Championing Education and Health for Hawaii's Youth
School Health Education
Program
Championing Education and Health for Hawaii's Youth
A service of the John A. Burns School of Medicine
Office of Medical Education
Frequently asked questions (FAQ) on
initiating PBL in the classroom
PBL in the classroom
1. How can I increase the depth of coverage of learning issues by students?
Suggestion: Use of teacher prompts is helpful to probe understanding and to encourage students to pursue issues in sufficient depth to add to their understanding of the subject matter. Also, on-going learning issue lists (posted somewhere obvious in the classroom) is useful to help students realize what they were missing and to remind the class what is still pending. As their researching and reporting skills get better, they can see that the list should get shorter.
2. How can I use PBL to increase students' research skills and their use of various resources?
Suggestion: A very good strategy to emphasize one the core skills (accessing valid information) is to review where students got their information, what resources were used and why, and ask for a short critique of all sources they accessed. Even ‘junk’ sources are helpful in that it can help students with their critical appraisal skills. Students should be encouraged to mention sources they found questionable or particularly helpful and pass this information on to other students. [An added bonus also is they learn how to cite sources so other can find them in the future]
3. How can I use small groups and try to effectively monitor them all?
Suggestion: Assigning and rotating students’ roles in small groups is a useful way of allowing the groups to progress without the teacher having to be there within the group, and may allow the teacher to circulate at a slower pace. Rotating roles and providing feedback on how they fulfilled their roles will allow everyone to experience having to both talk and listen, and lead and follow.
4. What can I do about the variability of student performance from year to year?
Suggestion: Individual students as well as classes as a whole adapt and perform differently in the PBL setting. Anticipating this will help not being discouraged if one year it goes great and another it doesn’t. Trying new things sometimes helps, or asking students for suggestions may also be of some benefit, but there are times where even in the most experienced hands, nothing works as well you think it should, or did in the past, and the best strategy is to grin and bear it – there’s always the next year…
PBL Cases
1. I tried to put as much as I could into my cases to cover as many topics as possible. I this a good idea?
Suggestion: Cases which are too complicated sometimes confuses students and they aren’t sure which direction they’re supposed to take. As a result, they don’t cover anything well, or their learning issues are so superficial they aren’t very helpful. It might be better to have a few simple objectives, and save other issues for another case.
2. Students are always asking what is the REAL answer or what happened in the end – is this necessary to bring each case to a neat and tidy end?
Suggestion: We’ve found that closure is important to students; that is, having a definite end to the case, or having a ‘diagnosis’ they can make. This seems to be essential to their satisfaction with what they got out of the case, giving them a sense of accomplishment from having working through it. While it is important to stress that ‘solving the case’ is not the prime objective, but how they go about solving it (i.e., it’s the process not the outcome), they still seem to need to ‘know’ what the happens at the end.
3. It takes a lot of time to write cases – is there a resource of cases we can access?
Suggestion: We (the med school faculty) are fairly close the having some cases which we can put together for teachers who attended the workshops, and we will try to speed up the process. At present, we can put up the cases we used as examples, along with the objectives, relevant content standards, teacher prompts and short resources lists in Word format so that teachers can edit at will. We will also be asking for feedback on how the case worked, and suggestions for improvement. Hopefully this will be more efficient in the long run, and teachers can share cases with different content areas. As always, feel free to email Dr. Gwen Naguwa, if you need help with factual content and she may enlist the expertise of other members of the faculty.