Back to Education Topics: PBL

PBL stands for Problem-Based or Project-Based Learning which has a potential to become the way people of the future learn and the schools of the future function. I do have some “half-thought-through phrases”; I would even say “a-quarter-thought-through” or maybe “not-thought-through” images. We often hear that the students can’t do this or can’t answer that, can’t find something on the map, or can’t explain something we can. We concentrate on what they can’t do instead of admiring what they can do. They can hear you and keep up with the conversation while typing their text messages and listening to their music. They can achieve a level on the computer game that we don’t understand at all; or if we do understand the game then their speed is unbelievable. Any kid when given any electronic device begins to push the buttons and gets results even if this is a new device s/he didn’t see before. Too often I am thinking that we are trying to hold the kids back to our standards from the last century instead of creating new standards that might hold some value in the nearest future. Imagine a fish in an ocean, the water runs through the gills, the fish gets the oxygen, but doesn’t slow down the flow of the water, and if needed moves to another spot and on and on. The ocean is the amount of information entering our consciousness all the time both kids and adults. We have to learn how to swim in it, catch what we need and leave what’s not. My generation was born into a lake, maybe even just a puddle of water, and it takes us time and effort to learn how to swim in the limitless ocean. The kids were born into the ocean; they have some kind of innate ability to filter the info and ignore whatever their sub-consciousness tells them is out of the area of their current interests. They naturally find the answers to their current questions fast and efficient. When I have a class in a computer lab the answers to my questions they find within first 2 minutes, the rest of the time is spent on creating the presentation. Of course, I am talking about the kind of questions that do not require “thinking”, like math problems often do. Creating the presentation does require “thinking”, but it is creative thinking, not math problem solving thinking. This is why the students love the creative part of the presentation, not the research part of gathering information which often is out of the area of their current interests. I, the teacher, brought the questions; they are my questions, not theirs. The last thought is about current projects. There are quite a few very good projects created for the elementary school level. There are even more topics which are even more appropriate and interesting for the kids of that age which are completely missed and forgotten. There are just a couple of good projects for middle school and there are no good projects for high school kids at all. I think I know why it is happening. We, adults, make those projects. They are artificial, do not come from children natural curiosity. The younger the kids are the higher level of curiosity is. It goes down because we do not help them to find answers to their questions, instead we bring our questions to them and make their questions less important. Do you see what kind of message we send to the kids? Their questions are not important. Important questions are not interesting. Learning is work, unpleasant thing, when you are forced to answer somebody else's questions. Of course, the teacher should help the kids with the questions as well as with the answers, but we have to learn how to trust the kids' instincts. Introduce the new topic and allow each kid study it only to the depth of his or her choice. For most of the topics you will see that the kids will learn and have fun getting familiar with new terminology, after that they will lose the interest and the teacher has to prepare next new topic. However, there will be a smaller group of kids who will develop their own questions about the topic, those should be allowed to go deeper and deeper in their search, while the rest of the class gets familiar with new and different topics. Only after work like that we can group the kids by their interests.