Guest Host: Jane Grabowksi

Education is Solving Problems

Every Fall, the faculty and staff of our college get together on the two days before Thanksgiving break for what we call Collaborative Learning Days. This year, Alan and I had a raucously good time facilitating sessions. We were lucky enough to do one on Play, in conjunction with our  colleague Kate Hess, a librarian and play researcher.  (Stay tuned for a podcast on play!) Alan did a session on solutions to puzzles within Angel, our campuswide LMS, and Nicole attended a session on common problems in teaching. The more we thought about these days, the more we realized that an awful lot of being an educator is solving problems. Students texting in class – is it a problem, why, how do you “solve” it? Students not attending class and their learning suffering? What do you do? Got tech trouble in the LMS…ack! Fire drill during a face-to-face class, or Internet outage during a distance one…OK, we’ll handle it…

Education is about solving problems, or at least approaching puzzles with a solution-oriented mindset. Recently Alan and I sat down with Jane Grabowski, an instructor in Communications, to chat about inquiry-based teaching methods, and how for her, it has helped resolve some of the traditional complaints about attendance, attention, motivation, and learner investment. We think inquiry-based models are pretty intriguing, and hope to explore them more in future podcasts.

In the meantime, have a listen to the podcast, and let us know how you’ve solved a particularly tricksy problem in your classroom, your teaching, or your learning. Comment or email us today!