Abstract:

Stressing problems related to the job are a threat that can lead to lack of productivity, absenteeism, leaving the organisation, psychosomatic illness etc, but first of all individual suffering of various degrees. Teaching how to deal with stressing problems related to the job is therefore of central concern in continuing vocational education as well as in adult psycho-education in general.

While teaching rational problem solving steps in a fixed sequence (with possible recursions) by instruction and training, can be often a successful strategy, if a problem turns out to be a - more or less - well-defined problem after the first (problem clarifying) steps of such problem solving procedures, a lot of stressing problems related to the job are ill-defined problems, and the strategy of rational problem solving steps fails.
For ill-defined stressing problems related to the job, it seems more promising to teach cre-active procedures for integrated problem clarification and problem solving - where "cre-active" means: catching and moulding the "kairos", i.e. utilizing and creating opportunities in due time with right measure - on the base of some set of intervention categories suitable for ill-defined stressing problems. There are several promising sets of such intervention categories (cp. Mathesius & Scholz, 2014, p. 178 ff), but - as already Protagoras, the first professional teacher of adult psycho-education knew - instruction and training according to rules are of minor help in teaching cre-active skills - the suitable teaching procedure is rather a form of joint exemplary and integrated problem clarification and problem solving (individually or in small groups), where the teacher is constantly attentive to the changing "zones of proximal development" in the learner, i.e. "zones of cognitive processing where the learner is almost ready for progress on its own, but still needs a little help by the teacher to discover new chances and/or gain insight".

To illustrate such teaching how to deal with ill-defined stressing problems related to the job, a concrete study of an employee assistance project will be reported, in which 9 intervention categories were cre-actively used (5 intervention categories of type A more clearly associated with problem clarification and 4 intervention categories B more clearly associated with problem solving (i.e. stress reduction). Of course, there were not two phases of teaching by A and teaching by B, but all 9 intervention categories were used in free combinations to catch and mould the "kairos" with respect to the prevailing "zone of proximal development". The study included 100 individual teaching sessions of the sort sketched above, with an average session time of 92 minutes (A session time chronologically fixed in advance, is incompatible with the "kairological" concept of cre-activity.) A global sign that learning actually occurred with this kind of procedure usually, is that the question (on an evaluation sheet), if the learner knew after the session what to do next with regard to his/her stressing problem related to the job, was answered in 50.0% with "Yes", 47.9% answered "Roughly", only 2 answered "No".

More information on the evaluation data, the concrete intervention categories applied, and the conceptual background will be given and discussed in the complete contribution.

References:
[1] Mathesius, R. & Scholz, W.-U. (2014). Multimodale Stresskompetenz (MMSK), Handbuch, Lengerich: Pabst Science Publisher

Keywords:

Problem solving, kairos, employee assistance project, zone of proximal development.