It seems that a few people have been thinking about PBL today. The first one that came across my inbox was Tomorrow’s Professor’s post and the second was from Spiral Notebook.
PBL came up yesterday in a meeting that I was in as we were talking about how the process is far more important than fact regurgitation. This is something that I have mentioned in the past as a way that we can try to help encourage transfer in courses as we have to stop thinking in silos and start thinking about education as a process that will ready students for tomorrow – not yesterday (was there ever a time that we in education thought that spitting up facts was the route to a better future?). The key to the process is as SN puts it, the project has to be something that the people involved care about (that seems to be a common theme… education and many other things in society are suffering because people don’t care anymore). In the work environment, caring is a little easier to encourage than in school. But if we can’t get kids to care in school, then how can we get kids trained in PBL? We have to be sure that the problems that we present to kids are something that connects to their world (why not ask them) and something that obviously is interdisciplinary (perhaps that is the problem with PBL, many instructors and teachers might be afraid of being shown up in their non specialty area… much like they didn’t/don’t like assignments in any other form than paper).
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