James A. Whitson, John St. Julien, and
Eugene Matusov, University of Delaware
What advice
would we have to offer on how to design effective problems for use in
pre-service teacher education classes? What would we say are the most important
characteristics of well-designed problems? Are there problems that have proven
effective in our classes that we could share as examples, or as “model”
problems for using Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in teacher education classes?
We have been
asked such questions since we became engaged in a PEW-supported project to
transform classes using PBL in the Elementary Teacher Education (ETE) program
for undergraduates at the University of Delaware (Matusov, St. Julien, and
Whitson, 2001). Although we are pleased to promote more widespread use of PBL,
and we are always happy to share our experience with others embarking on such
efforts, our experience leads us to question the basic understanding of
Problem-Based Learning which seems to be presupposed by a focus on exemplary or
“model” problems and their characteristics (cf. Duch, 2001, pp. 48-49).
This focus on
the characteristics, the design, or the structure of effective PBL “problems”
is understandable, as a casual and convenient way of discussing common concerns
in the implementation of PBL-style instruction; but our experience leads us to
question whether this focus, and this way of talking about PBL, might also
tacitly presuppose a way of thinking about PBL that needlessly limits its
usefulness, and may even obscure its most basic and powerful underlying
principles.
Two courses in
our project made use of a problem that has become a standard reference at our
university, the Plea Negotiation Problem developed by Dr. Valerie Hans for a
course in Criminal Justice (Hans, 2001). As she originally designed it, this is
a problem that the undergraduates in her course work on over a number of weeks,
in groups of four students, each taking the role of a prosecuting or defense
attorney, a passenger who survived an automobile accident in which her husband
and her unborn child were killed, or the defendant whose driving allegedly
caused the accident, and who was tested as being over the legal blood alcohol
level, with a previous record of Driving Under the Influence. (Of course,
students are not told that he did cause the accident or that he was
over the blood alcohol limit; what they have to work with are the police
reports, testimonial and other evidence, etc., just like in an actual case.)
In a truncated
form, this problem has been used successfully as an introductory PBL experience
at weeklong institutes for faculty, where students who had taken the
undergraduate class also shared their reflections on the effectiveness of this
PBL problem in their course. We used adaptations of this problem in different
sections of two courses being revised within our teacher education program,
with varying success (as discussed in Matusov et al., 2001).
We have
concluded that the effectiveness of the problem in our classes was not
determined solely by the quality of the problem itself, in terms of its design,
substantive relevance, or other characteristics of the problem. Success was
determined, rather, by whether or not the students “owned” the problem as
a real problem for them, as the problem with which they really were
engaged. In some sections, this happened. In other sections of our courses,
although students were indeed working on the problem as a class
assignment, the problem they were actually engaged with was the
“schoolish” problem of how to complete this course requirement with an
acceptable grade for this assignment. Instead of asking themselves and each
other questions arising from the “authentic” problem (such as “What charges
could I bring against this defendant under our state’s criminal code?” or “Can
I find precedents in the case law reports that will help me defend my client
against some of these charges?”), students were asking their instructor more
familiar “schoolish” questions, such as “how many sources do we need to get
from the Internet for this part of the assignment?”
We would argue
that our students taking the more “schoolish” approach were no less engaged in
problem-based learning. They were learning (but perhaps not what we were hoping
they would learn), and their learning had its basis in the problems they were
actually engaging in (again, even if these differed from the problem or
problems we intended as the focus for their efforts). The question is not,
therefore, whether the learning that occurs will or will not be problem-based.
The question, rather, is whether the problems actually determining what the
students learn will be, in fact, the “authentic” problems intended by their
instructors, as opportunities for acquiring intellectual and practical
abilities that have real value in the world outside of classrooms, or whether
those “authentic” problems will be preempted in the students’ minds by the
kinds of “schoolish” problems that they have been trained to deal with in their
past careers as students.
The principle
that all learning is problem-based can be seen in Dewey’s expositions of
the “problematic situation” as the impetus and context that prompts and determines
meaning in all logical inquiry (Dewey, 1938/1986; Garrison, 1999; Field, 1996).
Once we see that the question is not whether learning is to be or not to be
problem-based, but instead whether student learning will have its basis in
“schoolish” or “authentic” problems, then the question of how to understand the
“authenticity” of problems becomes crucially important.
The PBL
literature is replete with references to “authentic problems,” “real-life
problems,” and simply “real problems” (e.g., Torp and Sage, 1998, pp. 6-11).
David Lewis suggests “focusing problems on current events, student lives, or
relationships to actual occurrences at the local, national, or international
level,” and notes that “basing instructional problem on existing problems not
only helps students see the relevancy of their activity, but helps them develop
an appreciation for the way in which professionals analyze, design, and develop
solutions to their problems” (Lewis, 1996).
Although such
characteristics of the PBL problem are undoubtedly important, our experience
leads us to conclude that authenticity in PBL cannot be assured solely on the
basis of such characteristics of “the problem” itself. No matter how realistic
the problem is, in this sense, as designed by the instructor, it is
still possible that the problem, as it is being worked on by the students,
could be transformed by more familiar schoolish strategies for negotiating
course requirements.
Such
transformation of the problem, and consequences for student learning, can result
when students persist in practices habituated over years of schooling; but we
have also seen this happen where the students were more actively rejecting
substantive presuppositions that were built into their instructor’s
construction of a problem. In a course on strategies for teaching elementary
school classes, students were given the roles of a variety of specialists to
work in teams on the problem of devising inclusive curricula that would
accommodate the special needs of diverse students in an elementary school
classroom. Difficulties arose in the use of this PBL problem, however, because
the college students working in these teams had not bought into the idea of
inclusive curricula as a preferred way of dealing with such situations. It
turned out that many of the college students viewed the situation as one
involving problems best addressed by tracking and one-on-one tutoring; and
their role assignments actually precluded them from dealing with what they saw
as the real problems in this situation.
These teacher
education students performed their roles and completed their assignments, but
it became clear that they were engaged in what they saw as satisfying their
instructor’s arbitrary and unrealistic course requirements. In a crucial sense,
it did not matter whether or not the instructor had designed this PBL problem
in a way that “authentically” reflected how such problems would or should be
addressed in the “real world.” Either way, the students did not recognize or
engage in dealing with it as an authentic problem. Since then, we have learned
to use PBL more effectively, by “working with students’ concerns and visions rather than struggling against them” (Matusov et al.,
2001, p. xx). The critical question that has to be addressed by the instructor
to make the problem “authentic” for the students is why these students should
be engaged in the offered problem here and now.
Even the most realistic use of problems that
could be encountered in daily life, calling for decisions on a course of action
in the “real world” outside of the school or university, might not be enough to
qualify a PBL problem as “authentic” in the sense discussed above. On the other
hand, such relevance to practical decision making in occupational or daily life
roles may be an unnecessarily limiting qualification to impose on problems for
use in PBL. We have heard mathematics teachers say that, although PBL could be
used for teaching the more applied areas of mathematics, there are vast and
fundamentally important topic areas within the mathematics curriculum that
could not be taught using PBL. One mathematics education professor has
commented that, although these topics can be powerfully taught by using real
mathematics problems, those problems would not be “authentic” in the sense required
for PBL.
We see this
limiting conception of “authenticity” as a possible reason for the limited
range of disciplines or curriculum areas in which PBL is being implemented. The
Bibliography of the Australian Problem Based Learning Network (1999)
might serve as an indicator of the interest in PBL in different fields and
disciplines. Although the Bibliography includes a “general”
category, the overwhelming preponderance of entries for the more than twelve
hundred articles are in technical or “applied” areas, in categories ranging
from Agriculture to Engineering, Fashion Retail, Optometry, Police Services,
and Veterinary Science.
It
would appear that instructors in technical or occupational areas have more
easily seen how PBL can be appropriate and useful for their purposes, while PBL
has not caught on so well with faculty in liberal arts subjects such as history
or literature. The idea of “authenticity” as a matter of resemblance to
problems actually encountered in contemporary daily life appeared as a stumbling
block particularly in our course on teaching social studies in the elementary
grades. Pre-service teacher education students had no problem with the standard
PBL model for learning how to deal with realistic problems such as those they
could expect to encounter in their roles as classroom teachers. It was more
difficult, however, for them to see how they themselves could use PBL as an
approach for teaching history and other social studies subjects at the
elementary school level.
“Authenticity”
can be understood in a way that is, at the same time, too limiting, and yet not
demanding enough, as a necessary quality of problems used in PBL. It is too
limiting if it excludes the use of problems that people outside of classrooms
really care about and struggle with (including, for example, problems for
historical, literary, or mathematical understanding), where these problems may
call for judgments and decisions that might not be so closely tethered to the
kinds of applications featured in more technical or occupational curricula. At
the same time, even the most realistically designed problem may lack
“authenticity” in a crucial sense if it is not actually the problem that the
students will be genuinely struggling with; so the authenticity required for
PBL might not be realized as a characteristic of a problem as designed, but
could depend on an understanding of the problem (and its place within the
curriculum) that may need to be negotiated between students and instructors.
Our own
struggles with these issues are illustrated here with a number of widely
varying examples from our course on teaching social studies in the elementary
grades:
The
sweatshops problem.
After reading an article about Nike in Time for Kids, students in a New
Jersey fourth-grade class decided to research, compose, produce and perform a
play for their school that would dramatize issues of sweatshop labor conditions
at overseas factories producing products for Nike, Disney, and McDonald’s. “We thought
we could make a difference,” said class member David Mishler, after learning of
their school principal’s decision, announced just before their final dress
rehearsal, that they could perform the play in their own classroom for their
parents, but not for the larger school community. The students were not
satisfied. As fourth-grader Larry Fitzmaurice explained, “Performing for our
parents is not like teaching anybody anything” (Nieves, 1997).
Based on actual
published newspaper accounts and Letters to the editor (1997) on this
controversy, we present our teacher education students with the scenario in
which nine- and ten-year-old students have become intensely interested and
motivated to really make a difference on a controversial matter of public policy,
but where there are concerns from various quarters as to what they should be
doing about this in their school. Although class members and their parents
overwhelmingly support the project, the principal has been convinced by others
in the community, including some parents of other children in the school, that
this topic is beyond the comprehension level of the grade school students, and
that allowing this project to proceed would be allowing students to indulge in
irresponsible, unfair, and possibly even hurtful sloganeering.
As with many of
the problems in our course, this instance presents problems on at least two
levels. The fourth-graders are engaged in a PBL problem of their own, while the
adults are struggling with their own problem at another level, which provides
the focal problem for our teacher education students. This is genuinely a
problem, with substantial and legitimate concerns on both sides, involving some
questions that can be approached empirically through research and inquiry (e.g.
questions concerning the ability levels of these grade school students for
understanding the social, political, and economic issues involved), and an
open-ended range of possible strategies for a solution. After the future
teachers in our college class have come up with their responses to this
problem, we review the outcome in the actual New Jersey case, where the
students did not perform the play in their own school but, with school district
support, ended up performing it, with even wider publicity, in a theater on
Broadway in New York (Lounsberry, 1997).
The “you
can’t play” problem.
Veteran teacher (and MacArthur “genius award” prize winner) Vivian Gussin Paley
had long been bothered with concern about the consequences of children being excluded
by their classmates. What, if anything, should be done about this? Instead of
just deciding on her own response, Mrs. Paley shared this problem with the
members of her kindergarten class. In You can’t say you can’t play
(1992) she relates how she and her pupils worked together on this problem for
the first part of the year, deliberating among themselves (directly and through
inventive story-telling fantasies) and consulting teachers and other students
in the school (i.e., the “big kids” in grades 1-5), before deciding on a rule
against class members excluding each other from their play.
Based on the
scenario presented in Paley’s book, teacher education students in our class
have been presented with situations posing the problem of what to do about patterns
of ill treatment among students. The challenge is not just to decide on a
response, but to do so in a way that is appropriately informed about the
particular situation in a specific school and classroom, involving other
teachers and students in the school as well as the students and their parents
in this class. We ask our college students to consider whether such a problem
even has a place in our course on teaching social studies (rather than in
courses on classroom discipline and management). In dealing with this problem,
our students discover how such situations provide contexts and opportunities in
the primary grades for children to learn about such weighty social studies
concepts as justice, fairness, equality, the “rule of law,” distinctions between
public and private, and the processes of self-government by a democratic
community. Beyond that, the experience in Paley’s own classroom gives our
students an example of what PBL might look like at the kindergarten level.
The Columbus
problem. In chapter six
of their book Doing History, Levstik and Barton (2001) report the
efforts of a class of twenty-two children in kindergarten and first grade.
Their teacher had initially intended for the lesson to deal with an array of
“famous” people, developing the concept of “fame” in relation to the social,
historical, or cultural significance of their ideas or accomplishments. Her
plans changed when students became interested in a local controversy that broke
out over the observation of Columbus Day. Why did some people think Columbus
was so great, and others think he was so horrible? Are all famous people
heroes? Are there good and bad kinds of fame? And why do people care enough to
fight like this over somebody who died such a long time ago? The teacher helped
her students pursue these questions through a class project in which smaller
groups did research on different aspects of the controversy over Columbus and
his encounter with the inhabitants of lands that he “discovered.” Again, our
college students could regard those primary school children as learning through
a PBL-type experience; but the case also involves the teacher’s struggles with
problems of shifting curriculum plans in response to student interests and
external circumstances, helping students learn the use of basic research skills
and group processes without losing sight of the substantive historical problems
that they are investigating, et cetera.
The “Oregon
Trail” problem. As Bill
Bigelow himself reports, “The critics all agree: The Oregon Trail is one of the
greatest educational computer games ever produced” (1995, p. 14). Indeed, many
of our teacher education students remember playing this game as one of the most
interesting, engaging, and even exciting things they ever did in social
studies. And it isn’t just a lot of fun, either: The game is programmed full of
historical and geographic information that the players sometimes actually
learn, as they meet and overcome historically realistic challenges on their
simulated journey from Missouri to Oregon. Yet, Bigelow’s critique raises
profound problems with this simulation. Although the information presented is
valid historically, Bigelow argues that the problems players need to overcome
on their way to Oregon are specifically the problems faced by free white males
in that episode of our nation’s history. Although the game is populated with
female, black, and native characters, the activity is structured in such a way
that their struggles and experiences, and their problem-solving and
decision-making, are not encountered or experienced by the players in that
simulation. The way that game-playing decisions and the players’ overall
experience are structured by the design of this simulation not only determines
that the students will learn to view this particular historical development in
a limited and distorted way, but also that, in doing so, they will learn a
partial and distorting way of approaching and understanding history in general.
The game itself
could be regarded as a nice example of a PBL opportunity for children; but
Bigelow’s critique again raises a PBL problem on a different level for the
college students in our class. Like Bigelow himself, we are not recommending
against use of this simulation, but rather challenging our students to take on
the teacher’s problem of figuring out historically and pedagogically
responsible ways that such commercial products can be used in the curriculum,
so that their students’ learning will not be compromised by flaws and
limitations of such products as they are designed and marketed by their
commercial publishers.
The problems
described above are just a few of many problems or cases* that students in our social studies
teacher education class work on over the course of the semester. Their biggest
single project for the semester is development of a two-week unit plan for a
particular class of elementary school students. We treat this unit planning
project as a PBL problem that requires them to do research on the topic that
they will be teaching, as well as assessment of their grade school students’
levels of prior knowledge and understanding. They are encouraged to develop
units in which their pupils will be engaged in PBL-style cooperative inquiry
learning as well.
Because we are
encouraging our students to use a PBL approach in their own elementary school
teaching, part of our purpose in engaging students with the problems in our
course is for them to become habituated in the pattern of recognizing what is
problematic in any learning situation, and designing a pedagogical course of
action that makes learning meaningful by attending to the problematics of
contextualized subject-matter for specific groups of learners. Hence, it is
particularly important for us to help our students gain an appreciation for the
ways in which all learning is problem based. Teaching for “problem-based
learning” then becomes not a matter of deploying a classic “PBL model” for
certain units in a course; instead, it becomes a mode of instruction that exploits
the inherent problematics of the subject matter, while asking how these
problematics can be made to coincide effectively with the problems that are
genuinely motivating and determining their students’ learning.
Australian Problem Based Learning Network. (1999). Bibliography. The University of Newcastle. Available: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/services/iesd/learndevelop/problarc/bibliography.html
Bigelow, B. (1995). On the Road to Cultural Bias, A Critique of "The Oregon Trail" CD-ROM. Rethinking Schools, 10(1), 14-18.
Dewey, J. (1986). Logic: The theory of inquiry. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The Collected Works of John Dewey (The Later Works, Volume 12). Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1938)
Duch, B. J. (2001). Writing Problems for Deeper Understanding. In B. J. Duch, S. E. Groh, & D. E. Allen (Eds.), The power of problem-based learning: a practical "how to" for teaching undergraduate courses in any discipline (pp. 47-53). Herndon, VA: Stylus.
Field, R. (1996). John Dewey (1859-1952). The Internet encyclopedia of philosophy.
Available: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/dewey.htm
Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey. Encyclopedia of philosophy of education.
Available: http://www.educacao.pro.br/john_dewey.htm
Hans, V. P. (2001). Integrating active learning and the use of technology in a course on the courts. In B. J. Duch, S. E. Groh, & D. E. Allen (Eds.), The power of problem-based learning: a practical "how to" for teaching undergraduate courses in any discipline (pp. 141-148). Herndon, VA: Stylus.
Letters to the editor (1997, July 3). New York Times. Online.
Levstik, L. S., & Barton, K. C. (2001). Doing history: investigating with children in elementary and middle schools. (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lewis, D. (1996). Creating an appropriate problem. CSU Faculty Development Institute on Distributed Course Delivery for Problem Based Learning.
Available: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/clrit/learningtree/PBL/Choosing_PBL_problem.html
Lounsberry, E. (1997, October 27). Children's play reaches Broadway. Philadelphia Inquirer. Online.
Lundeberg, M. A., Levin, B. B., & Harrington, H.L. (Eds.) (1999), Who learns what from cases and how?: the research base for teaching and learning with cases. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Matusov, E., St. Julien, J., & Whitson, J. A. (2001). PBL in preservice teacher education. In B. J. Duch, S. E. Groh, & D. E. Allen (Eds.), The power of problem-based learning: a practical "how to" for teaching undergraduate courses in any discipline (pp. 237-249). Herndon, VA: Stylus.
Nieves, E. (1997, June 26). Commentary: Pupils' script on workers is ruled out. New York Times. Online.
Paley, V. G. (1992). You can't say you can't play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Torp, L., & Sage, S. (1998). Problems as possibilities: problem-based learning for K-12 education. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
* What the PBL literature generally refers to as “problems,” we would refer to as “problematic cases.” This would allow reference to “cases” and “problems” differentially in ways that we believe would have considerable benefits for both analysis and practice. We intend to suggest some of these possibilities in the discussion of this paper at AERA, but that discussion goes beyond the scope of this written paper. Fortuitously, the chair of our session is Barbara Levin, a renowned expert practitioner and researcher on case-based pedagogy, and co-editor and contributor for Lundeberg, Levin, & Harrington (eds.) (1999).