A quick internet search on skills for which employers are looking always includes Critical Thinking/Problem Solving and Communication/Collaboration/Teamwork at or near the top. I agree 100%. These skills are not just applicable in a career, they will result in good decisions in one’s personal life involving relationships, finances, and time management. The only way to develop these skills is to practice. That is, the only way to develop the ability to communicate and collaborate to solve challenging problems is to work in groups to try to solve challenging problems by communicating and collaborating. In the courses I teach, the students invest a lot of time struggling with challenging problems in groups. The problems always require the students to reach a new level of understanding and to generate an idea in their minds that wasn’t put there by anyone else. To have an “Aha!” moment. Basically, I’m not trying to teach the students as much as I’m trying to develop them. Develop their mental strength, mental stamina, and the ability to tackle a problem that they have never seen before and have no idea how to solve. Today’s students aren’t used to this. Many students today prefer to be trained how to do a problem rather than to invest time trying to figure it out for themselves. This is not surprising because the word UNDERSTAND was recently banned from learning goals at many universities. The reasoning cited that you can’t measure understanding, but you can measure whether the student can solve a particular type of problem. In fact, with non-standardized assessment, it is possible to determine whether a student understands a concept. When students are trained to follow specific procedures to get the answer, they are flummoxed when they are given a problem that they weren’t trained how to solve. They raise their hands and say things like, “I’ve never seen a problem like this before,” “I have no idea what to do,” “How do you expect us to do the problem if you don’t show us how, you’re the teacher; that’s your job.” It may seem counter- intuitive to some, but a teacher best supports students by not jumping in to steal their struggle. Difficulty awakens the genius. The problem, as I see it, is that students are used to getting help as soon as they don’t know what to do. As a result, not knowing what to do creates stress and shame. These are unhealthy emotions that hinder the development of the student. One way to avoid stress and shame among the students is by giving them straightforward problems that they have been trained to solve. Another is to explain to the student that there is no progress without struggle and that school is the best place to practice struggling with challenging problems. Once the students understand that struggling with challenging problems is the key to their development, they have the attitude, “I have never seen a problem like this before and I have no idea how to solve it. What a wonderful opportunity to learn and develop!” These students have a lot of fun tackling really challenging problems in a group. Sometimes they don’t solve them. That’s OK. The answer is not important. It is the struggle that is important. It is important that young people develop the skills to tackle challenging problems because they will have to tackle challenging problems after they leave the university. The first time that a young person must tackle a challenging problem should not be during a job interview.