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.