I recently viewed an interesting TED video by math teacher Dan Meyer.  He had a very interesting  perspective on problem solving.  I am going to summarize my learning in the form of questions:

Are the problems we give students to solve worth solving?  If we present problems in a way where everything is there, we create impatient problem solving.  If all of the information is provided in advance and there is no filtering necessary, are we really providing a compelling questions?  Or rather, are we just “smoothing it out” to make it easy for students?  When we really problem solve don’t we usually have insufficient information or an abundance of information that needs to be sifted and sorted?  Don’t we have to go to multiple, reliable sources to gather the necessary data?   Do we scaffold too much for students, instead of teaching them the skills of developing their own collaborative scaffolding skills?

Watch the video.  It will certainly give you something to think about . . . .