Today on the podcast: problem-based teaching. How do we prepare students for a world that’s changing so rapidly that a majority of those sitting in classrooms today will go on to hold jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t yet been invented to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet? Author Vicki Vinton, says the answer is to help build students’ capacities as critical and creative thinkers by shifting to a problem-based approach for teaching reading. In her new book, Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading, Vicki connects the practices in the book to all sorts of current thinking and trends. 

We recently sat down with Vicki to talk about her work. We started our conversation on what she sees as the need for a problem-based approach.

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See below for a transcription of our conversation:

Vicki:    Problem-based teaching and learning is actually something that's been around for a while. I think it's taken hold in STEM classrooms, it's been a while there, in math classrooms for quite some time, but I think the concept of it goes actually all the way back to Dewey. Dewey once said, "Give the students something to do, not something to learn, and if the doing is such a nature to demand thinking, learning naturally results." The idea there is if we move away from teaching kids to learn a strategy, a skill, literary elements, text structures, but instead give them opportunities to figure things out, like a problem. I think that every text, the biggest problem it poses is what is the writer trying to show me about people and life and human nature. That that's the core of the idea.
    I think there's all kinds of problems. A problem exists any time a writer says something implicitly instead of explicitly, and that could be from what the antecedent of a pronoun is — which trips kids up lots, they lose track of who's saying who, what's going on — to where something is taking place to how characters are feeling. All that are in effect problems to solve. Why did the writer choose to write it this way? What are they actually trying to tell us? I think we can set kids up in specific ways to try to solve those kinds of problems in ways that also tap into the whole notion of productive struggle, which I think, again, has taken root more in math than it has in literacy, beyond just suffering though exceedingly complex texts with grit.

Brett:    Does the Common Core approach to complex texts really prepare students for our complex world?

Vicki:    Yeah. That's something that I really talk a lot about in the book. Oh, to be blunt, I would say I don't think so. I'm not sure whether it's the Common Core standards themselves or the work that's come out, the thinking that's come out, around the standards, beginning with maybe the three or the sixth shifts of the Common Core standards, which are very focused on students learning content knowledge and building academic vocabulary.
    I would say, and I share some facts from a fascinating video in the book that show that human knowledge is doubling at just such an incredible speed that it's absurd to think that we can know everything. In fact, let's see, 1900 human knowledge doubled every 100 years, and by 2020 it's going to be doubling every 12 hours. Right now it's doubling every 12 months. So the idea that we're spending time to teach kids content k...