MY INTEREST FOR PBL
In my profession I have special interest in how the brain works in a learning situation and my goal is to create good learning behaviour in the classroom. Therefor I have spent a lot of time to create and develop problembased learning (PBL) for those students, which I teach. I will give you some reflections on what it means to educate problembased. PBL´s three building blocks is to start the subject you study by a problem/question, to work in a group and finally studying by yourself. This is very important because it stimulates you as a student to use all your senses and the whole brain in the learning process. And the last thing, as you will see down below, is very important to create a long time memory and promote good learning behaviour.
Let me start by giving you an example from an everyday life situation: If your friend tells you a fun story, then suddenly you get associations to a similar story that you want to tell to your friend. When your friend tells you about that story, he automatically gets association to a third story. And then it will continue as long as you got good stories to tell each other. What was happening in your brain, is that you "pressed those buttons" were your long time memory (LTM) have been stored. With the "buttons" I mean certain modules in the brain which contents the specific memory that you been looking for. You get a word, suddenly a lot of tracks get "untied" and you remember a new story! You got astonished every time it will work! That's the basic facts to convince me that problembased learning is the best way to learn. Because when you start a new subject, you construct a problem to be solved and that probably creates motivation to learn something new. This problem generates associations, a lot of new questions and a need to learn a lot to solve the problem. And suddenly the student understands the importance to learn things! The students also use their capacity to express themselves and you can catch all their associations and use them as a good start to learn more about something. Because everyone (especially teachers must be aware of this) is the sum of all your experiences. All people have all kinds of experiences. So you start from different points of view. But you must know that you build up new knowledge by your own, on this basic, earlier experience.
To me, this is very important. Because as soon as you learn to listen to the students and their thoughts as a teacher, together you build up the subject and create structure in what you will learn next. By the way: This also yields even in everyday life - we are all bad listeners but we all love to listen to our own voices and express our own valuations.
Next step in PBL is the group-discussions. In this group you get a possibility to discuss with your pupils about what they did or did not understand. For example of the teachers context this day or the learning goals for today. This gives you as a student a feedback, that is very important when you got to learn something. You even got the possibilities to prepare good questions for the next lessons etc.
Well, that was my own reflections about learning behaviour and memory. A little bit of "everyday mans knowledge".