front board, for example—I have yet to see any data showing that this practice increases student learning. No student really cares what the standard is; explicitly stating it does not help to engage students and takes up precious board space. The standard's purpose is to help the teacher and instructional leaders guide and frame the lesson and curriculum. A good alternative would be to post each lesson standard on a clipboard and hang it by the door for any visitors to see (or better yet, on Google Classroom) and use the now-vacant board space for a well-conceived essential question that frames how students will be engaged. When answered, this question will sufficiently address the standard and objective(s).

Our attempts to solve the wicked problem of highly effective teaching and learning have been thwarted in recent years, partly because we have fallen prey to confirmation bias—the tendency to selectively search for and consider information that confirms our beliefs. This bias abounds in all areas of society, and the internet has only made it more prevalent. Search engines and social media use algorithms to tailor content to individual users' interests. This is extremely helpful to advertisers, of course, but it also creates a more polarized society where we are exposed only to data that align with our beliefs, resulting in a very unbalanced perspective. Unless we consciously challenge our beliefs and assumptions and seek differing opinions and ideas, this tendency will continue. To begin moving beyond confirmation bias in education, we need to seek out opposing viewpoints that challenge our thinking and actions. Challenge is the key lever to help us and our students engage, learn, and thrive.

The following sections contextualize just what today's teachers are up against in their effort to provide challenge—and offer some insights and guidance for tackling the wicked problem of excelling with all students.

Setting Objectives: Making Today Better Than Yesterday

Although it may seem simplistic, working to make every day better than the day before would transform our education system. If every teacher were consistently and significantly better at the job with each passing day, our classes would quickly become extraordinary places. To consistently and systematically improve requires developing strong habits and intentional behaviors. This does not necessarily mean working longer or harder, but it does entail consistently reflecting upon and improving instructional habits.

To intentionally make today better than yesterday, begin by targeting a specific habit or strategy you seek to change. Write it down so you remember to act upon it. Identify the steps necessary to make this habit or strategy integral to your work or to students' experiences. Remember that if the goal involves your students, you need to work consistently with them to make it a part of their learning. As the habit becomes routine, it will become automated in the teaching and learning process and you can begin tackling the next most important obstacle to raising the levels of challenge, rigor, and excellence in your classroom. The difficulty often arises when we tackle too many changes or goals at once: students, teachers, and leaders can rightfully become confused about what is truly important. Valuing everything as critically important ensures you will master nothing while becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress.

The goals that you target should be personal to your setting, students, and needs. One example would be to set a goal of incorporating formative assessment every 10−15 minutes (or after every three or four slides during a PowerPoint presentation) to assess whether and where students are struggling. Formative assessment has repeatedly been shown to have one of the largest effect sizes of any instructional intervention for improving academic success (Hattie, 2009).

Improving your questioning techniques is another worthy goal. It is easy to fall into a pattern of asking mostly factual recall questions, which tend to squelch excitement and curiosity. While factual questions are necessary at times, an overreliance on them misses the vast array of questions that could engage your students and enliven your classroom. Great questions stimulate deeper thinking by piquing student curiosity, imagination, and wonder. Having a powerful set of verbs handy to guide your questioning to higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy or Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DoK) is a good starting point (Anderson et al., 2001; Hess, Carlock, Jones, & Walkup, 2009). We all are adept at asking basic knowledge or recall questions ("Who was the villain in the story?" "What is three times four?" "Where did the scene take place?"), but we need intentional practice in raising the cognitive rigor of our classrooms by using a more open-ended approach ("How could you improve … ?" "What if … ?" "How does … make you feel?" "How might you … ?" "What happens when … ?").

A first step in asking more powerful and engaging questions might be to write on an index card each day the three or four most engaging questions you want to explore with your students. These could be essential questions ("What makes a hero?"), argumentative questions ("Is there better a way to do this?" "Isn't it possible that … ?"), personal/affective questions ("How did this make you feel?" "When have you felt similar?"), or analytical questions ("How can we understand the underlying causes?" "What occurred?"). The point is to design questions for increased challenge, not just to meet standards or curriculum objectives.

To make your improvements last, you must be consistent in your efforts and hold yourself accountable. Perhaps you can find a partner who also wants to change a habit and work together to hold each other accountable. Once new habits have become ingrained, work on making small refinements to them while beginning to identify and then tackling a new obstacle. If you seek to make today better than yesterday, then you should always be able to identify and reflect upon the habit that you are currently working to improve.

Challenge and Stress

A survey of incoming freshmen at UCLA showed a dramatic increase in students responding that they felt overwhelmed by all they had to do during the previous year (Eagan, 2016), with 18 percent responding yes in 1985, 29 percent in 2010, and 41 percent in 2016. Our adrenaline and cortisol levels spike when we're significantly stressed and only return to normal levels when the stress subsides (Talbott, 2007). When our stress-response system is chronically activated, we are at greater risk for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, suppressed immune system, memory and concentration impairment, and weight gain.

Anxiety is the most common mental health disorder, affecting approximately one-third of all adolescents in the United States (Merikangas et al., 2010). When our anxiety is out of control, we tend to overestimate the danger of stressors and underestimate our ability to cope. Although it is felt across all socioeconomic categories, anxiety tends to affect various groups differently. Anxiety in students from more affluent households, for example, frequently manifests itself in the form of perfectionism, a fear of failure, and a sense that their efforts are never sufficient (Luthar & Latendresse, 2005).

Some may say that the rise in stress and anxiety among students means we need to lower expectations rather than increase them. I believe the opposite: that we have overprotected our students from unknowns and uncomfortable situations, resulting in bubble-wrapped kids. We tend to set up perfect, idealized learning situations that are unrealistic, so when students are confronted with the messy real world, they are easily overwhelmed. A "helicopter parent" society has resulted in students not knowing how to work through dilemmas, unknowns, or awkward situations. Well-intentioned overseers swoop down to save students when anything remotely troubling surfaces. Schools only make matters worse by leaning increasingly toward avoidance-based strategies rather than exposure-based ones. When Ethan and Silva don't work well with others, we allow them to work alone instead of helping them build the capacity to function better in collaborative settings.

To flip this paradigm, we need to sometimes place students in uncomfortable situations. In this way, students can learn to confront fears, anxieties, and challenges of increasing complexity without shutting down or feeling the need to run. If we truly want to encourage resiliency and perseverance, then we must create scaffolded learning opportunities in this area. It is far easier to talk about the need for students to be resilient than it is to model it and hold students accountable for it.

Distractions

There is little doubt that we are becoming more distracted as a society. On the road, drivers demonstrate this by weaving back and forth wildly while attending to the continuous pings of e-mail and social media apps. (I felt the painful reality of that personally one day several years ago, when a distracted motorist struck me while I was riding my bike.) Although inattentiveness seems pervasive in the classroom, the research is mixed. A recent Time story (McSpadden, 2015) stated that our attention spans waned from 12 seconds on average in 2000 to 8 seconds on average in 2015. If true, this places us just behind goldfish, which are reported to have an attention span of 9 seconds. It appears that classroom lectures of 30 minutes or an hour are a complete waste of time.

Or are they? Further investigation (Bradbury, 2016) reveals that these data come from a 2015 Microsoft report stating that the average person spends about 8 seconds on a website. It would be an inaccurate leap to extrapolate too broadly from such a finding. There are myriad reasons why people click off pages—because the sites are unhelpful, for example, or because the information sought is quickly found. Perhaps the real story is that people have improved by about 30 percent in their ability to filter and find targeted information. It could also be true that we are using the internet more often to quickly access simple facts (e.g., sports scores, word meanings, calendars) than was the case in 2000.

More germane to the conversation is research from Middendorf and Kalish (1996) finding that attention and resulting performance drop dramatically when lectures exceed 15 minutes, with a significant increase in students checking out for a minute or more after that time (Bunce, Flens, & Neiles, 2010). Even so, far more consequential to student attention are the teacher's skills and abilities (Bligh, 1998; Bradbury, 2016). Just think back to examples in your own life; in some classes, you would probably willingly engage for hours, whereas other times you tuned out immediately.

We know our students are increasingly anxious and increasingly distracted. So how can we take positive steps forward while consistently challenging them?

The Need to Know

Challenging students means pushing them beyond their comfort zone in developmentally appropriate ways. To do this successfully, we must remain cognizant of student cognitive load. Without going into a full course on cognitive psychology, cognitive load is essentially the maximum amount of short-term or working memory that is available to us at any given time. Give or take a little, we can work with about seven elements (e.g., letters, words, numbers) at once. Our working-memory capacity does not change much as we get older or acquire more knowledge: as our expertise in an area increases, so does our ability to chunk (e.g., seeing three groups of 5 as three elements rather than 15), categorize (e.g., placing vowels in one group and consonants in another), and draw from long-term memory (e.g., knowing that you have a dog or have been to the beach). We move items from short-term memory to long-term memory through rehearsal and use, and it is easiest when we can link them to prior experiences or knowledge (schema).

A need to know is essential to the process of knowledge retention. Students don't usually attend class eager to learn about photosynthesis or how to say eat in Spanish. Instead, they come innately curious about the world around them: they wonder why the leaves on trees are mostly green but turn colors during the fall, or how they might communicate with a relative in Spain. Too often, we start and end learning by focusing on computational fluency: memorizing vocabulary in world languages or the multiplication tables in math, learning facts and dates in social studies, defining concepts in science. Instead, we should begin by giving students real-world dilemmas to solve, creating a need to know that inspires them to learn the fundamentals. When we engage students first and truly get them exploring major ideas before we deliver facts, content knowledge improves for all students, narrowing the achievement gap in the process (Marshall, 2013; Marshall & Alston, 2014; Marshall, Smart, & Alston, 2017). Memorization and computational fluency are important, but the amount and sequencing of both should be intentionally addressed.

Lowering the Cognitive Load

When putting exploration before skill proficiency, it is important to lower the cognitive load where possible so short-term memory can focus on areas requiring the most rigor. For instance, when beginning to write for deeper meaning, many students struggle with the vocabulary necessary to enrich their writing. A vocabulary continuum, either student- or teacher-created, can provide words with different strengths of connotation so students can incorporate more powerful verbs or richer adjectives in their sentences. Give examples of sentence variety to help students build the complexity of their writing. Positively reinforce students when they go beyond provided examples and incorporate rich vocabulary or vibrant sentence variations.

In math class, students could come up with examples of real-world problems that illustrate the concepts being studied. For instance, when studying percentages, students could calculate the tip for a meal, the discount on a sweater, or the tax on a purchase. Reward those who can tie examples to previous concepts. If students have 10 problems for homework, the first 8 could focus on building computational fluency, and the final 2 could be an opportunity for them to extend their knowledge. Just remember that students should practice computational fluency after they have explored and grasped the concept.

In history class, as you begin to investigate events, you can provide a list of historical figures to study and reward students who find additional figures related to the event or time period. Emphasize the importance of synthesizing the historical understanding from multiple perspectives (e.g., World War II from the perspectives of people in Japan, England, Germany, and Russia, or from the perspective of an American homemaker, farmer, military family, or politician).

There is a sweet spot in learning. If the process is too easy, then students get bored. If it is too hard, they can become overwhelmed. We tend to see students who appear very apathetic at either end of the challenge continuum.

The 40 Percent Rule

Centuries ago, Horace wrote the phrase aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem: "remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even." In our increasingly distracted society, it is imperative that we learn how to focus better. According to the "40 percent rule," whenever we think we are mentally, physically, or emotionally spent, we have actually reached only about 40 percent of our capacity. It is preposterous to expect our students (or ourselves) to perform at 100 percent mental or intellectual effort 100 percent of the time, but we need to learn that running from difficult situations is not a solution for growth, either. Whether in sports, arts, or academics, our greatest achievements often require a bit of hardship.

Think about where you want students to focus most in your class and make your expectations clear to them. Begin by establishing a benchmark to assess existing student stress levels. This can be done very quickly through a brief survey that asks students to respond using a Likert scale (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) to statements such as "I feel comfortable sharing in class," "I am OK not always having the right answer," and "I feel the work in the class is challenging yet achievable." Depending on your purpose, you may wish to make the survey anonymous. Once you identify key stressors for students, you can begin to develop strategies for minimizing them (e.g., by moving a test or deadline back by a day) and help students develop coping strategies.

Moving Past the Status Quo

Rigor and challenge are often expressed in terms of speed and agility relative to a given knowledge base or skill set. However, true challenge requires us to completely rethink an idea, swimming against very powerful and sometimes antagonistic forces. Nicolaus Copernicus stood against the Church and society when he proposed that Earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around—a reconceptualization that in turn made humanity rethink how planetary bodies move. It is worth noting that his work was published 66 years before Galileo used the first telescope in 1609.

It is easy to say that you'll never be as revolutionary as Copernicus, but all individuals are capable of learning to take static facts and figures and use them in new ways. In so doing, we become the next authors, musicians, leaders, doctors, and teachers. We need individuals who will challenge the status quo if we want to make the world, community, or school a bit better than it was yesterday. Deviating from the norm does not mean that students are no longer responsible for learning essential skills such as vocabulary or basic arithmetic. Instead, it is about reexamining the frequency and duration of such learning.

Know your goals and build a plan for pushing against the status quo. As an example, you might choose to provide students with "create time" every Friday, during which they can freely explore a matter that excites them but that you have not fully explained to them. In a science/engineering class, students might create a new product for an "Invention Convention" later in the year. In other classes, they might choreograph their own dances, write their own plays, or create their own documentaries on historical figures or events. For many students, this flexibility will be exciting and freeing, while for others it will be a bit terrifying at first. Most will be at least a bit uncomfortable at the beginning, not quite knowing where or how to begin. Give them some time (depending on the grade level or complexity of task) to think it through or jot down ideas. Then, provide those who need it with a framework to help guide their process. Some students may need more support here than others. Students must identify the topic, product, or idea before they can begin outlining, prototyping, or developing a procedure.

You may prefer to infuse smaller pockets of create time into the day-to-day learning process. In math class, for instance, where we are often focused on absolutes and single solutions, we might provide frequent opportunities for students to learn how to estimate solutions that don't have a single answer (e.g., projecting a family or company budget). After all, the real world is a mix of absolutes and approximations. When engineers design structures, they always "over-design" to allow for unforeseen events; similarly, when builders estimate costs, they always seek to provide a cushion for cost overruns.

Real-world learning contexts can encourage students to push beyond the status quo of abstract and sterile computations. Here's an example of an exercise that challenges students to think deeply and in a real-world context about an estimation activity using basic arithmetic skills:

You are a homebuilding team, and a client would like you to build a variation of a type of home you have built several times over the past two years. You know that your total cost before any profit has typically run about $185,000 for the 2,400-square-foot home. The client would like to add 2 feet across the entire back of the home and wants to know how much it will cost.

Remember that you need to make a profit on the home to keep your business running, but if your price is unreasonably high, you will lose your client to another builder. [Note: a 10 percent profit may be a reasonable target, but it would be good for students to consider what their profit margin needs to be and then see if their estimate has made them competitive with others.] Each team will come up with a price that it must justify to the client in a two-minute presentation.

A few details that may or may not be helpful:

1. This is a single-story house.
2. The house is approximately 60 feet wide and 40 feet deep.
3. The requested addition will add about 20 square feet to the kitchen, and the rest of the added space will be in general living space (e.g., a living room or bedroom).
4. The new lot cost is $42,000 versus $35,000 for the prior homes built.
5. Because of a building boom across the country, construction costs have increased by about 15 percent since your last homebuilding project.

Playing in the Box

It's fun to think outside the box, but we also need to be grounded in reality. Any solutions to problems that we devise must still conform to conditions in the box that we are required to play in. We can reshape the box a bit, but we can't just toss it away. We must address the state or national standards, for example, and we must comply with district, state, or federal mandates. Yet our process is also bounded by our own perceptions, which can at times limit our progress.

Time and Timing

We are also bound by the time we are given to interact with our students. The Greeks had two words for time: chronos, meaning chronological time, and kairos, meaning time that is opportune or right. In the business world, timing in the latter sense accounts for approximately 42 percent of the difference between whether a company succeeds or fails (Grant, 2017). Finding kairos in the classroom—the proper timing and sequencing of learning to maximize student achievement—is critical for success.

Do you think you have even greater success with your students when given less time? This may seem absurd on the surface, but adding time to the school day has not clearly been shown to improve student achievement, even for those who are behind academically. The research is mixed and often entangled with other possible factors, such as higher expectations. Instead of simply fighting for more time, we should focus on how we use the time we have. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows schools in the United States to be about average among developed nations in terms of time spent on science, mathematics, and language arts each week. Students in countries with well-regarded school systems like Finland and Japan actually spend less time on these subjects than do U.S. students. Any increase in time allotted to students would need to be coupled with more meaningful learning opportunities to work (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2015). In fact, a longer school year may be helpful. This makes intuitive sense, since we know that there tends to be a precipitous learning loss for students during the summer months.

But again, just adding time is not the answer if it will only be squandered, particularly after state testing has occurred. We have seen a consistent trend in the quality of instruction increasing from the beginning of the year until early in the third quarter, after which it drops steeply as teachers focus on preparation for state or national tests at the expense of learning (Cian, Marshall, & Qian, 2018). The last few weeks of school are often filled with parties, movie days, or "free" days. If this is consistently the case, I would argue for shortening rather than lengthening the school year.

We err when we think we must craft every lesson to fit a given class period. Some lessons may take 130 minutes to complete, with each day's dismissal bell simply denoting an intermission; others may be short enough to allow the last 15 minutes of class time to be used to set the stage for whatever comes next tomorrow. Unfortunately, it's all too common to find students staring into their phones after completing a quiz that only took half of the allotted class time to complete. Effective teachers find ways to turn idle blocks of time into meaningful learning opportunities.

Review your essential purpose or goal for students and identify any constraints that are holding them back from maximal success. Realize that not every frustration is an obstacle. If you don't have evidence that something is holding students back in some way, remove it from your list. Remember that many teachers thrive with the same constraints in place as you, so success is certainly possible. Henry Ford famously said, "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." You can't just get rid of standards, double instructional time, or dispense with district mandates, so focus instead on using standards to frame instruction, using instructional time more effectively, and complying with mandates in ways that don't distract you from enhancing your students' success.

Who Am I? Where Am I Going?

This chapter explored the wicked problem of challenging and excelling with all our students. This is certainly no easy feat, but it's manageable if you develop and implement a thoughtful, intentional plan. Whether you aim to build students' resiliency and perseverance or move past the status quo of low challenge, the chapters that follow look at the key linchpins of culture, design, assessment, and implementation associated with challenge and excellence in your classroom. These elements, when coordinated together, provide a powerful framework to build upon.

Go through your current student roster and score each student on academic success and challenge. (If you are doing this in the summer or very early in the year, you may want to use last year's roster and think retrospectively on your interactions with students.) Use the following scores:

• S1: highly successful
• S2: moderately successful
• S3: not successful
• C1: consistently and highly challenged
• C2: sometimes challenged
• C3: rarely or not challenged

For this exercise, highly successful means strong academic achievement and highly challenged means students are pushed to question, discover, and explore beyond their comfort zones or current abilities. What metrics will you use to arrive at your scores? Students' current grades? Their scores on standardized tests? Be sure that you have a cutoff for each category and your metrics reflect something that you or your district highly values. I recommend using a spreadsheet for easy analysis. What patterns do you see? Where did most of your students fall? Who is not being challenged? Who is not succeeding? Be careful not to draw conclusions that will curb further growth, such as dismissing students' potential for improvement because they have a difficult family life or different cultural background. In the next chapter, an entire section is devoted to how labels and expectations affect student performance. Think through why students may be receiving the scores you determine, then begin to unravel what your next steps will be.

Summing Up

This chapter challenged you to intentionally clarify who you are and where you are going as a classroom leader. Remember, as you pursue a path toward greater challenge, it is important that you challenge your own thinking. After all, how can you challenge students authentically if you aren't willing to challenge yourself?