③ Transfer · Solve the problem

Phase 3 — Meet the problem

⛔ Gate check: only open this phase once students have finished Surface and Deep. This is where they transfer everything they built into a real, messy decision.

This is Problem-Based Learning. Students don't answer questions about the Progressive Era — they step inside industrial America of 1906 as stakeholders, and the teacher guides rather than tells. The whole phase runs the problem-solving and decision-making process named in §113.41(c)(31)(B).

🎟️ Entry ticket — 1-minute warm-up

Problem-solving teaching · d 0.61§113.41(c)(5)(A), (c)(31)(B)

Step 1 · Meet the Problem

Read the narrative aloud. Read it once for the story, then again for details students will need.

The year is 1906. Industrial America is booming — and breaking. Steel, oil, and railroad fortunes tower over the country, while in the cities immigrants crowd into airless tenements and children work twelve-hour shifts in mills and mines. A handful of giant trusts set prices that farmers and shopkeepers cannot fight.

Then the muckrakers strike. Ida Tarbell has laid bare the ruthless rise of the Standard Oil trust. Jacob Riis has photographed how the other half lives. And this spring, Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle has turned the nation's stomach — describing rotten, diseased meat packed for American tables. Readers are horrified; sausage sales collapse.

In the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt reads the reports and demands action. In factories and boardrooms, owners warn that heavy-handed government will strangle the free enterprise that made America rich. Workers organize. Mothers fear the milk and medicine they buy for their children.

The question cannot wait. Should the government step in to regulate big business and protect workers and consumers — and if so, how far?

First reaction (not answers yet): what did you notice? What do you wonder? Keep it open — the point is to pull students into the problem.

⚠️ Handling difficult history: the Progressive Era's real gains in regulation, democracy, and public health are taught here alongside its blind spots — deepening segregation, and the eugenics and immigration-restriction ideas some Progressives embraced — directly and respectfully as documented facts, not sanitized and not sensationalized (TEC §28.0022).

🏛️ The documented events: read the sourced account — Library of Congress · The Progressive Era to the New Era ↗ (§113.41(c)(5)(A)).

Multiple perspectives · d 0.75§113.41(c)(28)

Step 2 · Take a stakeholder role

Assign or let students choose a stakeholder. Each will reason from that person's point of view. Every role has something real at stake in 1906.

📰 A muckraking journalist

You expose the abuses — filthy factories, tainted food, ruthless trusts. What do you want the public and government to do, and how far should reform go?

🏭 A factory or railroad owner

You built jobs and industry through free enterprise. What regulation could you live with, and what would you fight as government overreach?

✊ A labor organizer

You fight for shorter hours, safer conditions, and an end to child labor. What reforms do workers need most, and can you trust the government to deliver them?

🎩 A Progressive politician (a Roosevelt-style reformer)

You promise a "Square Deal" — fairness to workers, consumers, and business alike. How far can you push regulation without wrecking the economy or losing your allies?

🧳 An immigrant worker in a factory or tenement

You do dangerous work for low pay and live in a crowded tenement. What changes would improve your family's life — and do the reformers speak for people like you?

🍼 A consumer / mother worried about food & medicine safety

You buy the food and medicine your family depends on. After The Jungle, whom can you trust, and what protection do you demand from government?

Problem-based learning · d 0.53§113.41(c)(31)(B), (c)(28)

Step 3 · Hunches → Know → Need-to-Know

Build three shared columns on chart paper. This identifies the problem and plans the inquiry — the first moves of §113.41(c)(31)(B).

💭 Hunches	✅ Know (from the text)	❓ Need to know
Our guesses about what is happening and what each side might do.	Facts we can point to (it's 1906; trusts dominate industry; The Jungle exposed unsafe meat; Roosevelt wants action; owners fear regulation).	Questions we must answer — What did the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Acts actually do? What was child labor really like? Which reforms passed, and which failed? Who was left out?

Turn "Need to know" into the H of KWHL: How will we find out? (which sources, whom to consult). Record it — this is the class's research plan.

Transfer strategies · d 0.75§113.41(c)(28)

Step 4 · Inquiry & investigation

Groups pursue their "Need to know" questions using vetted sources (see the facilitator guide for suggested public-access sources). Students gather and use valid information, applying the source routine they practiced in Phase 2. Keep filling the Learned column of KWHL as answers come in.

Teacher-as-guide moves: answer a question with a question; point to a source, not the answer; ask "How do you know?" and "Whose view is missing?"

📚 Investigation sources: LoC · Progressive Era collection ↗ · LoC · Immigration & industrialization ↗ · National Archives · DocsTeach topics ↗ · National Park Service · Theodore Roosevelt ↗. Full list + how-to in the facilitator guide.

Weigh & choose · d 0.75§113.41(c)(31)(B), (c)(28)

Step 5 · Propose & defend a solution

From their stakeholder's point of view, each group develops a recommendation for whether and how far the government should regulate big business in 1906 — and to protect whom — and defends it with evidence. Assessment happens throughout the process, not only here (the reasoning is the point).

Groups present an 8-part problem/solution brief (poster, slides, or spoken):

Title & group members (and your stakeholder role)
What is the problem?
Why is it a problem — and for whom?
Who are the stakeholders?
Options we considered (advantages & disadvantages of each)
Our recommended solution
The evidence and sources behind it
How we'd know if it worked

Evaluation & reflection · d 0.75§113.41(c)(31)(B), (c)(5)(A)

Step 6 · Debrief & metacognition

Close the loop — the evaluate step of the problem-solving process. Discuss across roles so students hear how the same question looked from every side.

Did our solution address the real problem — the balance of economic freedom and public welfare — or just one side of it?
Did we use evidence from more than one source? Whose point of view did we still miss?
How did the question look different from another stakeholder's chair — the owner's, the immigrant worker's?
Transfer & analyze the reforms (c)(5)(A): knowing what followed — the 1906 food and drug laws, the initiative/referendum/recall, the 16th–19th Amendments, but also the reforms that excluded Black Americans — how do you now judge the Progressive answer? Where else does this decision-making process fit today?

Connect to today & to the standards: societies still weigh economic freedom, public welfare, and the reach of government when they regulate. Name the steps students just used — identify, gather, list options, weigh advantages and disadvantages, choose, implement, evaluate — that is §113.41(c)(31)(B).

🧑‍🏫 Facilitator guide & sources ✅ Assessment pack

🎫 Exit ticket — check yourself

‹ Phase 2 — Deep Unit home

Aligned to (not reproduced from) 19 TAC Ch.113 §113.41; effect sizes from Visible Learning MetaX. The Meet-the-Problem narrative is a teaching fiction grounded in the documented events of 1906.