Problem-based Learning

Is there anybody reading this who hasn't acted like a 'helicopter instructor' at some point? Sometimes, telling our students what we want them to learn is the quickest, most straightforward way to teach. In a large lecture hall or even a smaller classroom with more material to cover than time to do so, lectures, demonstrations, step-by-step explanations can make sense. Other times we hope to help students think knowledge into existence, not just receive it already formed. One of the ways we can encourage students to do this is through 'problem-based learning.' Suppose we're asked to teach an epidemiology seminar. We could present some different ways to model and explain the distribution of disease in a population. Or we could give our students artifacts from an imagined or real community in question - illness narratives, health department reports, community and patient histories, newspaper clippings, maps, and so on, and ask them to explain why one group appears to be disproportionately suffering from one or another illness. Last week, Emily, Jon, and I led a workshop on teaching this latter method. We were lucky enough to have Donal Walsh visiting our workshop. The recent incarnation of problem-based learning was formalized and developed in medical school curriculums, and Dr. Walsh played a part in that early history. At one time, Dr. Walsh reported, 90% of some medical programs' curriculums consisted of problem-based learning. However the depth this method offered came at the cost of curricular breadth; now, Dr. Walsh said, many medical schools reserve 30% of their class time for problem-based learning and draw on more traditional methods during the rest. Have your students benefited from problem-based methods? How do the challenges and rewards of problem-based learning differ across different disciplines? Stop by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) or next week's workshop or leave a post here and let us know. And if you'd like to learn more about problem-based learning check out Hans Langer's case history, be sure to check out Hans Langer's case history, which Donal Walsh created for a class he teaches and kindly agreed to share with us. - Matt