Teachers, solve your problems first please!

By Wendy Wu
EDI 600 Psychological Foundation of Education
School of Education
Long Island University, C. W. Post
April 10, 2010

Once, you came to your classroom with very low emotion. Although you already planned a very active class, you couldn’t carry them out because you had had a fight with your boyfriend last night. You just read the textbook with your soul wondering over in the air and your thoughts still arguing with your boyfriend.

Nobody can avoid having problems. When our students have problems, it’s our responsibility to teach them how to solve the problems. However, as human being, teachers must have problems no matter who they are; no matter how professional they are. These problems may come from every aspects of your life, you should solve your problem first, and then you can teach your students how to solve their problems.
There are three common types of problems: well-structures problems, ill-structured problems and issues. It’s better for us to realize the existing of problem, no matter what kind of the problem is. According to our peregoy, problem finding depends on curiosity, dissatisfaction with status quo.

After we find out what the problem is, we can represent the problem based on our prior knowledge and the worked out examples which are familiar with the present problem. The third step is to collect all the relevant information about the problem, which can help us to analyze the problem very well, or we can divide the complicated problem into pieces of simple ones. Now, we can formulate and carry out a solution, which means we can study worked examples, solve the simple problems first, and then solve the harder ones. Last but not least, evaluate the solution. Ask yourself these questions to evaluate: what kind of the problem is? Did it happen before? Did I solve it? Yes or no? Why I can or cannot solve that? What kind of solution did I carry out? What can I learn from this problem solving process?

As I have said, we teachers are human being, we cannot avoid having problems, but we should be professional and we should not be influenced by our emotion especially when we are having classes, because we are role models of our students. We should set a positive model for our students to motivate them to solve their problems.