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.