Helping My Students Move From Overwhelmed to Confident Problem Solvers
I was selected to participate in the inaugural Teacher Leader Institute sponsored by Schools That Lead, an organization whose mission is to equip teachers to lead using the tools of improvement science to transform how schools improve from the classroom up, centering student voice, leveraging new data in new ways, and creating schools that work for the people inside them.
When analyzing my students’ progress in math, I noticed a persistent challenge: many of my 5th graders struggled to apply their multiplication and division skills when solving multi‑step word problems. They could often perform the operations in isolation, but became stuck when those skills were embedded in real‑world contexts. As new topics demanded our attention, it became clear they weren’t getting enough time or support to fully master these foundational problem‑solving skills.
To understand why, I examined the contributing factors. Some students had gaps in number sense, others struggled with reading comprehension, and many lacked fluency with basic multiplication facts. Several simply hadn’t had enough practice with multi‑step problems to feel confident. But the most significant issue was that students had not yet mastered a clear, consistent protocol for approaching word problems. Without a reliable process, they often felt overwhelmed before they even began.
After exploring different ways to strengthen my students’ problem solving skills, I decided to center my instruction around the Polya model. In How to Solve It, Polya (1945/2004) explains that true problem solving begins with understanding the problem before jumping into calculations, and that idea immediately connected to what I was seeing in my classroom. My students were often rushing to compute without first making sense of the situation. Polya’s four steps: read and understand the problem, make a plan, carry out the plan, and look back offer a simple but powerful structure that addresses exactly what my students needed to improve. Through consistent modeling, I intended to make the analytical habits of problem solving visible and explicit for my students. My goal was not only to teach them how to reach an answer, but also to explain their thinking behind each step.
With this in mind, I designed a small, testable change idea. For four weeks, I used the warm‑up portion of every math class to model a structured problem‑solving routine. Each day, I walked students through the same steps: read and understand the problem, plan a strategy, carry out the plan, and look back to check the answer. After modeling, students completed a similar problem independently. This daily repetition was meant to build confidence and automaticity. To monitor progress, students completed a weekly Friday exit ticket to show whether they could apply the routine on their own.
This approach became the foundation of my improvement cycle. I tracked student work through a change‑idea tracker and collected daily warm‑ups, exit tickets, notes on confidence, and the beginning of the year i-READY diagnostics data as a baseline. These sources helped me see not only whether students were improving, but how they were engaging with the process.
Throughout the four weeks, I modeled the routine daily and made small adaptations, such as adding visual reminders and sentence stems, to support students who needed more structure. Over time, students became more willing to attempt multi‑step problems and used the routine with increasing consistency.
When I reviewed the data at the end of the cycle, several patterns emerged. Students’ written work showed stronger reasoning, more accurate operations, and clearer explanations. Their exit tickets demonstrated steady improvement in accuracy and independence. I also saw meaningful growth in reading comprehension. Out of seven students, five exceeded expected growth based on their beginning-of-year I Ready results, one met expectations, and one maintained.
The Conclusion: A Simple Yet Transformative Idea
These results confirmed that the structured routine not only improved students’ problem‑solving accuracy but also strengthened their overall confidence and willingness to engage with challenging tasks. Moving forward, I plan to continue using the routine as part of our daily warm‑ups and gradually introduce more complex problems to help students transfer the process to new contexts. I will also provide targeted support for students who showed minimal growth and extend the routine to other math units—such as fractions, decimals, and ratios—to reinforce consistency and deepen their problem‑solving skills across the curriculum.
Luis Fernando Garcia
Luis Garcia is a fifth-grade teacher at Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools and an inaugural member of Schools That Lead’s Teacher Leader Institute.