From the course: Teaching Future-Ready Students

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Overcome functional fixedness

Overcome functional fixedness

From the course: Teaching Future-Ready Students

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Overcome functional fixedness

- The way to tackle a wicked problem is to teach your students how to come up with wickedly unexpected solutions, and how do you do that? By teaching them how to break patterns. Breaking patterns, it turns out, is a really counterintuitive thing. Especially, for people who grew up learning formulas for problem solving. That's because we're not designed to break patterns. Instead, the human brain is one giant pattern recognition machine. Recognizing and using patterns is what allows us to learn from experience, including the experiences of others. We replicate patterns for future encounters to help us survive. The pattern based learning process starts early. As toddlers, we know that forks can be anything. Hair combs, airplanes, tools for shaping mud pies, props for stuffed animals, musical instruments. But after a few thousand experiences, our growing brains recognize the fork pattern, food transport module. After that, we stop using forks for anything but delivering food to our…

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