When my daughter, Abby, was in second grade, I volunteered as a guest to teach a variety of character education lessons in her class. As I taught the last lesson of the school year, I couldn’t help but notice how respectfully the students spoke to one another and how engaged they were in conversations about the content. They were actually listening and responding to one another. I know many adults are still working on these skills, so I stopped the lesson to tell them how impressed I was with their communication skills. They all smiled and looked back at their teacher, who was beaming too. 

This shift in how students were communicating and how they were working together was the result of a yearlong inquiry project guided by the school-wide focus: How can we improve meaningful student engagement? Liz Sloan, the principal, had asked each grade-level team to identify a specific focus or problem of practice. The second-grade team initially identified that students were having trouble listening. (I am sure other teachers can relate to this problem.) Based on this assessment, the team posed the question, “What strategies can we use to improve our students’ listening skills?” The collective inquiry provided both structure and accountability for the teams while allowing the teachers to determine their focus (based on schoolwide and district goals) and exert their own agency to determine what to read, explore, and implement in order to achieve the goal of helping students learn to listen. 

During collaboration time, the team members researched and learned about new strategies. They went back to their classrooms to try them out and later came back together to share their successes, challenges, and new ideas. As a result of this collaboration, Christine Kazarian, Abby’s amazing teacher, taught them strategies for engaging in productive dialogue and how to listen and respond respectfully. They practiced and received feedback on how they were progressing. Because they had a shared goal, they worked to improve as a class and took pride in their growth. Christine shared her biggest takeaways from that year with me: 

1. Explicitly teach communication skills. She taught lessons on effective feedback, showed videos, and gave examples of effective communication. She described the behaviors that she wanted to see, observed them in action, and used the evidence to plan for the next lessons. 
2. Hold students accountable for what they are learning and putting into practice. She videotaped them, gave feedback, and allowed them to reflect on their behaviors. 
3. Have students lead the work. She called this having “students lift the weights.” Allowing students to determine their own level of engagement and how to increase it provided them with the agency to make changes in their behaviors. 

The first two takeaways are foundational for teaching, but what I think is critical for learning and improving is the third: agency. In this process, the teachers were empowered to lead their professional learning and, in turn, empowered their students in their own learning process. As the second-grade team of teachers explored how to encourage students to be better listeners, they learned to teach their students to be better communicators and learners.

Solving the Right Problem 

Let’s examine the steps that helped Abby’s class move from struggling with listening to becoming actively engaged communicators. The initial framing of the problem that pervades our classrooms is that the kids weren’t listening. Not listening can lead to a host of classroom management issues and might lead to punishment. Christine and her colleagues reframed the problem by using the lens of inquiry and seeking to understand how students could become better communicators. The reality is that this reframing approach can help us address any number of common challenges, both in and out of the classroom. In an article titled, “Are You Solving the Right Problems,” in the Harvard Business Review, speaker and author, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg considers the implications for many “problems” and offers a strategy to think about reframing them. The way we see the problem can prevent us from creating more effective solutions. 

In the article, this example of how to reframe a slow elevator problem to uncover different solutions is provided: 

Imagine that you are the owner of an office building and your tenants are complaining about the elevator. It’s old and slow, and they have to wait—a lot. Several tenants are threatening to break their leases if you don’t fix the problem. 

He notes that most people will identify solutions, such as replacing the elevator or fixing the motor. These symptomatic fixes provide solutions aimed at a perceived symptom or problem. These solutions address the assumption that the slow elevator is the problem. 

When business managers, however, were asked to look at this problem, they identified a different solution. They suggested putting up mirrors next to the elevator and found that this diversion proved to effectively minimize complaints. Wedell-Wedellsborg found, “This simple addition proves wonderfully effective in reducing complaints about waiting for elevators because people tend to lose track of time when given something utterly fascinating to look at—namely, themselves.” 

You might note that the mirror solution doesn’t address the stated problem. Rather than make the elevator faster, the solution comes by reframing the problem to find a different challenge to solve. 

Reframing Our Current Challenges Due to COVID-19

The example above was from my book Learner-Centered Innovation and I was reminded of it as the relevance to or current crisis when I recently had an opportunity to connect with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, the author of What’s Your Problem. He has inspired my thinking about how to reframe problems as he has done for companies around the world. In this short conversation, we chatted about the elevator problem example above and how to reframe any problem. Check out our conversation here or his book with tons of applicable examples and ideas.

He shared the following 5 tips that can help to reframe our current challenges and many other problems that we face. 

1. Examine the problem and see if there is a better way to frame it.
2. Rethink the goals.
3. Examine bright spots from other people or situations. Where is there success in other contexts?
4. Look in the mirror. How might you be contributing to the problem?
5. Empathize with people and see the problem from multiple perspectives.

As school buildings are closed for at least the remainder of the year and likely won’t be able to reopen for all students we have to start looking at how we can create schools that allow for social distancing for the next 18 months according to many experts.  At first blush, the problem might seem to be: How do we recreate school in a remote setting? This seems like a reasonable assessment of the problem and the solution to that might be moving our instruction online or gets packets to students who don’t have access so they can still complete the assignments.

Instead,  if we look at the reframing loop suggested by Thomas Wedell- Wedellborg in his book, What’s Your Problem, we might find another more relevant problem to solve.

1. Examine the problem and see if there is a better way to frame it.

Instead of thinking about how to recreate school online maybe we can focus on how we can ensure that students are learning and developing the necessary knowledge, habits, and skills to be successful in our unpredictable world.

2. Rethink the goals

At a closer look at the goals, might we focus less on getting through content and lessons and focus more on skills that students need to be more effective, self-directed learners? What if we prioritized the most important knowledge, skills, and dispositions that we wanted students to develop and focused on how to support each and every one of them to get there?

3. Examine bright spots from other people or situations. Where is there success in other contexts?

There are bright spots all around us when we think about how we learn and why we learn. We are motivated to engage in new content when it’s personally relevant, within our challenge level, we have choices and get to do work that matters to us and others.

4. Look in the mirror. How might you be contributing to the problem?

If I think of my own teaching as I transitioned from an in-person course to an online course and even with the best of intentions, I still focused more on the content I was teaching than how and what students would be learning. It is easy to get caught in this common teaching trap:  If I didn’t teach it or see them do it, they didn’t learn it. Yet, when we shift our accountability systems from ensuring students completed assignments and spent X amount of hours doing work or being in class and instead hold tight to the evidence of what they learned, we can be help learners to understand the goals and where they are in relationship to them so they can better navigate the path. This is a reminder for me more than anyone else:).

5. Empathize with people and see the problem from multiple perspectives.

One thing I know is that we are all in different places and many people don’t have the capacity, motivation, or resources to sit online all day and do school work all day. They may have to take care of family, work, may not have computers, struggle with the executive functioning skills, and more challenges that prevent them from engaging in school content amid the current pandemic. Seeking to understand others’ perspectives, especially if they are who you are aiming to serve, is always crucial to solving the right problem.

Moving Forward

After reframing, it seems to me that there might be better problems to solve.

• What if we helped students learn to manage their work and set goals?
• Could we ensure that learners understand how to investigate something that they want to learn?
• What if we were we focused on evidence of what students were learning rather than the completion of tasks?
• What if students learn the skills to learn, not just memorizing facts and practicing algorithms?
• What if they focused on habits and skills that the world requires like develop the capacity to work through challenges, work collaboratively with others to understand diverse points of view, solve problems, and advocate for themselves to move forward?
• What if we helped them identify and navigate emotions to be productive and effective?

Instead of recreating school at home or focusing on what we have to cover, what if we focused on the knowledge, skills, and habits that matter most? Imagine if students spent their time in school developing a sense of agency, learned how to effectively collaborate with others, and applied their knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems. Now is the time to build the system that is more personal, authentic, and designed for all learners to reach their full potential, not recreate our outdated policies and practices.

What are you thinking about? What other challenges might we think about reframing to best meet the needs of learners during COVID-19 and as we move forward? Let’s focus on learning, and what’s best for learners, to find the right solutions, together.