Problem-Based Learning (PBL): AEE 412 Weekly Writing #7

As agricultural educators we not only want to teach our students content knowledge and technical skills, we also want to teach them what are referred to as 21st Century Skills - communication, cooperation, and critical thinking. One of the key techniques we can use to teach our students critical thinking is by using problem-based or problem-solving learning. This past week and this coming week we focused on this technique and how we can use it in our classrooms. Essentially this technique shifts the transfer of learning from teacher-to-student to student-to-student-to-teacher, by providing the students with a scenario or problem related to the class's content that the students must develop solutions to and teach the class.

In class we discussed the various ways this could be used in an agricultural classroom, depending on whether you were utilizing it as a single solution or multi-solution problem, and whether it was simple or complex. Examples included: having students solve a trouble-shooting issue with an engine in a small gas engines class, discovering what is causing illness/problems in animals or plants in the program (of course if it's serious, you take care of the issue first without telling your students the cause/solution), or in an environmental science or agricultural issues class present the students with an issue such as global climate change and have students develop possible solutions.

As you can see based on just the few scenarios above, problem-based learning can come in many shapes and sizes in the classroom, which means it can be adapted to any classroom and any content. But how do we truly implement it in our classrooms? How do we set up our students so that they have the necessary skills and content knowledge so that they can successfully develop solutions to the problems we present them, without giving them too much and defeating the purpose of the problem-based learning approach? How do we know that we're presenting the information at a time and in a way that's relevant? What if a student presents a situation related to their crops or livestock at home, or even a current news topic that is a great opportunity for problem-based learning but I haven't set my students up yet to be able to use it.

Problem-based learning is a technique I would love to use in my classes, yet I am struggling to incorporate it into my lesson plans without shifting to a project-based approach. I'm sure in the next week we will learn more about both of these approaches and how to properly set up our lessons to incorporate them but for now, it's still a little confusing. I know I have been in classes where problem-based learning has been utilized but I don't think I've seen the set-up beforehand to understand how it worked. Some resources I have were this Illinois Ag in the Classroom link to several inquiry-based lessons. They are written for a younger grade range but I think they could be modified to complement high school or middle school lesson plans. Everyone should also check out some of the NAAE Teachers' World workshops during National FFA Convention, based on their descriptions some of them should incorporate problem-based learning but I'm sure all of them will be helpful. 

Hopefully this week we can decipher the "problems" related to setting up your students to be successful in problem-based learning.