Module 3 - Hunches, Questions and Stakeholder Groups

Hunches, Questions, and Engagement, Oh My!

Now that you have crafted your problem engagement, you are almost ready to introduce it to students. In this section, we're going to model what happens as students work their way through the part of the Problem Flow known as Hunches, Questions, and Stakeholders.

As we begin this section, the goal is to provide students with access to the problem narrative. This is where they actually "Meet the Problem."

To accomplish that, follow these steps:

a) Give students the narrative or project it on the wall using a document camera or digital projector. Or, you may pass out copies of it. After reading it together, say to them, "In order to help them, let's share what our hunches are about this situation, what we know, what we need to know to help the person/people in this situation."

b) Your next step is to enlist the help of students in solving that problem. To get them interested, you've engaged them with the "Meet the Problem." Your next step is to get students to share their hunches about this problem. Essentially, what guesses can we make about what is happening in the story?

Write these hunches/guesses down on your whiteboard, type them up in a word processor on the screen, or on a wiki page (what we will be doing). Label the column "Hunches."

Now that we've created a list of hunches, let's focus on what we know about the situation. Create a new column on your projection device (e.g. whiteboard, document camera) and label it "KNOW."

In order to help the person/people in this problem, based on our reading of the problem, what do we KNOW for certain? These are "in the text" questions that help us list the facts.

Finally, in a column labelled "Need to Know," write down everything students agree on that they need to know about the problem to provide help or assistance to those affected by the problem.

What do we need to know about this problem that we don't know? Use your map of possibilities to help guide YOUR understanding (as teacher). List all the questions.

Take a moment to look at the problem narrative. With your students, ask yourselves, "Who are the stakeholders in this problem?" You may have to explain the concept of stakeholder. This is essentially anyone who has invested time, money, effort in a situation. Your goal is to divide the class up into the stakeholder groups.

Once students have asked these questions, prepare to take 2 additional steps shown below.

Step 1 - Work with students to organize questions according to stakeholder group.

Step 2 - Prioritize questions within

e) Now students, who are the stakeholders in this group, the people to whom this matters? Obviously, there's the person suffering the problem. But there are also others. Tease out of the discussion who these stakeholders are and write them up on the board/chart.

f) Ask students to help you sort questions--need to know--into the different stakeholder groups. "Ok, now we're going to divide up into these stakeholder groups so we can develop a solution from a stakeholder's particular perspective."

Assignment:

Using the submit assignment, fill out what this might look like for the Immigration issue. Introduced in Meet the Problem.