Wednesday 6 March 2013

Solution Fluency with Lee Crockett



I am fortunate to be spending the day in a workshop in Canberra with Lee Crockett, global educational leader and author of "Literacy Is Not Enough".





Davey Crovckett - no relation

His model of 21st Century Fluencies considers the following 5 fluencies:


  • Solution Fluency
  • Creativity Fluency
  • Collaboration Fluency
  • Media Fluency
  • Information Fluency




SO, we were considering Solution Fluency, which Lee has divided into 6 steps, or phases, in a cycle:


  • Define
  • Discover
  • Dream
  • Design
  • Deliver
  • Debrief

Then we were presented with the task - build the tallest tower you can using newspaper and tape. You've probably done this with kids before.

Immediately, we grabbed for the paper and tape, totally forgot about the 6 D's, and built a tower. 

I did try to suggest to the gathered 30 or so teachers that maybe we could all collaborate, to produce one big tower, rather than several small ones. Got a few laughs - and 3 people came and joined their group to ours.


Our group very cleverly headed up the stairs to get a height advantage,
defining "tallest" as meaning "height above sea level".


Here's out final tower - something went wrong at the top.



Here's another finished product - not a bad effort.

In the final "debrief", it was interesting to see how quickly a group of educated teachers had abandoned a framework that they had been presented only minutes before. Little effort had been made to define, discover or dream, some design had happened but most of the time was spent on the "deliver".

Interesting.

What does that mean for my classroom?







3 comments:

  1. I've presented a challenging mathematics problem to five different groups of teachers (about 200 or so teachers) and so far not one person has started by drawing a diagram or creating a table of values. I wonder why people so often do not use the tools they teach others to use...

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  2. Thank you for posting. I can't count how many times I've watched this happen! I'm curious if the framework was modeled, or if a graphic organizer was provided, or was it just explained? If the process were made more interactive or concrete, I'm sure more people would have used it.

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  3. Yes - there was a graphic organiser shown to the group. And the process was explained comprehensively as well. People are funny - and teachers are the worst students!

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