Problem Based Learning

Oh the essays I could write on Problem Based Learning. I have a student teacher this semester and she has to teach at least one unit using a PBL approach and has struggled to find the right topic that the students can understand, use the PBL, and still accomplish the curricular goals that need to be addressed. Unfortunately in secondary schools with the current emphasis on testing PBL is an idea that while utterly awesome in theory often is difficult to use if the goal is for students to learn certain specific things. However if a teacher decides that learning itself is more important than the curricular goals the state has mandated for our students then PBL is a great tool. Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I never use PBL, I probably use it as much if not more than any of the other 100+ teachers in my school, but sometimes at the end (or beginning) of a unit I have to "teach" certain aspects that the students didn't get out of the unit that it has been decided that they should have. PBL works, I know it works, every year I see students that have already graduated who come back to see me and tell me that they learned so much in my class even though lots of it wasn't necessarily about the course they took. A large portion of this I attribute to my use of PBL which allows students to think outside of the box to arrive at solutions in their own way.

As to using PBL in a multimedia environment- I don't know how to NOT use multimedia with PBL in today's society. Often the first place my students will go with a PBL-based assignment is the web to seek out information, videos, or other graphics. I know we can structure PBL activities and give students specific resources to use but personally I feel it minimizes the importance of the quest for knowledge if students are being spoon-fed the information. I think if I were going to structure a web-module or something for PBL I'd probably include some dead-ends and such to keep the process as authentic as possible.