Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and early 1990s) was developed after medical experts in teaching hospitals could not
understand why otherwise excellent interns froze up when real life humans were placed in
front of them with real life problems (there might even be panic and bleeding).
After long investigation, if became clear to instructors that while the students were book
smart and could recite page after page of diagnostic information from memory, most patients
did not present their symptoms in a way that matched the book: You know Doc, my elbow
hurts just like the description on page 354 of the Jensen Ortho text, said no patient ever.
We need to move away from the pedagogy of the single answer and move towards teaching the
messy problems of Problem Based Learning. This is different than Project Based Learning (as I
wrote about here), where the end goal is already known (and thus a single correct answer is
reached in many cases). Life does not work so much like a project; human development is
pretty much Problem Based Learning. The best outcome or solution is usually not known when
the problem is presented. Sometimes it is, but not often.
In pursuit of the messy answer
Let us agree on a common set of goals, and let us at least consider the idea of making true
problem-based learning part of the standard curricula for grades K to 12 and beyond.
Yes, its messy and harder to teach. Yes it takes more time.
But if you truly believe that clichd phrase hanging on the wall in your school somewhere
about preparing students for the future, and how they will be future leaders, then you have to
know, deep down, that just teaching kids to take tests is not preparing them for anything other
than just taking tests. Nobody will pay you for that for too long.
If we can teach kids to solve messy problems before they graduate, they might not have such a
hard time solving messy problems when they start running the world. Or trying to figure out
what is wrong with my elbow.
(And they will start running the world, you know. Thats one question we can be pretty sure has
a single answer.)