Today lots of the research being performed is multi-disciplinary and requires constant collaboration. This collaborative environment needs to be incorporated into the classroom as much as possible. No one person knows everything and it takes collaboration to get a complete picture and understanding of scientific research. Learning how to work with others to achieve a goal or complete a project is a life skill that teachers need to help facilitate.

There needs to be a shift away from the memorization of facts and procedures as isolated items to learn. Students need to utilize prior knowledge and make connections on how the different topics are actually related. As teachers we need to find ways to help students make those connections so they can better apply a single concept to many different disciplines and situations.

Having access to someone that students view as an expert is important for athletics, but also in the classroom. In the classroom this takes the form of a teacher, but can also be other students in the class who may have mastered a concept. A students confidence in a teacher falls back to them believing that the teacher is an expert. Teachers do not always have all the answers, but being a knowledgeable teacher in your field is extremely important. The teacher needs to be able to guide the student through different ways of thinking to help them learn how to solve problems just like the track coach guides someone new to hurdling.

There should have been a stronger push to make the connections between the two problems that were asking the same thing. The student had just conveyed that they know how to solve the problem, but in a different context. If more of an emphasis was made to understand that they are working on the same problem they could apply the same reasoning in their head to solve other problems.

Failure should not be praised, but there is a lot to learn from failure. Students should be given chances to learn from a task they may not have been successful at the first time. Going back and learning from a mistake, can allow a student to learn a topic just as well as someone who may have gotten something correct the first time. This can be implemented in science tests by allowing a student to solve a similar problem to a question they may have gotten wrong on a test. Partial or full credit could be received if they can work through the different problem and show they understand how to solve it.

I found this concept to be relevant not only to problems that involve many steps, but also to what someone may have going on outside of your classroom. When someone has a lot going on outside of school they will be limited in their ability to work through more difficult problems. Working memory could be at a very low capacity right at the start of working on a problem due to thinking about so many other things. This can also make a problem that may be at the right difficulty level, seem too difficult to solve.