David, Dewey was known to have some strong opinions about how education
should (and should not) be conducted. As Lee Shulman reported last month
at AERA, Dewey was an outspoken opponent of apprenticeship learning, a
position that might be surprising to present-day educational researchers
given the interest in forms of Legitimate Peripheral Participation and our
view of Dewey as the 'learning-by-doing' guy.
I think a reasonable question to ask would be, what would Dewey really make
of PBL? My guess is that he would probably be pretty favorably disposed.
In my own (possibly biased) view, PBL has at least two strong connections
to Dewey's theories of teaching. On a macro level, the
hypothetico-deductive method that is embedded in the problem-solving
approach used by the groups maps extrordinarily well onto to the model of
scientific reasoning described by Dewey in _How We Think_. On a
micro-level, the conversations that lead to the production of a Learning
Issue (what I have referred to elsewhere as "Knowledge Display Segments")
are "problematic situations" in the Deweyean sense, and lead to learning in
the way that Dewey would predict. ---Tim