Reading Excerpt:

Process education also shares many components with problem-based learning, or PBL. (www.pbl.org). PBL was introduced as a term at McMaster University and was written on extensively by Barrows and Tamblyn, who applied it to medical education. In medical education, faculty were frustrated with the effectiveness of traditional teaching methods. They found that graduates in their internships after medical school were often not able to apply what they had learned to the challenges they faced in the hospital.

Through PBL, students are presented with an ill-defined problem. They work cooperatively to solve the problem, accessing resources as needed. An important component of PBL is that it is student-centered, with the students, rather than the instructor, managing the problem-solving process. The faculty member in PBL serves as a facilitator of that learning.

Central to the methods described above is the role of the faculty member as a facilitator of the learning process. There are many strategies for facilitative learning, with the main goal of moving the teacher away from the center and locus of control. Many have written about the use of cooperative learning in education. As Wong and Wong stated in 1998, "Cooperative learning is not so much learning to cooperate as it is cooperating to learn." As they and others have indicated, cooperative learning extends far deeper than just placing students in groups. Two elements are key, according to proponents of cooperative learning: positive interdependence and group and individual accountability.

References

Barrows, Howard S. and Tamblyn, Robyn M. (1980). Problem-based learning: an approach to medical education. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Wong, H. K., & Wong, R. T. (1998). How to be an effective teacher: the first days of school. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications, Inc.

Most of the vocabulary is okay, but I probably should check out the definition of "facilitator," since this is a key work in this passage. I also am not too sure what "locus of control" means.

Who is the audience for this article? It seems to be written with other teachers in mind or at least those interested in teaching. It does seem to assume I already know some things about educational philosophy. From the title of the journal, it is clearly academic writing. I will have to watch for jargon. For example, I see phrases like "collaborative learning" and "facilitative learning."

On first read, this is an interesting passage. I can see how medical students would be better served from getting ill-defined problems to work with. My father is a doctor and he often told me that he learned the facts in med school, but lacked many of the skills he need to solve real problems. There was too much emphasis on knowing the facts. I’ll have to ask him if he would have benefited from working on more ill-defined problems. And this idea of a teacher serving as a facilitator! I’ll need to observe our instructor to see how she puts these ideas into action.

I think I did pretty well in my first reading to get the main points. I looked up the word "locus" and it means the place where something is situated, so that would mean that the place of control would not be with the teacher/facilitator, but with the class? With the student? Groups? I wonder how that works…I also googled "locus of control" and found this interesting site that talked about internal versus external locus of control. Here, someone who has an external locus of control sees their lives controlled by external factors such as fate and someone with an internal locus of control seeing their future more affected by their own actions. I’ve already seen in class that we are encouraged to think more for ourselves and take responsibility for our own learning.