ARE YOU TEACHING RESPONSIBLE PROBLEM SOLVING TO YOUR MIDDLE OR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS?
Updated 1/2023 Do you teach life skills such as responsible problem solving and decision-making? Do you cover the social skills and sportsmanship skills related to playing indoor and outdoor games, with your middle and high school students? This post will give you teaching ideas and resources for both of these important life skills.
Problem Solving in a Responsible Way
Consider this. When teaching students about the process of solving problems and making decisions, don’t just teach them how to solve problems but teach them how to do so in a responsible way. Help them evaluate their decisions and improve their ability to identify problems and generate solutions while also considering the moral obligations they have to those around them.
Responsible Problem Solving
You can begin with a view of the SEL Video Lesson from youtube on responsible decision-making skills. It’s short (1:05) and encourages students to think about times they have had to make hard decisions and reminds us that making good choices (like social distancing during a pandemic) is not always easy. Have students share a time that they have made responsible decisions that were not easy but benefited those around them.
- Was it easy or hard?
- Who was impacted by the decision?
- How did it impact others?
Next, use these boom cards on responsible problem-solving. They start with an introduction to the steps to solving problems. This tiered deck of boom cards starts with having students identify problems in social scenarios from a choice of four responses and then has them choose the best solutions. Students are shown the choice made by the person in the scenario and are given discussion questions to evaluate the impact of the solution. Check out the preview video below.
Not familiar with the boom learning platform? This prior blog post might help!
Active Listening and Problem Solving
Being an active listener is an essential part of the problem solving process. Problems are definitely easier to solve when both parties are actively listening to eachother!
View this video clip from the Big Bang Theory, “Sheldon is a bad listener,” 3:05 and have students generate a list of all of the listening problems that came up in Sheldon’s conversation with his roomate, Leonard.
Here are some discussion questions!
What was Leonard trying to do?
Was Sheldon listening to Leonard?
What are the signs that Sheldon is not listening to Leonard?
Why isn’t Sheldon listening to his roomate?
How is Leonard feeling about Sheldon’s lack of listening?
Both friends have a problem. Who is doing a better job of listening to the other? How does that look?
Problem Solving Issues around Conversations
Many issues and problems in our daily lives emerge from a lack of effective communication skills.
Play this deck (pictured above) of BOOM cards for identifying problems in conversations. The first portion of the deck offers multiple choice options and the second part of the deck has students fix social mistakes by writing in something else the characters could have said in the given situation.
If your students need further practice with social problem-solving, there are free downloads of comic strip templates and a problem-solving diagram to use to help students dissect social problems in my subscriber’s library. Click below to join the newsletter and access the library.
Responsible Problem Solving and Values
Being responsible is a value that guides decision making. Explore with your students the values or character traits that are important to them and serve as a backdrop for their decision making? View this short 1:16 YouTube video “Making Good Choices,” by Lessons for SEL. Discuss with students what personal values are important to them? How should these values impact the choices we make? Have students pick 5 values that they want to use to guide their decision-making, from the list below.
- Authenticity
- Achievement
- Adventure
- Accountability
- Autonomy
- Balance
- Boldness
- Compassion
- Challenge
- Citizenship
- Community
- Communication
- Committment
- Creativity
- Curiosity
- Determination
- Fairness
- Faith
- Friendships
- Fun
- Growth
- Happiness
- Honesty
- Humor
- Influence
- Inner Harmony
- Justice
- Kindness
- Knowledge
- Leadership
- Learning
- Love
- Loyalty
- Meaningful Work
- Openness
- Optimism
- Perfection
- Peace
- Pride
- Recognition
- Reliability
- Reputation
- Respect
- Responsibility
- Security
- Self-Respect
- Service
- Spirituality
- Stability
- Success
- Simplicity
- Trustworthiness
- Teamwork
- Wisdom
You mght also discuss what hard decisions students have had to make during the coronavirus epidemic. Did they have to decide to:
- do longer and more frequent hand-washing?
- practice social distancing?
- isolate or quarantine themselves?
- accomodate changes in their school routines and platforms for learning?
- not see their friends face-to-face?
- give up travel plans?
Sportsmanship & Social Skills of Games
Sportsmanship is an important character trait and it also involves social skills. I like to teach the social skills and sportsmanship issues around playing games. Cover both indoor and outdoor games as the essential social skills are similar for both types of games. Begin by showing them photos of games from the middle and high school version of the GOOGLE SLIDES sportsmanship/social skills packet. Have them pick a favorite game and generate the skills involved related to sportsmanship/social skills. Compare it to the list in the above-named packet and then read the teaching story from the packet.
Sportsmanship & Social Skills of Games
Watch the Youtube clip “how to be a good sport” by Adam Bell. It is 7:05 minutes long. Then choose any of the tiered accompanying activites from the Google slides packet of the social skills and sportsmanship of playing games. There are activities related to character traits, perspective-taking, being a sore loser or trash talker and more, so you’ll be sure to find an activity that meets the needs of your student(s). I really like to cover character traits with this unit. How we act when we lose a game tells alot about our character.
Have your students play a game that involves winning/losing such as a board game, card game or other electronic game. Then, use a self-reflection form (there is an animated one in the google slides packet) and have students check off the skills they successfully used during the game! End the session by having students generate something they can say when they win OR lose a game. such as “great game” or “that was awesome.“
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