For better and for worse, teaching has passed through a metamorphosis. Sometimes conceived as the passage of culture from one generation to its successor, and always cited as the insurance a democracy keeps paid up for itself, education in the public schools and especially the city schools, has a clear mandate today to provide much deeper training than an historical sense of responsibility to defend freedom of thought. Or perhaps that is the one constant aspect which does not change. We teachers find ourselves with more complicated responsibilities in the classroom. Our subject matter seems inadequate to equip our students to succeed in the world outside our schools. We find ourselves inundated by a plethora of additional curricula to teach skills which though valuable and essential, leave us frustrated by the sense that our job prevents us from doing our work. We are further stressed by the cynical perception that many of the curricula which compete with our disciplines are passing fads in the eternal search for success in public city education.
Onto this tarpaulin of skepticism dribbles a temptation, a possibility. If there were a skill which a student could find valuable immediately, and which s/he could apply successfully to life as well as to school, which provided its own reward and which was consistent with our sense that the purpose of education is to teach thinking, one might still want to teach it, to teach it well. Such a program is the Life Skills Problem Solving Program.
In the school year 1989-1990 an ambitious program was begun in the New Haven Public Schools. Every student in the sixth and ninth grades has a course in Life Skills which includes problem solving, human sexuality, drug prevention, AIDS education as well as several other skills. Next year these programs will expand to include the seventh and tenth grades. The goals is to expand the Life Skills Programs to encompass kindergarten through grade twelve by 1993. The program with which I worked was the sixth grade Problem Solving curriculum. This unit is designed to supplement the city-wide Life Skills Programs.
As educators, we are accustomed to breaking material into consumable bits. The Problem Solving Curriculum does just that for the skill of solving problems. The skill is taught in six steps which can be covered in about thirty lessons. The logo for the program is a stop light, with the steps printed next to it. Step one, next to the red light is: Stop, calm down, and think before you act. Next to the yellow light are steps two through five: Say the problem and how you feel, Set a positive goal, Think of lots of solutions, and Think ahead to the consequences. Next to the green light is the final step: Go ahead and try the best plan. The lessons of the program include working on the concepts involved: What is a problem? What makes a goal positive? What kind of plan will work? One of the most useful tools for teaching this curriculum is role playing, creating small dramas to illustrate the various steps. The intent is for all students to grow comfortable with the process and to apply it to situations which occur outside of school. By applying these steps to the story of Cinqué we will demonstrate how problem solving works in a complex world.