I believe that one of the most important things we as educators can teach our students is to problem solve and think critically. As our students move through their lives they will not be able to look in the back of a book to find the solution to what they are facing academically or personally. As teachers we can often fall into the trap of only showing our students questions with a definite right and wrong answer. These one answer questions come in the form of worksheets, multiple choice and similar quizzes and test, short answer questions where we’re looking for a specific phrase, and many other assignments we give out. When we only show students problems and questions with a single answer we are modeling the wrong principles, we are telling students that there is always a right answer and a wrong answer, that the problem only has one solution and everything else is incorrect. There is another Carl Sagan quote (yeah, he comes up a lot in my classroom): “Every kid starts out as a natural born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.” I believe this quote is true; science and engineering rely on creativity to solve problems.

This week we as a cohort were faced with solving an open ended problem and many people faced the same challenge as our students: how do we solve problems when we don’t know what the “right” answer is? Many of our group truly struggled with the lack of structure of it all, how are we supposed to solve a problem without a clear view of what the procedure is or even a full understanding of the problem? It was an interesting endeavor to see a group of outstanding educators become frustrated trying to deal with such an open ended problem. If anything watching the confusion and frustration around the room made me more sure that this is exactly what my students need. Life is an open ended problem and our students need to be exposed to this situation. They need to grapple with an idea and try out many solutions. They need to experience failure enough times to learn that failure is only a starting point and that nothing in life actually has only one answer.

The engineering design process teaches students all of this and I am now prepared to help my students understand what an open ended problem is and how to approach one, I’m raising expectations this year on student problem solving and with that raising the support and time I provide them to really approach an open ended problem in a way that models real world engineering processes. I want my students to approach problems creatively with a growth mindset and I want them to be gritty in their approach to solving whatever they come up against (if you haven’t seen this TED Talk on grit, watch it!). Here comes my engineering classroom!