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The Monkey on our Back - Teaching Students to be Effective Problem Solvers in an Information on Demand Society

The Monkey on our Back - Teaching Students to be Effective Problem Solvers in an Information on Demand Society

By Stephen Portz

From a TED-x Talk given at The WEISS School, May 3, 2019

As you can see I brought a friend with me today to help me with my talk.  You may be familiar with the idiom – “You have a monkey on your back.”

Having a monkey on your back means that you have burden to carry, a problem to solve, a challenging task at hand.  It comes from the notion that monkeys can be annoying creatures, especially when they are this close to you – they can pull your hair, scream in your ear, even bite you. Monkeys, like problems that need to be solved, are things we hope to be rid of, if even for a short time until the next problem arises.

Well, here is my monkey.  His name is Peekeroncheeto.  So, the monkey on my back, if you will, is to help you understand that recognizing, accepting, and dealing with the monkeys on your back is fundamental to your success in learning and in life.

As I work with my students in problem solving activities, I often think that we, as educators, take entirely too much responsibility for our students’ learning. 

You may be thinking, how is that possible? How can a teacher assume too much responsibility for student learning?  Teachers are entirely responsible for student learning, right?

While most people think this is true, after 30 years of teaching I have come to the conclusion that my greatest role and responsibility as a teacher is to create an environment that protects student self-discovery; not to be an information dispenser or worse yet, a rescuer from learning frustration.

Many teachers view student anxiety and temporary frustrations with problem solving as a teaching deficiency on their part.  But Leonardo Davinci, the famous engineer and artist, disagreed.  He suggested You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help them discover it for themselves.”

One challenge that students have in today’s information on demand society is that they don’t have to work very hard for many of their answers.  The monkey on their back is often easily dispatched with a simple Google search.  But what about problems that are unique and specific to a situation, require more creative problem-solving methods, or are problems that don’t even have a known solution yet?

Google’s Alexa, Amazon’s Echo, and Apple’s SIRI presently give us the Star Trek like experience of simply speaking our question into the air like Captain Picard, o the Star Ship Enterprise and having those questions instantly answered by these electronics built into our environment.

In the book entitled “The Next Fifty Years,” Roger Schank, a leading researcher of artificial intelligence and a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University, foretells how dealing with information, learning, and problem solving will occur in the future. 

Schank maintains, as information becomes so easily accessible, it becomes devalued, and knowledge as we presently view it, that is, having things committed to memory, will become totally unnecessary with information on demand. 

In a world such as this, the best and the brightest students will not be the ones who know the most stuff or score highest on the test. 

The best and the brightest students will be the ones that can ask important meaningful questions, questions that go beyond a computer’s ability to answer.

So how do we train our students to be prepared for a world such as this?

I found an account of an interaction between a master teacher and an apprentice learner which very powerfully illustrates the challenges of teaching and learning problem-solving in today’s information on demand society.

The apprentice had asked the master for help in solving a difficult problem, because, after all, they were the master teacher and supposed to know these things. 

The master teacher's response was highly instructive.  Speaking to the apprentice they scolded them a little – “You recognized there was a problem that needed solved but you, yourself, gave no thought to any possible solutions other than to ask me for help…if you want to grow in your understanding and ability, you must first study the problem out in your mind and arrive at some possible solutions on your own.  Only after you have done that should you come and ask me what I think.”

Many students are conditioned to ask for help the moment they are in a learning situation where they don’t know the answer.  They simply get frustrated.

Because of our information on demand, immediate gratification society, our students’ tolerance for frustration when solving problems has been steadily decreasing when at the same time, the need for this skill is increasingly important.

To be a good problem solver, you simply have to develop the capacity to endure learning frustrations. Because we will have a lot of them.

Peekeroncheeto helps me in times like this.  When a student is frustrated, it is useful to acknowledge the monkey on their back, to empathize, and talk with them about their points of frustration as well as ask them about their ideas of what they might try next.

The best strategy I have discovered for helping students with problem solving and “seeing what is in their mind” is jumpstarting the process by making them ask specific questions about the help they hope to get.  

Just saying "I need help, I don't understand, is not acceptable." Because that is just so much - YOU TOOK NO THOUGHT EXCEPT TO ASK ME FOR HELP.

Requiring students to specify their request for help does many things.  It can tell the teacher what they already understand and where they are at responsibility for ownership in the problem-solving continuum.  There are four levels of problem solving ability in this model, and you can tell where a student is on the continuum by the type of question that they ask you:

Level One: “I don’t understand.” – The student assumes no responsibility for the problem

Students in this stage want the problem solved for them.  They have little or no anxiety for solving the problem because they have not yet assumed ownership of it.  If they can get the teacher to assume ownership for the problem by making them feel guilty for THEIR lack of understanding, then maybe the teacher will take the monkey off their back and do the problem for them.  

It is my experience that students struggle at this point in the problem-solving process is often not a lack of understanding; it is a lack of assumed ownership, some resiliency in the face of frustration, and the mindset needed to look at the problem in different ways.

It is important to remember as their teacher that the answer is not the most important thing; but knowing how to arrive at an answer, that is the most important thing.

And be warned, you must not be afraid to walk away until a student is ready to assume ownership.  I tell them: “Go to where you don’t know… then, go to work."

Students at this point may really turn up the guilt as they want you to take away their monkey: “You are the TEACHER; you are supposed to help me!”  But they don’t want help, they want the answer.  They want the monkey off their back.

As problem solvers, we all want the frustration to go away, but fail to understand that the frustration is our greatest benefactor – it is what helps us develop the capacity for future problem-solving ability.

Level Two: “Can you give me a hint? In this stage, the student has started to accept their monkey, but they are not sure how to approach the problem yet.

The difference between this student and the Level One Student is problem ownership. This student is trying.   As the teacher, we can go back and reference past understanding and see if they can pick up on the strategies, identify patterns and processes.  Continue to coach creative thought and to consider the problem from different angles.

Level Three: “Can you help me, I tried this, and it didn’t work?” – The student has assumed most of the responsibility for the problem and has tried some ideas, but so far is unsuccessful.

Students in this stage of the problem have often made a wrong turn or misapplied a concept and just need to be redirected.  Make them go back over their work and think aloud to you.  It may be necessary to stop them in the error and remind them of the process: “Remember when I did this, I said to watch out for this?” and let them catch their own mistakes.  

You could ask, “What feedback are you receiving?”  What is the problem communicating back to you beyond the fact that this problem is not able to be solved in this way?  The problem does “talk” to us, if we will pay attention.  The problem will demonstrate what works, what kind of works, what doesn’t work, under what conditions and for what duration.  Edison really was saying this same thing when he was questioned about his failures with the incandescent light and gave his famous quote: “I have not failed. I have found 10000 ways that did not work.”  We have the opportunity to learn much more from our “failures” then we can from our successes. In fact, this is where the old adage “fail early, fail often” comes into play.

Level Four: What can I DO to make this work?” – The student has now internalized and taken full responsibility for defining the problem and solving it.  They are asking themselves the questions now; the teacher is not needed.

This is the ultimate goal for teachers as we prepare our students to be successful in an uncertain future.  A future where correct answers are cheap and easy to find, while good questions are much more prized and much more elusive. 

 

We can best help our students be prepared for the future by doing the following:

By using strategy of requiring our students to frame specific questions about the problem before receiving our help;

By making them accept ownership of the problem and think more about their thinking;

By understanding that learning frustration is an ally and not an enemy and not relieving our students of this learning frustration;

By using these strategies, we teach our students to be more resilient, more self-reliant, more resourceful, and more creative problem solvers.

But perhaps the most helpful thing of all in problem solving is having empathy for our learners.  Sometimes telling a story of a problem-solving frustration from your own life or the life of a great inventor is helpful.

Helping my students with their problem solving metaphorically is much like me taking the monkey from them and scolding the monkey for annoying the student.  “Peekeroncheeto, you are such an annoyance, why do you have to make things so difficult for my students?”

But in the end, I return the monkey to the student, because after all, it is their monkey ....their problem to solve.... their learning experience to have.

By doing these things our students CAN be successful in an information on demand society as we always remember: “If you show me the answer, I will never remember it.  If you let me discover the answer for myself, I will never forget it.”

Thank you.