Em Holliday

Want to get the kids thinking 'outside the square'? me too - here's how it's going so far...In an idealistic world everything in the classroom you try will work wonderfully, in the real world (which pre-service teachers see sadly little of) they don't! No surprises there.

My mentor teacher is wonderfully supportive of me trialling strategies and techniques I want to use in my own classroom, happily giving me a safe place for it all to come crashing down.

I've started "Ms Holliday's Problem" which is a self-motivated problem solving strategy I want to use in my classroom. Basically I post a problem up on the door of the classroom and the children will solve it in their own time and reveal their creative thinking to the class. Thus earning the privilege to be "problem solver of the week" and get a picture of themselves thinking (as absurdly as they like) in the star studded picture frame I've made.

The first problem I put up was "Which switch" which was somewhat of a failure simply because it was too hard! However, the children were really trying and for the 30 minutes it took us to throw around ideas, every child was busting to imput and thoroughly engaged. So the concept is obviously good - now I just need to pitch questions of a suitable difficulty - a difficulty in itself!

So what I need to consider:

Difficulty of problems (as noted).

Access to resources: I need to include questions that don't need internet access to solve. Questions that can be solved in any place at any time.

Range of interest : I don't want this to be something only the highly intelligent in the class can do. So, I want to find out any specific interests my students may have (who knows what these kids are experts in from dragons to Erogon to cars...) and pose questions which will enable every kid a chance to prove they are the "problem solver of the week". An example might be if I knew a kid in my class was an avid collector of base ball cards (and wasn't one who could necessarily solve a logic problem) I'd pose a question which could be solved by the contents on the baseball cards. (This requires pre-planning by getting the kid to bring them in and ask lots of questions about them - which also strengthens the relationship).

Range of abilities: The next problem I pose will be a captioning problem - I've found a cute picture and the kids need to come up with a quirky caption or speech bubble. By strategic prodding I can guide any particular student who may not have a good chance of winning the weekly competition to having a great caption. Thus manipulating the game to include all kids. Don't worry, there'll be tricky logic, maths, english, sport problems. Within the space of a year I will easily cover interest areas for all children.

Reward system: Do the kids get a prize? Is the prize tangible? Food? a toy? Respect? Do I record the success? I'm personally against prizes in the classroom for individual work (although I've seen it used to great effect with table groups and keeping the room tidy) and so want to encourage non-tangible rewards such as praise, photo on the wall, a certificate in the homework diary...that sort of thing.

I'll keep you posted on the success of this activity and will post all activities I create on the "Problems for the thinking classroom" page in this blog.