Response to Chapter Five: Problem-solving Activities

Designing a problem-solving activity helps students undergo the information-extending and information-rearranging processes and strengthen their memory of the knowledge they use in the processes. Teachers use their creativity to design the problem that stimulates students’ critical thinking and activates their schemata for valid solutions. I experienced a problem-solving class when I was taking Chinese in university. The professor asked each group of students to come up with different ways of presenting the reading for discussion in every class. Therefore, the problem is posed: in what way students can present this idea and why this will work or will not work. One time, when everyone got stuck in thinking of a new way to discuss the classic novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, our group just had the eureka moment: each group drew a plot diagram of the novel and explained why they labeled some parts of the plot as the rising action, the turning point, the climax, and the falling action. We applied this for our reading, and it successfully elicited students’ discussion of how they interpreted the plot. The problem-solving teaching is also crucial in the language classroom. The ultimate goal of learning English is to communicate with others effectively. Therefore, teachers can design a problematic scenario to help students practice their communicative skills in English. For instance, in the first class, the teacher asks students to introduce themselves as if they were in a job interview. After listening to each other’s self-introduction, students can share what are their impressions to others. If other students’ impression is not the image the target student wishes to convey (there might be some misunderstanding in the communication), he can ask them why they think so (what he has said or what he has done that lead to this impression) and he can also think of another way (with different attitudes, tones, or wording) to present himself, which might lead to another impression. The final goal is to help students present themselves to create an impression that they desire in a job interview. The purpose of this class is to improve students’ communicative skills when they encounter misunderstanding in the conversation.