PBL Plus Tech

At par with the vast development of Internet, traditional classroom teaching and learning can be replaced with project based tasks. Highlights of PBL is the K-W-L chart (Tannenbaum, 1996) for a reflection of what I Know, What I want to know and What I’ve learned.

The strengths of PBL us based on the fact that it focuses on student’s individual growth instead of comparing them and evaluate students’ strengths on what they know rather than their weaknesses (Huerta-Macias, 1995 as cited in Tannenbaum, 1996).

This reveals that we are allowing students to shine based on their own ability and develop the motivation to work on the qualities to help them improve in the language proficiency through a progression of a timeframe.

In PBL, the teacher acts as a mentor and a facilitator in PBL instead of becoming a reference source. Thus the basic steps of KWL need to be reviewed and repeated for a number of times to enable teachers to reach the objective of learning. So the teacher needs to list and have checklists on what the students know, list out possibilities of solutions for students problems and what activities or actions relate to solve the problem and whether it can be implement within the timeframe of learning period.

In the end, both teachers and students need to put in the extra mile in teaching and learning to foster critical thinking for a PBL activity to become successful.

Teachers must be able to monitor progress, place a yardstick to how it can be conducted and evaluate performance of students’ work, without keeping pace of the project and having a checklist PBL will burden teachers to mark at the end of the course and evaluation  at that specific time only would defeat the purpose of progressive learning in PBL. So be more proactive in teaching for the wholesome benefit of the students. I hope we wont be needing  this. :)