Building PBL Units |
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Module Seven - Learning by Doing
What can be done?
Once the problem is clearly defined, the team starts by developing a deeper and more complex understanding of the challenge. 1. Deepening Understanding The teacher has spent enough time sussing out the issue or problem so that students need not flounder about. The teacher frequently sets them in motion and points them toward some worthy sources - eye-openers, if you will - that speedily awaken their curiosity and inform them of the most important aspects of the problem. Once students have worked through several PBL units, teachers might do less of this early guidance and scaffolding, but failure to provide it on early experiences can result in serious disappointments. 2. Sussing out What's Been Done This search should include a careful review of what has been done in the past in similar situations, but we would hope that our students would look past conventional wisdom and cut-and-paste solutions, inventing some new ways of solving the problem that build upon the best ideas of the past. The skill of invention (synthesis) involves combining and rearranging the elements of something until a new version emerges that is superior to what existed previously. Synthesis and invention can be taught. If a teacher expects a class to practice original thinking and synthesis, then the class needs a toolkit of invention tools and strategies such as those discussed in the following article: "Building Good New Ideas" at http://fno.org/jun01/building.html. Take a look, especially, at the Mindware tools described toward the middle of the article.
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Return to your PBL Unit Plan and fill in sections 2 and 3.