By "the PBL site" were you referring to the site maintained at IMSA
(provided by Linda) or some other site? I ask because there is another
site maintained by folks from the medical school (http://www.pbli.org/)
and, as I intimated earlier, there are many flavors of PBL.
As to the futility of setting up strict appositions, I'm with you---we tend
to discuss things like student-directed learning as though it was something
that you could actually do, rather than just a concept for thinking about
teaching and learning in a slightly different way. I think about PBL in
similar terms, incidently. I have concerned myself for the last few years
with the question, what is that participants (students and tutors) actually
*do* when they say they are 'doing PBL'?
>Another difference I saw was the differentiation of making practice theory
>in contrast to having theory as a lense in which to view practice. The
>Arkansas example is one in which the scientific method and theoretical
>concepts are used to view and understand practice, and from the PBL site I
>did not sense that emphasis. It seemed more focused on the everyday
>experience to concept? model in contrast to a more dialectical interaction
>and transformation, at least that was my impression.
I'm not quite sure I'm following you here. Maybe part of my confusion is
that we may be talking about two different models of PBL. The way that PBL
is organized and conducted in high schools is quite different from the way
that it is conducted in professions ed. Further, in re-reading the
interview that you sent out earlier, I'm not sure I could articulate how
PBL, as, for instance, it is done at the medical school here, really
differs from Lyublinskaya's "Socratic Method". They both seem to be
student-directed, both seem to be case-centered, and both seem to be
collaborative. The two descriptions of "Socratic Method" (Howards and
Lyublinskaya's) don't appear to be talking about the same thing.
Maybe one reasonable question would be, how often do teachers in the
respective methods ask questions to which they already know the answer?
---Tim