VII. Chapter 6: How Do you implement problem-based learning?

a. Fears teachers have:

i. Afraid that students might not come through when the responsibility was in their hands for defining problem statements, for coming up with solution options, and what steps to take to pursue their solution options.

ii. Control issue…you can’t control journey but you can help guide.

iii. Finding a balance between what students need to know now, teaching it, then letting students go explore and get frustrated and come back and work with their information.

b. As coaches, our role shifts from one of control of what and how students learn to one of mediation of student learning. This coaching role requires us to be as engaged in learning as our students and to develop a sense of flow in our teaching beliefs, actions, and decisions.

c. Coaching is a process of goal setting, modeling, guiding, facilitating, monitoring, and providing feedback to students to support their active and self-directed thinking and learning. Teachers do this by encouraging as much active learning as possible and by finding ways to make students’ thinking visible. Coaching breaks down into two broad processes:

i. Exposing and facilitating student thinking and moving to deeper levels of understanding—through diagnosing, mentoring, questioning, and modeling.

ii. Managing the PBL process itself in your classroom—adapting the process, using role and drama, managing group work, and monitoring student engagement.

d. Facilitating Student understanding: Teachers of PBL must coach students’ thinking, inquiry, and metacognition as students work to solve problems. This process has several parts:

i. Diagnosing: Coach must identify students’ learning needs and their level of engagement so that students don’t slide through a PBL experience without ever understanding the problem and its solution. They do this through:

1. Asking questions of students

2. Asking students to map or web their current understanding of the problem.

3. Direct instruction when students need to know some background or facts or to learn a particular skill.

ii. Mentoring: Coach seeks out and values their students’ points of view. The coach does not take over thinking for students by telling them what to do or how to think…but rather, challenges them by inquiring at the leading edge of their thinking.

1. Assign entries in student thinking logs, asking focused questions like, “What is your current understanding of [issue]? And read and respond to student responses.

2. These logs/journal entries serve as measures of student thinking, but also as assessments embedded throughout a PBL experience.

iii. Questioning: Through questioning, coaches hold students to strict benchmarks of good thinking and reasoning, including specificity, defensibility, examination of bias, and consideration of opposing views.

1. Well placed questions probe students to think further or challenge them to reconsider their thinking not only to help students consider different aspects of a problem situation, but also encourage them to become critical thinkers.

2. Questions serve to redirect students or prompt them to set goals for their own inquiry.

3. Use the Karen Kitchener’s 3 level model of cognitive processing:

a. Cognition: Students compute, read, perceive, and comprehend information.

i. What have you learned?

ii. Are you sure?

iii. What seems important here?

iv. What does this mean for our problem?

v. Do you have enough facts to suggest____?

b. Metacognition: Students monitor their own thinking process and consider appropriate strategies.

i. What, if anything, about your goals and strategies needs to change?

ii. What kinds of resources have been most helpful to you so far?

iii. Have you considered ____? (process or strategy)

c. Epistemic cognition refers to individuals’ understanding of the nature of problems and includes knowledge about the limits and certainty of knowing and the criteria for knowing.

i. How do you know?

ii. What can we know? To what degree of certainty?

iii. What is at stake?

iv. What solution fits best with the criteria in our problem statement?

d. Guidelines for questioning:

i. Actively listen to what students are and are not saying.

ii. Ask questions that require a rich response.

iii. Use all 3 levels of cognitive questioning

iv. Avoid yes-or-no questions and one-word answers

v. Pause to allow thoughtful responses

vi. Encourage and allow the conversation to reside among students as much as possible

vii. Avoid the temptation to correct immediately or interrupt

viii. Encourage support and justification of ideas—probe to extend student thinking

ix. Challenge data, assumptions and sources

x. Avoid feedback that cues students to the rightness of their statements; probe students frequently so probing is not viewed only as a cue for wrongness.

iv. Modeling: Coaches model the kinds of thinking behaviors they want their students to exhibit. Those include behaviors include:

1. Openness to complexity and ambiguity

2. willingness to engage in ambiguous situations

3. Model patience, particularly when listening to others and being open to what others are saying.

4. Talk about and model our thinking, not dispense information.

5. Respecting ideas and opinions of others through acknowledging of students’ perspectives

6. as a co-learner with students.

e. Managing the PBL Process

i. Management for coaches includes adapting the PBL process, using role and drama, managing group work, and monitoring student engagement.

ii. Coaches engage students by having them take on a role that might be unfamiliar to them. The key to role play is to learn to suspend disbelief.

iii. Managing group work:

1. Group work can help promote creative problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills as well as develop an appreciation of diversity and teamwork (Cohen, 1994).

2. Cooperative group work has also been linked with higher performance on complex, ill-structured problems (Qin, Johnson & Johnson, 1995).

3. Two challenge areas:

a. Sharing of information among students

b. Assessing performance for coaches. Assessment is accomplished through:

i. Structuring individual assessments such as review of journals or logs while students are working on the problem and planning the presentation of solutions as a group accountability.

ii. Rubrics are co-developed for scoring culminating performances…they help members of groups take ownership and be aware of indicators of quality that form the assessment.

iv. Monitoring Student engagement

1. Coaches keep an eye on disengaged students and help them re-engage the problem.

2. Identify why student disengage and encourage them to pursue an area of inquiry that is personally motivating.

v. Embedding Instruction and Assessment:

1. Embedded Instruction refers to events planned by the PBL teacher to help students explore important information related to the problem. Coaches can schedule these events to occur during the design of the problem or during the course of the problem.

2. Coaches may plan to work with small groups on such needed skills as letter writing or mathematical computation as students encounter a need to know such knowledge for locating information or solving the problem.

3. Embedded Assessments provide teachers with a sense of students’ thinking at various points in a problem sequence. They also prompt students to address relationships among important events and to learn during the problem experience.

4.

Types of Assessments