Mini Training Series: Ep 4 Teaching Problem Solving Skills

Hi, this is Sasha from The Autism Helper, and in this episode of our mini training series, I'm going to talk about how to teach your students to become problem solvers. The only way your students are ever going to become problem solvers is if they run into problems, and that means creating situations in your classroom on a regular basis where they don't know what to do. So this might mean that you have to get a little creative and do a little sabotage, but that's okay. It's not being mean and it's not setting your kids up for failure. It's giving them the chance to practice the skill of solving a problem. This is such an essential life skill. When we want our kid— when we think about our kids growing up and being adults, in order to function in everyday life, have a job, live outside the house, go to and from a job, there are going to be situations where we're unsure of what to do. And as teachers, even as teachers of young students, we wanna start to prepare our students by slowly teaching the process of how to solve a problem. So if we think about the end goals we have for our kids, whenever I ask teachers, you know, where do you see your kids, students in the future, in 20 years, in 10 years, What's that kind of global goal? What I hear all the time is independence, independence, independence. And in order for your students to become independent, they're gonna have to be problem solvers. So in the meantime, you're gonna have to get a little bit mean sometimes and create those problems for them to solve. So when you start off on this process, you wanna look at the entire setup of your classroom and where your classroom is at right now. How well your staff's working together, what level of behavior problems there are overall, what the needs of your students are before deciding to jump in. You don't want to have all of these behavior problems and staff challenges and then be like, "Hey, we're going to implement a bunch of Plan problems," because that's kind of going to be a recipe for disaster. Look for areas of your classroom and specific students that are having a lot of success. And I'm not saying that in a mean way like, "Oh, they're doing really great, let's trip them up." But look for students that are doing really great and are ready for the next challenge. That's what you want to think of this as— students that are ready for the next challenge, or parts of your day that you're ready to up the ante with, or staff members that are really doing really well and understanding a lot of the processes you're teaching them and are kind of ready to help you take on this endeavor. So kind of look at the needs of your class and what areas you can kind of instigate some of these communication opportunities. Problem solving is really all about communication, and we want to teach our students to communicate and advocate for themselves when solving a problem. So you want to start off by contriving some small problems because these are things that you can orchestrate and you can make sure that your student can handle. These can be small problems first, and they should be small to start with. So things like giving a juice box without a straw or a set of paint without a paintbrush. Giving missing items are a great way to encourage communication and really motivate communication in that moment and not always have a student waiting for someone to give them something. So they're, you know, advocating for themselves that something is missing. Missing items are a great way to do that. Other potential problems students can run into are getting the wrong items. So maybe you give Stacy Tyler's folder and just walk away and see what happens. Giving non-preferred items or forgetting items on the schedule or forgetting what day it is, if there's gym today or music today. Let your students correct you because in life sometimes that happens. People make mistakes or make errors and you have to learn the skill to politely correct them without causing a big issue. So look at your day and look at kind of typical situations that you can just tweak a little bit to give your students the chance to run into that problem. And this isn't something that's one and done. This isn't something that should be just done once a month or once a quarter. This really needs to be almost every day. Think about how often you or I run into a problem. Probably every day, right? Not every day, every single thing goes exactly how we planned. When we do have those days, we're like, "Oh my gosh, everything went perfect today!" Those days are more rare than days when those little hiccups occur. So think of these as little hiccups that you can just insert into your student's day. Remember, the more often they have— our students are going to have exposure to problems and solving the problem, the better they're going to get at it. So it's all about repetition and lots and lots of opportunity. This isn't a skill to memorize. This is a skill to learn in situ and learn what concepts I can pull from and how I can reference previous problems. When you or I solve problems, typically we think back to a time where something similar happened to us and how we solved that issue. So if we're giving our students this big arsenal of events that have happened to them, we're giving them more life experiences to pull from when they solve future problems. So once you've gotten the idea of setting up some of these small problems within your classroom, the most important part is how you respond when these problems occur. Because the last thing you want to do is rush in immediately and be like, "Wait, here's your ketchup for your chicken nuggets," or, "Here's that missing paper I didn't give you," because that would be solving the problem for your student. So how do we respond when these problems occur? We want to first give that wait time, and this is something that a lot of us forget. I forget that all the time because I'm always moving way too quickly, trying to get way too much done in a short period of time. So, when I'm in get-it-done mode, I oftentimes end up over-prompting students just because I'm trying to get stuff done. So, really think about giving the wait time the processing time that your kids need to think through what to do next. It might not be an immediate reaction or an immediate response of, "Oh, I should go ask for this," or, "I should go look for my folder," or, "Oh, I see everyone's at the carpet. I should go to the carpet." Give that time for them to figure it out on their own. If students need some help and aren't figuring it out yet, there's a few options of some ways you can help them find the right answer. So some ways are modeling the correct response. This is great for our visual learners to see what the correct action is. Oftentimes us telling them what to do isn't as powerful. So if we think of how essential visuals, visuals are in our classroom, visuals means our actions as well. So it's not just Boardmaker pictures, it's seeing what people are doing. So modeling is a great way to show exactly what the student should be doing in that situation. For your students with more verbal skills, you can help talk them through the problem. Help remind them of similar situations they've had and how they solved that one. So, so showing that association of, "Oh, remember last week when you forgot your lunch? What did you do then?" So you're not giving them the answer, you're just leading them to it. That can be a really successful strategy as well. Also, giving students options again might help kind of lead them to that right response without just giving it to them, because the goal here is independence. We don't want our students to always rely on us. None of us have dedicated our lives to following our kids around forever, unless you are a parent, um, but even then you want your kids to be independent. You don't want to be with your kid at the job site if you're a parent, And as teachers, at some point your kids are going to go to another classroom, another school, and we want these skills to generalize and to maintain. So we want our kids to be able to figure stuff out on our own without us being there. One important thing to remember when looking at this whole process of setting up problems and helping our kids walk through these problems is you want to make sure to get your whole staff on board. This is absolutely never going to work if you are the only one trying to do this because first of all, your staff will think you're crazy and kind of mean. And second of all, your staff will be inadvertently jumping in and helping solve these problems because they're just trying to help and they don't know that there's a method to the madness and you've been doing this on purpose. So sit down with your staff and really explain the reasoning behind this. For some staff members, they might be immediately on board and be like, this is great, I'm all about this. Other staff members might need a little bit more convincing and kind of seeing that big picture purpose. Some staff members are so hardworking that they accidentally over-prompt a lot. Just like the example I gave with teachers, our staff do that too. They're just kind of worker bees and doing stuff all the time. So those staff members especially want to really help and encourage to give that wait time and explain the process and the goal here. The goal is not for the adult to hang up all the coats, it's for the students to hang up the coats. And if someone's coat is on Johnny's hook, he's got to figure it out on his own where to put his coat or what to do with the coat on his hook. We're not going to be following him around for the rest of his life making sure there's no coats on Johnny's hook. So give a lot of these examples and explain that long-term goal. For our younger kids, that's harder to see because we think of these, you know, 4, 5, 6-year-olds who are really cute, and it can come off sometimes as being mean. "Well, I just want to help Johnny find the right spot for his coat. I feel bad for him." But explain that, yeah, Johnny's really cute as a 4-year-old, but not knowing where to put your coat because someone else's coat is on there at 24 isn't so cute. We want Johnny to have these skills on his own. So really take the time and engage your staff in a meaningful discussion about this, because if you don't have them on board, this really isn't going to work. Once you get them on board, have them be involved in this process too, so you aren't the only one setting up these little hiccups throughout the day. They are as well, and teach them the methods for talking students through the problems and how to prompt appropriately in these situations. So I really want your mantra to be, "If I want to teach problem-solving skills, my kids have to run into problems." And I want this to kind of keep coming up in your thinking, in your lesson planning, in the day-to-day procedures in your classroom, and really make this part of the way you interact with your students. Problems will naturally come up, or you might set some up, and that's okay. The way we respond is really going to give our kids the opportunity to learn the skill of solving a problem, which is one of the most essential life skills you can teach your kids. So some caveats on this, like I mentioned earlier, you probably don't want to try this with a student that is having a lot of challenging behaviors because they might not be ready for this type of challenge yet. And if you're having a lot of difficulties within your classroom schedule or you're working on staff training, things like that, this is maybe something to put on the back burner and wait till things are smoothed out a little bit. But for students or parts of your day that are going really well, this is really important to kind of input into your classroom so kids can start to learn this skill. If this is something that you're well-intentioned on doing, but you're constantly forgetting— that's something that happened to me all the time in the classroom. I'd be like, I have all these big plans and all these great ideas, and all of a sudden it's December and I haven't done any of it. If this is something that you're forgetting about, Write it into your lesson plans, write it into your daily schedule, really have your staff on the same page as you and, you know, encourage them and ask them for help on setting these things up and reminding you to do this as well. 'Cause this is something that even though we all agree can be so great for our kids, we might forget to do on a regular basis. And again, the key here is regular basis. We want frequency on this, we want consistency on this, we want a lot of opportunities. When our kids do engage in appropriate problem-solving skills, we need loads and loads and loads and loads of reinforcement. We want to have a party and get so excited and provide genuine praise and preferred items for our students when they engage in this skill because the skill of solving a problem can be hard. So we want to make sure we're matching that reinforcer with the challengingness of that skill. So really make sure to think about that also. Over time, increase the complexity of these small changes. Make them bigger. Make them things that are a little more complex. Pull back your prompting over time so our students can get kind of better and better at this skill. Start to give those little hiccups or small problems in the playground, in the cafeteria, outside of the classroom where things are a little more unsure and there's more going on. Overall, the goal is teaching our kids to be problem solvers. Which means they're gonna have to run into problems. I'm sounding like a broken record, but that's okay. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of our mini video training series. We've done 4 of these so far, so if you haven't checked out the other ones, be sure to check out our YouTube channel and see all the other episodes. 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