SeeSaw: What is SeeSaw?
SeeSaw is software to help you think
Solving complex problems often feels like comparing apples and oranges. You might have a compelling rationale behind one possible solution, but a completely different set of rationale for a competing solution. How can you help students compare them? Complex problems have complex answers. No single solution is always correct or even clearly the best. The problem is, how do you explore and represent the nuances of this kind of understanding?
SeeSaw is designed to help you and your students weigh alternate solutions to complex questions. It supports your thinking, helping you evaluate problems, consider key issues, and explore trade-offs. You choose the question. SeeSaw helps you to weigh alternatives through the tasks of identifying key criteria, judging their importance, and rating how they are "for" or "against" each solution. You can then "weigh" the solutions to see which solution your settings suggest is the best one. Through this process of articulating understanding and interpretations of disparate solutions, your students will gradually develop a deeper understanding of the issues at play for each solution.
How does it work?...The SeeSaw Process
The key steps involved are:
- Identify a question
- Identify possible solution(s)
- Brainstorm criteria for evaluating the solutions
- Rate the importance of the criteria
- Seek evidence about the impact of each solution
- Evaluate the evidence from your perspective
- Weigh the solution
Weighing a solution.
(Click picture to see it full size in a new window.) - Explore other perspectives
- Compare various perspectives and solutions.
Weighing and comparing all solutions.
(Click picture to see it full size in a new window.)
Learning Goals
SeeSaw can help students address many of the challenges of exploring complex problems with multiple complex solutions:
- Separate fact from opinion
- Separate their perspectives from the perspectives of others
- Articulate the relative importance of different criteria to each perspective
- Weigh the relative merits of each solution according to each perspective