Abstract
This article describes the use ofproblem forumsin undergraduate professional writing courses as a technique for facilitating and sustaining learning from increasingly complex, messy, and wicked problems that are characteristic of 21st-century work. Problem forums are designed to scaffold project team discussions of rhetorical, technical, or collaborative difficulties that have unexpectedly slowed or halted their work. Problem forums are thus intended to facilitate and sustain continual learning on project teams.
Professional and technical writers today increasingly confront complex, messy, and wicked problems that are characteristic of 21st-century work (Buchanan, 1992;Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2013;Mehlenbacher, 2013;Rittel & Webber, 1973). ForJohnson-Eilola and Selber (2013), professional and technical writing is at its core a form of problem-solving work, which involves individuals and teams developing “the ability to sense a problem, diagnose what forces within a context are causing the problem, and develop and implement a change within the context that addresses the problem” (pp. 3-4). What this means forMehlenbacher (2013)is that we evaluate and reflect on our experiences during the problem-solving processes. At the most general level, this requires that we consider what worked and what did not work. If we actively engage in reflection, we will also review our experiences in the light of prior experiences for potential improvements, progress, and in terms of intrinsic meaning and effort expended. (p. 202)
To be effective problem solvers, in other words, professional and technical writers must continually build opportunities for reflection and learning into their processes of problem solving in addition to developing sustainable strategies for extracting lessons learned from their successes and failures to improve their collaborative work on project teams.
Implementing a flipped, or inverted, classroom in professional and technical writing courses provides a productive space for students to engage in addressing and solving complex problems while also emphasizing the need for individuals and teams to continually reflect and learn from their experiences. At its core, the flipped classroom is a pedagogical method for encouraging students to develop as self-guided learners by requiring them to read course materials, watch video lectures, listen to podcasts, or post written reflections on a course website in their time outside of the classroom, thus freeing up time in class for hands-on learning through small group discussions, problem-solving exercises, or project team meetings.Danker (2015)has argued that the flipped classroom fosters a learning environment “where students explore and make sense of their learning through active learning activities” (p. 174). Moreover, the flipped classroom encourages problem-based learning (PBL), which places ill-structured problems at the center of discussion and challenges students to develop workable solutions to them (Barrows & Tamblyn, 1980). AsPennell and Miles (2009)suggested, PBL “provides an inherently rhetorical framework” for professional writing students to engage in complex problems directly and “figure out what the situation calls for, how to do what they are being asked to do, and how to do it effectively” (p. 388).Rosinski and Peeples (2012)have noted that such an approach situates professional writing instruction “within open-ended, indeterminate, messy problem spaces” (p. 10), which in many ways simulates the types of unexpected problems and difficulties students will face in real-world work environments while also sustaining an active engagement in classroom learning.
To engage in PBL throughout the course of a team-based project, undergraduate students in my professional writing course participate in what I callproblem forumsto gain firsthand experience in working through complex problems and extracting lessons learned from these problems in order to improve their overall collaboration as a team. Problem forums are designed to provide students with frequent opportunities to engage in the messy work of articulating their encounters with unexpected difficulties throughout the development of a team-based course project. These forums are, by definition, occasions for students to reflect on and discuss—indeed, to get comfortable discussing—rhetorical, technical, logistical, or collaborative difficulties that have either slowed or halted their work as a team.
Problem forums are intended to resemble one of the most common strategies for project teams to learn and continually improve for future collaborations: postmortem reviews. While postmortems go by a number of names—such as project reviews, retrospectives, postmortem or postpartum analyses, after action debriefs, and lessons learned—their overall purpose is to aid professionals in collaboratively reflecting on the successes and failures of a particular project after it has been completed. Such reviews are valuable opportunities for teams to conduct retrospective analyses of their work processes, collaboration strategies, and use of available technologies. Importantly, postmortems are not intended to lay blame on any member of a team. Rather, they are meant to identify and assess what went right, what went wrong, and what can be improved in future projects. As such, postmortems have a number of benefits. Most obviously, they provide a diverse array of employees, managers, and decision makers a chance to learn from recent experiences and to understand what contributed to the success or failure of a project. As a written workplace genre, postmortem reviews provide teams with documented accounts of feedback that can help improve communication, collaboration, and cooperation among its members. The ultimate goal of postmortems is to facilitate team and/or institutional learning in ways that are sustainable and that benefit both the organization and its stakeholders. While discussions of success are important because they allow team members to acknowledge effective practices, team cohesion, and other characteristics valued in collaborative work, more often than not, talking about what went wrong is more instrumental in facilitating complex forms of learning and—ideally—change.
Like postmortem reviews that prompt discussions of successes, challenges, and failures of a particular project after it has been completed, problem forums are scaffolded occasions for team members to talk about real and emergent difficulties that are not yet fully articulated as problems to be solved. However, unlike postmortems or lessons learned meetings, problem forums do not necessarily take place after a project’s completion but are periodically scheduled throughout the full life cycle of a project to encourage continual learning and improvement.
Building and Sustaining Problem Forums
As it is unlikely that students have conducted or been a part of a postmortem review prior to my class, I carefully scaffold the problem forums so that they are able to both understand the purpose of the forums as well as use them as productive opportunities to learn from problems they have encountered in order to improve the way their project team collaborates on future tasks and projects. To facilitate problem forums, I begin by providing my students with a brief reminder that these forums are intended to help their team develop a language for articulating, identifying, and learning from unexpected problems encountered throughout the course of a project. A key component to holding these problem forums is consciously building and maintaining an open atmosphere that encourages participants to engage in what are often difficult conversations. In my opening remarks, I stress that our forums are primarily concerned with sustaining open dialogue between team members. They are, in other words, not intended for teams to point fingers or assign blame. Nor are they really designed to help teams conduct root-cause analyses of problems they have encountered. Problem forums are a way for teams to troubleshoot unexpected problems in order to understand how they relate in complex ways. To ensure that such talk is sustainable, I emphasize how conversations must be respectful and that the team should not aim to settle on one explanation for problems but should rather embrace a number of perspectival accounts of how problems unfolded and affected the team as a whole.
After reiterating the purpose of our problem forums, I ask that students meet with their project team for 35 minutes. In the first 5 minutes, teams collaboratively develop a brief forum agenda—what amounts to three or four talking points—that will keep their conversation focused. Teams then designate one participant to facilitate conversation and another participant to document what is discussed in the forum. These roles rotate so that all members will have an opportunity to facilitate and document at least once throughout the semester. Throughout the class session, I circulate and touch base with teams to assess if students need assistance or support to keep the conversation going.
While the most successful problem forums tend to be driven by motivated students setting their own forum agendas, many teams need a place to start. The following question-based heuristic is useful for initiating and sustaining problem forums:
Plans and Expectations: How have our initial project plans changed since our last meeting? What has prompted those changes? Did we keep our initial plans flexible enough to account for this change? Are our plans flexible enough now? How have our expectations for this project—that is, expectations of both our team’s collaboration and our intended goal—changed in the past week?
Articulated Problems: What problems, difficulties, and/or unexpected disruptions have we encountered recently as a group? As a team, how did we respond to these situations? Was that response effective? Do we anticipate that we will encounter this problem—or one similar to it—in the future? How will we change or modify our response in future situations?
Unarticulated Problems: Have we encountered any unexpected situations or disruptions that are difficult to articulate? How are our individual descriptions or accounts of these difficulties similar or different? Have you encountered any unexpected problems that you have not communicated to the team? How did you identify and/or respond to the problem? As a team, how can we address that problem now?
Team Learning: What can we learn from these problems? What can we change about our team’s plans, rhetorical strategies, established roles, collaborative process, and/or use of technology that will benefit the project and the project’s stakeholders? What lessons can we share with other teams?
This adaptable four-part heuristic is driven by the fact that we do not fully understand problems before we address or attempt to solve them. In this way, the heuristic functions as a simple way of constructing—and reconstructing—problems. Students are able to use these questions as a way to develop agendas or as a team exercise to foster deeper discussions in the forum. I have also directly used the questions to challenge students to resist reducing complex problems to a simple cause.
The heuristic value of these questions is rooted in how they occasion teams to articulate complex and difficult-to-describe problems. They also help teams take a moment to slow down and reflect on the progress of their work in ways that improve overall collaboration.Conklin (2006)went so far as to suggest that such momentary reflections are necessary if teams wish to remain effective throughout the course of a project: Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. If the necessary result of a meeting is that the participants reach shared understanding about an issue and shared commitment to a path forward, hurrying through the meeting often just means you have to do it again . . . [and] for many participants it will be an unproductive and frustrating rehash. (p. 199)
The same is true for problem forums. That is, to ensure that problem forums are productive for professional writing teams, they must be fully integrated into project development as an ongoing effort to maintain open dialogue about problems. While problem forums are a required component in my professional writing courses, I do not assign grades to them. Choosing to not grade these forums helps students understand them as less of a project requirement and more of a method for continual improvement that is shaped and reshaped to suit the evolving problems encountered by teams.
Undergraduate students in my professional writing courses are required to hold at least five problem forums throughout the duration of a crowdfunding campaign project. One team in particular encountered several difficulties at the outset. Frustrated by an initial crowdfunding project that turned out to be technically infeasible, the team brainstormed a number of new ideas that all ended up lacking either an identifiable audience or some motivating exigence that made it a worthwhile pursuit. In their first problem forum, the team addressed this difficulty head-on, noting that it seemed like all of their ideas were impossible to implement. Helping scaffold their particularly frustrating conversation, I asked them how they determined the value of these new ideas. They replied that as a result of their initial venture, which failed before even getting off the ground, they became a lot more critical of each other’s proposed ideas; the reason, they suggested, was most likely because they already felt behind on the project and did not want to risk another false start. Touching base with them later on, the team informed me that they decided to articulate several workable ideas before assessing their feasibility. Their hunch was that the initial failure was barring them from seriously considering and reworking subsequent ideas into a manageable project. Rather than spinning their wheels trying to develop a project idea free of risk, the team came to understand that the problem was less of an unmovable obstacle and more of a question that needed to be asked differently. These students, in other words, found insight into troubleshooting their own ways of working as team. Indeed, we might say that troubleshooting, as a kind of rhetorical practice, is an essential part of not only being a member of a team but of ensuring that the team continually learns from the problems it encounters.
As a way of facilitating situated learning, problem forums help teams improve how work gets done. Moreover, these forums are built to be temporary sites for rhetorical troubleshooting. Troubleshooting here encompasses a range of formal and informal diagnostic practices that allow teams to locate underlying sources of difficulty that have impeded project work. Etymologically, the notion of troubleshooting is derived from telegraph or telephone repair work, whereby highly skilled “trouble-hunters” would trace and fix damage to telecommunication lines (“Troubleshooter,” 1986). Thus, troubleshooting involves a significant amount of locating and isolating local disruptions that have slowed or halted a larger networked system. The etymological roots of troubleshooting are important to remember because they illustrate the fact that problems are not always solved in a comprehensive manner; troubleshooting involves a kind of rhetorical assessment, whereby we survey the available means of addressing a problem in order to respond in an appropriate and effective way. Moreover, this sense of troubleshooting reminds us that even complex, ill-structured problems are relative and thus differ across local situations and stakeholders. Some problems, for instance, call for quick, temporary fixes, such as patching a frayed telephone line, while others call for more extensive forms of repair work, as is the case with uprooting and rebuilding existing infrastructure. No matter the situation,Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2013)noted, “students and professionals need to be equipped with a variety of frameworks for approaching ill-structured problems” (p. 12). Problem forums, I suggest, serve as one possible framework.
To conclude, one of my motivations for developing problem forums as a pedagogical practice was to provide professional writing students with an opportunity to become comfortable with, attentive to, and perhaps even fascinated by the unexpected. My goal, in other words, was not only to help them learn ways to avoid encounters with problems, mistakes, or outright failure but also provide them with flexible ways of understanding and talking about such encounters as rich occasions for learning. Of course, such conversations are often difficult to initiate and even more difficult to sustain. Building effective problem forums is thus rhetorical work that allows professional writing teams to troubleshoot unexpected problems they have encountered or continue to encounter throughout the course of a project’s development. Unlike problematic images of the vacuum-sealed laboratory or the egalitarian public sphere, problem forums are not intended to offer professional writing teams a pristine site for rational deliberation; rather, the forums I have described here are, more often than not, exceedingly messy, contentious, and somewhat uncomfortable spaces to inhabit. But learning to build and sustain these problem forums provides us with a manageable way of both learning from our past problems, as well as generating new ways of talking about our inevitable encounters with the unexpected.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography