A Weekend of Good Quotes.

Upon being asked to define "Problem-based learning" for Skills for Teaching:

"PBL means Education that's a lot like Life."
- Me

A Weekend of Good Quotes.

"You must 'Want to Understand' before you get to 'Want to Help."
- Me

A Weekend of Good Quotes.

"Love isn't an Abstract. Love is an Action."
- Blue

Lee Shulman on "Communities of Learners"

From Jewish Education News, Spring 1998

"At this point, something rather revolutionary happens. That is, the teacher forgoes the dream that all the students will learn all the material."

"The six principles which appear to characterize the conditions for authentic and enduring learning in the communities of learners model are generative content, active learning, reflective thinking and practice, collaboration, passion, and community or culture." ["Community" or "culture" here indicating a supportive environment.]

"A particularly glaring problem is the eternal question of curriculum, namely, "How can we possibly teach everything we know when we have so little time?"... "Even if we have three times as much time, there would not be enough."..."The community of learners model suggests that we must be prepared to live in a world where different people have come to know different things in depth, and where they develop the capacity to collaborate with one another when there are problems to solve, problems that transcend what any individual can do alone."

Casey & Tucker's Problem-centered Learning

from Skills for Teaching, Week 10: "Problem-Centered Teaching" by M. Beth Casey and Edwin C. Tucker, for the Phi Beta Kappan, October 1994

Designing Problem-centered Lessons:

• Focus on developing the children's reasoning skills rather than on the correctness of the answers.
• Present a problem that is based on the students' interests and is meaningful to them.
• Identify the background knowledge needed to solve the problem and assess how much of it the students already possess.
• Introduce content material that provides useful background information but does not limit solutions to the problem.
• Incorporate some or all of the steps of thinking into the lesson.
• Provide hands-on activities rather than direct instruction.
• Ask the students to give reasons for their answers.
• Incorporate students' planning into the lesson.
• Provide a variety of open-ended materials that do not limit the children to one way of solving the problem.
• Make available a variety of resource books to assist in problem-solving.
• Throughout the lesson, pose additional open-ended questions that will further probe the children's thinking.
• Rephrase the questions when the students are not responding.
• Let the students explore and test their own solutions even when they do not fit your preconceived answers.
• Make the students feel successful at the end of the lesson by focusing on the strategies they have tried (even if the problem has not been "solved").

Using Materials in a Problem-Centered Classroom

• Provide a wide variety of materials in the classroom (including teacher made and found materials) and give students free access to them.
• Provide materials in the classroom that naturally pose problems (e.g., broken appliances with their inner workings revealed).
• Set up a variety of interest areas and learning centers in the room.
• Make the environment as orderly, systematic, and organized as possible. Label the shelves clearly.
• Encourage the students to find and use materials in diverse ways rather than copy one another.
• Use the walls to display students' products that document their diverse solutions to the problems you have posed.
• Display materials on the walls that pose problems directly or are written records of the students solutions.