In another class this term, I was introduced to ISPs (ill-structured problems) so I was v. interested to read this breakdown of PBL. The listicle-structure of this article helped me too. Some of it was about what you'd expect, sometimes even too obvious to publish ("...teachers should be trained to design suitable problems for their courses"), but some were surprising (the surpring, initially counter"-intuitive lines were --".
The emphasis on group work was interesting, and the conclusions were optimistic and speculative (paraphrasing due to some odd grammar in the paper, "Through group work students can deal with new situations and develop life-long learning skills", 77. How on earth could you know that??). I found the group-work material "interesting" because I'm always looking for group work that could make it easier to teach 250 students w/o sacrificing too much of their hands-on education/project work. The helpful part was the vocab of calling the instructor the "facilitator" was helpful to me, and, very unusually, so was one of the flow-charts. Those diagrams are often more like handy succinct paraphrases rather than clarifications, but the way-points WHERE an instructor should facilitate have always been mysterious to me (p. 75's diagram is the one I liked. The ones before it seemed redundant, but maybe I'm not giving them enough credit.
Overall, the parts where the paper seemed vague, or to be jumping the gun, those didn't bother me on a gut level, and I have no serious disagreement with them. HOWEVER, it's helpful to see that articles kind of have to get vague when they're talking about THE POINT of these approaches, because maybe that's the part that could use the most research. OR, maybe the part that's vague in an overall paper like this Ali paper is the same part that's more bespoke for each individual discipline. This is important because the article also talks about multi-disciplinarity, and it might be that if a PBL method is borrowed from one discipline to use in another, the part that MUST change is that why, that part that's so utopian and speculative in this paper. IOW, if I borrow from a natural science for my game design class, maybe after some lesson-design, I should look at the learning outcome, change it on paper, and then go back through the lesson design and make sure every part of it is changed, however slightly, to suit the new outcome, EVEN if it seems like it's already suitable for both this discipline and its discipline of origin. (Having typed that out, I'm wondering if all that was redundant.)
I am interested in how this overall look at "problems" might factor into the question-type database I've been building throughout this class, since Johan Huizinga (who wrote my secular Bible, Homo Ludens) talked about problemata as a distinct class of Greek riddle, related to ainigmata (enigmas).
Yes, this is a BUMPY road. Thank you for noticing!
Okay, so the Felder Archives are daunting, but I get the linked notes and accordion sections, etc. This was a prolific person. So, I'm diving in, starting with 'Imposters Everywhere' from 1988.
Okay, so disappointingly, there were a lot of dead links in that archive. (Click on any green link to get to a better set of his articles).
This quiz about Learning Outcomes is awesome! HERE we have an example of the multi-disciplinary approach, one of them is a pedagogical method antique and standard practice in law school, but unusual everywhere else: Call on them by name whether they have their hand up or not. (He later half-reverses/half-complicates this in an article on question-crafting, link via Wayback Machine). ALSO, the plain-spoken but totally credible idea that yes, 20 minutes is too long to talk, but he went over that and the students were fine w/ it because they have something to do. Good to know.
Felder said something I have encountered SO many times, I was practically yelling "Yes, thank you!" at the screen. He said that he has a lot of intricate exercises, and that some faculty say that if they had that many exercises they'd never get through the syllabus. But having all of those enables them to get through the syllabus more efficiently, not less so (link to his article on same, via Wayback).
I really wanted to read his paper on Questions and was so sad to find a dead link, but guess what? I found it on the WayBackMachine! (Other similarly archived papers of Felder et. al.'s are below)
All I can say is that this selection of content put me in touch with some less developed parts of myself as an educator -- I am much more cynical (not cynical--indifferent? tired? numb?) about student well-beaing and accessibility than I want to be. I don't have any ideological reason to be -- the opposite, in fact. But I know I don't have any solutions. I also remember that I dumped on people a lot as an undergraduate, and I shudder to think what would have happened if everyone had been as un-receptive to that as I am. It was a different world of course. But when I think of what some grad-student TAs did, how far out of their way they went, and the _ridiculous_ situations they were talking me through, or out of... one of them let me live under his bed (under because I was too neurotic to not be behind or underneath furniture, which made going to class really hard) -- another tried to help me write my first book (because he thought writing a book could cure anything) and a third TA allowed me to identify as [I am redacting this because it's really out there] and she read, and graded in good-faith, term papers that did not make ANY sense AT ALL. I don't mean they were badly written -- one of them was about the metaphysics of Clue, and it was completeky fucking nuts. Not in a cool way. Just... omg this kid is _lost_. This was a long time ago, and it was Santa Cruz, where everything was kind of Lewis Carroll anyway, but...
Anyway, I looked into the site's material on accessibility and universal design, and on student mental-health. Let's move on.
This is going to get confusing real-fast. This article surprised me in that learner-centered and student-centered mean the same thing. Only academia could arrange things this way. We are, none of us, in any danger of getting our theories straight anytime soon.
P. 20 -- "lack of discipline, learner-centeredness, focus on trivial problems, little attention to subject matter, anti-intellectualism, and a lack of a clear definition of the teacher’s role” (Elias and Merriam 2005, p. 56)" -- Those are MOST of the cited objections to SCL that the article addresses (they later add "focus on process over content," which is IMHO impossible for SCL advocates to refute, since they're proud of that).
I'm grounded in the convo about some of those terms (lack of discipline, focus on the trivial) but I wasn't aware that the lack of definition for the teacher's role was part of that... even though I've experienced that unclarity, I thought I was just being a ditz again (and all the time). The anti-intellectual claim strikes me as valid right now, so I read this with particular attention to whether the article can bring me around on that point (otherwise, I'll be reading without focus and I'll go bananas).
P. 21 - This paper links skills-based learning with student-centered learning (and/or with this other thing called "learner-based" curriculum? Maybe they're not being theorized as different things...) -- and further links these ideas to the problematic vagueness, and (I have to agree) with pedagogy for its own sake (as the expense of ideas). I have a lot of trust in the solidity of this paper, but I would have thought skills-based learning to be separate enough from the rest of it that it could be closer to the other doctrines that it wouldn't necessarily belong to SCL.
P. 22 -- oh good GRIEF, "student centered instruction" is different from "student centered learning" too? They need to start bunching these into D&D classes, I need radical distinctions here. -- I read that there's a focus on student thoughts (rather than knowledge) so that the instructor knows what to bring up from HIS OR HER own knowledge (I resist the neutral "their" here only because we're comparing a plural entity to a singular one)
pp. 23 - 26 - Lerning environments section focused on technological enhancements, and here's where I see reserch opp for myself. What if the tech enhancements were actually OLD technology added to the classroom rather than gizmo-tech? Not sure what... I'm picturing something kinda Rube Goldberg / steampunk right now, but I'll work on this. The rest of this section was an interesting look at the history, and this paper seems very detailed and solid so I trust it.
This module's lab notes contain index several interesting Felder articles unavailable on his site, linked to PDFs on the Wayback Machine (as the links on Felder's own website are currenly dead.)
Note, the links are dead, not disabled, which is why I am comfortable that it's okay to use Wayback to retrieve them.