The first piece I read for the May workshop was "What is Problem-Based Learning?" This article was helpful in particular for its attention to questions about students’ prior knowledge: how much do they know when they enter the classroom? How much do they need to know to do the PBL tasks we assign them? I also read "Problem-Based Learning: An Introduction," by James Rhem. I liked how this article clearly defined PBL while at the same time maintaining in a reasonable way how difficult it can be to actually pin it down (given the variety in current practices and understandings). I appreciated how this article connected PBL approaches to earlier ones historically. And, just as the previous article addressed the problem of students’ preparedness when they enter a course, this one addresses the problem of their preparedness when the exit a course. When I try new instructional methods, in particular "student-centered" ones which shift the responsibility for learning from me to my students, I sometimes have teacherly anxiety about "not covering enough" or about sending my students away at the end of a term without "knowing" enough. So I appreciate Rhem’s discussion of this problem. (He seems to favor a quality heuristic process over a quantity of learned product, and goes some distance to reassure nervous teachers about this.) Finally, I’ve been reading Kevin Brooks' summary of a piece called, "Emphasizing The problem in Problem-Based Learning." I like how this article in its second half covers some clear steps for writing a good problem, including this one: "Choose a central idea, concept or principle that is always taught in a given course, and then think of a typical end-of-chapter problem, assignment, or homework that is usually assigned..." This seems so obvious, but it helped me to get a start on thinking about how to pose a problem to solve in the kind of classes I teach.

Most of what I read so far stresses the importance of giving students material which is relevant to them—even urgently relevant--and which also poses real problems within the discipline being studied. One of the main questions I have (and which these articles have helped me to isolate) is: how do I come up with assignments in Freshman Composition which are both relevant and discipline-specific? I think Kevin Brooks speaks to this when he says that his discipline (Rhetoric/Composition Studies) doesn’t really have "content," and what content we give it often winds up being or seeming "arbitrary and idiosyncratic." I could give my comp students semester-long discipline-specific problems involving writing pedagogy (I agree that, ideally, the problem being investigated in a class should be as real for the teacher as it is for the students)-- but, since 110-120 are general education/service courses, will such problems really be of that much interest to my students? Will these problems be real for them?

Brooks, Kevin. Summary/Transcription of "Emphasizing the Problem in PBL." Email attachment, May 17, 2002.

Gallow, De Dr. "What is Problem-Based Learning?" Problem-Based Learning Faculty Institute.

Rhem, James. "Problem-Based Learning: An Introduction." The National Teaching & Learning