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5
Effective intervention for co-operative problem solving
Patricia Murphy, Reader in Education at the Open University who has evaluated the Nuffield primary solutions units when they were being trialled, has identified a set of optimal preconditions for collaboration in the design & technology classroom. She groups these under five headings:
Patricia Murphy
o Teacher commitment
o Task context
o School and classroom organisation
o Pedagogic strategies
o Student perspectives
The pedagogic strategies are of particular interest and include the following two important ideas.
1. Knowing how to scaffold students' problem solving through offering both ideas and tools to make students' thinking explicit to themselves and to others.
Quick sketching to explore a design decision in which the pencil moves back and forth between teacher and students is one way of providing a useful tool (sketching) so that students get to use it themselves and see it being used by the teacher. Through this sketching the teacher and students can also offer ideas.
2. Encouraging discussion of decisions, particularly why actions are suggested (by both students and teachers) and why decisions are made. Part of this should include the teacher being able to disagree with a decision after having given his or her reasons, then allowing the students to go ahead and carry out and evaluate their own choices.
This is tricky. No teacher wants to let children go down a path that is seen as leading to failure. And if a teacher does this, there is the temptation to say "I told you so" when failure occurs. It will be important to have in mind the previous work of the children, their track record of success in risky ventures and an explicit strategy for recouping the situation if things do go wrong.