Problem-based lesson Reflection

As a 6th grade teacher of Language Arts and Reading I wanted the students to create an authentic model that would enhance their understanding of a problem. As part of our writing curriculum the students learn persuasive writing. The hardest part of persuasive writing for young students is to see both sides of the argument. A major problem in this kind of writing is anticipating the arguments of the “other side” and responding satisfactorily to those arguments.

To help with this process I have the students ask their parents for something that they would like; i.e. a cell phone, redecorating their room, or a later bedtime. The parents will give a list of every reason that their son or daughter cannot have what the want. The student will then try to refute every one of their parent’s objections through a letter written to their parents.

I have done this assignment in the past and have found the students have had some difficulty organizing their ideas and overcoming some of the objections. I chose to introduce a model near the beginning of the assignment to help the students “visualize” the problem.

“Visualization tools are normally used to support some kind of investigation or larger learning activity. They are not used, as are many Mindtools, to produce a final model. Rather, they are used to help learners interpret ideas of to represent ideas while conducting a study and investigation of a topic.” (Jonassen, 2006)

I chose the software Inspiration because I felt that is would be able to serve the purpose of creating a visual view of the student’s problems and as a district we have enough student licenses for all of the kids.

I teach three separate blocks of students and I first modeled an example that all of the students were familiar with; redecorating your room. We have been working with this idea since the beginning of the assignment. I modeled with each of the classes how to create an Inspiration model and how to organize their thoughts.

“To successfully solve virtually any kind of problem, the problem solver must mentally construct a problem space. A problem space is mentally constructed by selecting and mapping specific relations of the problem.” (McGuinness, 1986)

Initially, I thought that all three-class models would be the same since I was facilitating the discussion. But to my surprise each class made different choices as how to set up the model and what each objection represented.




I was pleasantly surprised at how the different classes “built” our collective model. Working as a whole class gave the students the support and scaffolding they needed to complete their own personal models to overcome their parents objections. I felt that the students were able to better conceptualize their parent’s objections. They were able to have a better understanding of how to approach their ultimate final goal of writing a letter to their parents overcoming the objections to get what they want.

Here are some student examples:




The students used their models to help construct their argument for their parents objections. Overall I felt that it did help the students have a better understanding as how to approach their argument. They were able to group and see how many of their parent's objections were very similar to each other.