Solving Problems for Real World

After reading Rachel’s blog entry, Celebrate the Season of Giving, one phrase which particularly stood out to me was: “We need to make schools more relevant to life”.  I couldn’t agree more with this statement. This led me to do some research on more unorthodox, “real-world” classrooms. While quite a few articles and papers within education science have discussed the pros and cons of “problem-based learning”, the New York Times article, Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design provides a good example of the success of problem based learning within the classroom. 

If the name doesn’t already give it away, problem-based learning focuses on designing solutions for particular technological and social problems, with a single course asking students to come up for a solution to address a particular narrow problem. The article focuses on Stanford’s Hasso Platter Institute of Design, or as it’s called, the D.school. Not only are the courses within this school extremely popular with Stanford students, but they have also yielded start-up companies and products that combat issues ranging from clubbed feet, infant mortality, to even improving the hair-cutting process.

While I thought this article focused too much on the products created from the D.school, and not enough on the actual educational practices that went into designing these courses, I whole heartedly think that redesigning classes around real-world application and social innovation is going to better prepare not only college students, but also K-12 students for increasingly unstable job market. More importantly, I think that problem based learning facilitates innovation, and the type of self-guided learning that will not only motivate learning, but will also eradicate the sort of “parrot learned classes”, where a semester’s worth of information is crammed down’s one throat, regurgitated, and then forgotten two weeks after the final exam.

However, I am not saying that every single class should be reconfigured into this kind of format, because that is neither useful nor effective, but I am saying that both K-12 and higher education should consider including more practicum style classes that would not replace, but rather cooperate with the classes in which one learns facts, figures, and principles. It is definitely a mistake to believe that you can just give students a problem, set them loose, and expect them to solve it perfectly. Problem-based learning needs to complement traditional classes where we learn things like the Pythagorean theorem, Spanish, and the mechanics of cell communication.

Of course, I don’t have too much of an idea of the price tags of designing and implementing these types of classes, but rationalizing the cost in terms of the long term value of problem-based learning doesn’t seem unreasonable. Going back to Rachel’s blog entry, I liked her solution of the Capstone Research Project. As someone doing a thesis, I can personally attest that it exercises a completely different set of skills than the regular lecture-based course.

However, I would like to suggest that schools should integrate projects and problems based on solving an existing or future social problem that could certainly captivate the attention of willing students. It’s a principle within psychology that we remember and learn information that we deem personally salient, and so it makes sense to allow students to tackle problems that they find personally important, and can create a visible product or solution from.

This type of narrow-problem focus isn’t as narrow as it sounds, because although it looks like you are only solving one particular problem, you are using classroom knowledge to innovate a solution, and those skills are transferable to new problems. With practice and experience, once students repeatedly apply the formulas, principles, and facts they are learning to one social problem after another, it is becomes a question of where can I implement this knowledge, and not why.

A few final points: 1. I don’t think problem based learning has been entirely absent from the classroom, but I do think it’s an underutilized phenomenon. I have had classes at UVA besides my thesis research where we have been asked to write policy memos on certain political issues, and design a game that uses our knowledge of coding. 2. Isn’t it a valuable selling point that these types of classes will output solutions and skills that are marketable and resume-worthy? Not that this should be the ultimate goal of a class, but it’s probably for employers to evaluate someone in terms of what they have created, and not only standardized testing scores.

~Mona Azadi