Problem-Based Learning: Turn Your Brains Inside-Out, Teachers

In our group's division of labor for the PBL project, I ended up writing the initial "poorly-structured question." It sounded like an easy enough job at first, but it ended up being a bit more complicated than I'd expected. It basically boils down to two steps: first you describe the overall situation, then you describe the students' role in it. The first part is pretty simple with a little bit of creativity (and if you're taking it from a real problem, that's sometimes not even necessary), but the second part is definitely the more challenging of the two. It's not always easy to come up with a way to justify students' involvement in a larger issue; either you go into a lot of detail and end up actually giving things away about the solution, or you don't give enough information and leave students confused. A humorous take on it might work in some situations (like the teacher getting his students involved in the rocket industry by putting on a funny hat and claiming he was an engineer), but for more mundane situations (our group is working on cleaning up garbage and making a "greener" Milwaukee) a more serious take is needed.

The inside perspective

Earlier this week was my scheduled day to meet with my Little Brother (for Big Brothers and Big Sisters). It was pretty awkward for a while - it was only our third meeting, and we're still looking for things that we have in common; I, great conversationalist that I am, spent most of the time feebly groping around for something to talk about. Naturally the old questions about school crept into our discussion (he's in seventh grade). I was surprised (for some reason) to hear a familiar concept pop up: his science teacher is using Problem-Based Learning. It was actually pretty similar to the example that Lady-From-The-Future used in the video we watched on Monday, except that instead of "the water looks funny," it was "the trees in this area keep changing out of season." Students were tasked with figuring out possible causes and solutions.

As for Lil' Bro's reaction, he said it was more interesting than most of the stuff they did in class, although he does enjoy the class overall because there's a lot of hands-on work (and he gets to dissect things and pretend he's Michael Myers - don't ask). He did mention some initial uncertainty and frustration, however. Apparently his teacher didn't initially give the class very much information, aside from the prompt I already described. The result was that a lot of students didn't know where to start and felt completely overwhelmed at first; it wasn't until individual students went after the teacher with questions that she turned around and gave the students a few more pointers about how to succeed. There was no initial brainstorming of ideas and possibilities on the board, the way we did in class and saw in our examples; she'd apparently intended to leave that sort of thing up to the students, when they really could have used a little guidance. As we can see, it's important to provide some degree of scaffolding for your students before you expect them to dive headlong into their work.

Growing up in West Bend, one of the more conservative zones in southeast Wisconsin, I didn't really have any encounters with homosexuality as a concept until I entered high school. It wasn't that there was some institutionalized effort to portray it as something bad; we just didn't talk about it in school. Ever. Well, there was one way we talked about it - as an insult, among ourselves. If you were one of the dorky unpopular kids in the class (like me, naturally,) "fag" was one of the names you'd get called - usually by people who didn't know, or care, what it actually meant. Although people like the school guidance councilors were willing to discuss the subject if you approached them (so said a couple of my friends), we were never informed of that fact as a class - if we didn't go in and ask about it, we would have been none the wiser.

The situation didn't really change all that much in high school, at least officially. Teachers still didn't talk about it much; if gay students wanted to find help, they would have to do it on their own. What did change was the status of the students themselves. In high school there was a surprisingly large community of homosexual students - people who had never officially come out, but may as well have because everyone knew about them. Several of my friends were in this group (I still remember my initial reaction: "what? is gay? That can't be; he's too normal!") and thus, I had an inside look at their status. They suffered the same kind of backlash you might expect - the name-calling, the anonymous death threats, the parents calling them up to shout at them to stay clear of their kids - but this student-formed group made it all so much more bearable than it would have been otherwise.

What they all agreed on, of course, was that things would have been better still if they had done it sooner - in middle school, when they were still afraid even to talk about it, and didn't know about each other. Perhaps some more openness at school would have changed that.

And now for something completely outdated

I'm in something of a weird situation right now (don't ask), so this is the blog I intended to post three weeks ago but never did. Those looking for something fresh and relevant should probably go elsewhere.

We ran into some issues with our group project, mostly caused by the fact that we had one student (me) who didn't live anywhere near the campus, giving us exactly one opportunity outside of class to meet up and discuss what we had done. While my three compatriots were able to meet independently, my group contribution ended up being to simply send an e-mail off to them, telling them what I had done. Which might very well have been all I could do, of course, but it wasn't exactly conducive to a cohesive presentation - while I was up there on stage droning away, I couldn't help feeling like my information didn't always match up with what the others had done. Awkward.

The actual research, on the other hand, went very well. I'd been expecting to have a lot of trouble finding ways to get parents involved in school life. Instead I discovered that there was an entire organization dedicated to the subject; it had come up with a comprehensive list of the different areas of parental involvement, as well as the logic behind them - something I probably wouldn't have thought to include on my own.

Backseat Drivers

Our group's focus is on dealing with resistance towards our teaching or our curriculum from parents or administrators. It actually crosses over with one of the other CURRINS classes that I'm in right now, where we talk about censorship from various sources. Given the makeup of the country we live in, it's not too difficult to see where teachers would run into parental objections to their lessons, particularly in English classes - the list of banned books is a mile long, with new challenges coming up all the time from parents and special-interest groups who fear that we're going to "corrupt" their children.

As always, there are two sides to the issue. Parents should have a right to have some say in what their children are taught. But at the same time, some parents are bigots or morons, and catering to the lowest common denominator by allowing them to dictate the curriculum of an entire class is hardly the way to provide a good education. Personally, I'm not inclined to give in to such demands - but simply refusing outright will lead to other problems (kids being pulled out of school, even more complaints, administrative action, and so forth). In the end, prevention may be the best method: offer a more flexible curriculum to cater to a wider range of backgrounds. If students or parents have an objection to a particular text, see if another one can be found that will still be worthwhile, and give those students the option of reading it. But whatever you do, don't allow it to disrupt the class as a whole.

Violence sells, but it's all OK if it's not your fault!

Perpetually behind schedule, I just finished reading the articles for this week. The Males article on "teen bashing" stuck out the most for me, probably because of the partial similarities between what he reports and my own experiences as a growing teen. While I agree with Males that people - and the media in particular - have a tendency to make judgments about the cause of society's downfall in order to avoid confronting the real issues, my personal experiences lean in a slightly different direction. Rather than being feeling discriminated against because I was a teen (as Males seems to suggest when he focuses primarily on the media's interest in perp's ages), I found that people tended to look down on me because of my pastimes.

I'm a professional dork, so I tended to have a lot of interests that didn't coincide with the accepted mainstream: video games, Japanese cartoons, comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, and so forth. Though I was never stuffed into a garbage can, I nonetheless saw a lot of "you're into that? Doesn't that turn kids into criminals?" reactions. Video games in particular drew plenty of negative attention, helped along by the media, who likely discovered that headlines blaming crimes on something that was popular-yet-still-fringe got lots of attention. This in spite of a general lack of useful statistical data, not to mention the frequent signs that media outlets weren't all that well-informed about the subject. (Witness the flurry of post-Columbine reports citing the game Doom as an imminent public danger, when the game was six years old at the time and most gamers didn't really play it anymore. Or fast-forward a few years to when Rockstar Games, infamous for Grand Theft Auto, announced that its next title Bully would be taking place in a school, triggering a short-lived frenzy over the upcoming 'Columbine simulator' - never mind that no information had been released about the game aside from its setting.)

This is hardly a new phenomenon - the media has long been pointing fingers at things other than the real problem. Back in the '50s, a report found that 99 percent of all juvenile criminals read comic books, but neglected to mention that 99 percent of all juveniles read them. From Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent to stories of satanic D&D cults to that infernal rock n' roll music, the thing that's popular - but not yet popular enough - will always draw fire for causing problems that have been with us all along.

Though it probably wasn't intentional, I actually found it really funny to see how well the article on puberty proved its own point. Puberty is hard for American parents to talk about, to be sure; a great example of that is given in the chapter, where the author "explains" puberty by discussing the biological changes involved in painstaking detail - for pages upon pages upon pages. It may as well have been lifted from a biology textbook, providing very little practical information for the casual reader.

Meanwhile, on the emotional side of things, much time is spent discussing the problems adolescents have because of poor teaching, but relatively little is spent discussing the problems they would have otherwise. Thus it's implying that poor teaching is the main problem they experience - that biology-textbook speeches or puritanical sermons are all adolescents get.

What would happen if better teaching was given is never really said. Perhaps we simply don't know enough at this point to make a prediction.