If someone told me I have common sense, I would honestly take that as one of the best compliments of all time. It is a level of higher-order thinking and ‘reading the room’ that only a few people are lucky to possess. It is a combination of practical and logical thinking, as well as social perceptiveness and foresight. It is the typs of skill that can improve your work life, personal relationships and even health and wellbeing. I used to think that common sense was something you were born with, and you either have it or you don’t. Now, I think it is something that can be developed and practised. I also think it is something that we can teach. Of course, common sense for children is different to common sense for adults, but that ability to solve problems and assess situations calmly is something that be nurtured from childhood. Actually, the sooner it begins the better! So without further ado..let’s get started!
Blog Post Objective: Outline some strategies that can be used in the classroom to teach ‘common sense’ and resilient problem solving.
Definition: Common sense in the context of resilient problem solving is the practical ability to make sound judgments and decisions based on everyday experience, intuition, and situational awareness—especially when under pressure or facing uncertainty.
Model Common Sense
In my biased opinion, teachers have tons of common sense. I think it comes with the survival instinct that kicks in when you are responsible for a group of children and not only keeping them alive but also teaching them. You are always modeling something to the children, so make a conscious effort to exaggerate using common sense and explain your thought process to the children. For example: tidying up a spill, dressing for the weather,
“Common sense without education, is better than education without common sense’”
PAUSE for Problem Solving
Similiar to the teacher modelling common sense, my next strategy is all about solving common classroom problems calmy and logically, but this time it puts the responsibility on the children. So how do I do this?
Basically, I print out a large stop sign and stick it on a stick of some sort. Any time that one of these classic classroom dilemmas crops up, I hold up the stop sign and call out for everyone to stop what they are doing and ‘pause for problem solving’. We all stop on the spot, and have a group brainstorm and it looks something like this:
Teacher: ‘Oh no, Sarah just noticed that there are no more glue sticks left. Let’s all ‘PAUSE for problem solving’. What should we do? Does anyone have an idea?’
Child 1: ‘We can go to the office and get more!’
Teacher: ‘That is a great idea but we only have 15 minutes to do this activity and going to the office takes about 10 minutes. What else could we do?’
Child 2: ‘We can share!’
Teacher: ‘Yes, I like that idea. We have 13 glue sticks and 24 children. How can we share?’
…and so on and so on. It’s nothing special but it just helps me turn these situations into teachable moments and hopefully highlight the brainstorming process of solving a problem. The goal is that the children learn how to solve these problems by themselves, so the next time there is not enough glues, they manage to figure it out without asking for the teacher’s help. Maybe wishful thinking but maybe not. The idea is to explicitly teach the skill and put a system in place to train the children into the habit of solving problems with common sense.
Build Emotional Awareness
I am a chronic people pleaser and over thinker, so I don’t necessarily want to teach the children to overly consider other people all the time at the expense of themselves. However they do need to be able to understand social situations and the consequences of their actions on their peer relationships.