Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject in the context of complex, multifaceted, and realistic problems. The goals of PBL are to help the students develop flexible knowledge, effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills, and intrinsic motivation. Working in groups, students identify what they already know, what they need to know, and how and where to access new information that can lead to resolution of the problem. In PBL, students are encouraged to take responsibility for their group and organize and direct the learning process with support from a tutor or instructor. The role of the instructor is to provide appropriate scaffolding and support for the process, modelling of the process, and monitoring the learning. The tutor must build the students' confidence to take on the problem and encourage them, while also stretching their understanding.
The six core characteristics of PBL are as follows:
- PBL consists of student-centered learning.
- Learning occurs in small groups.
- Teachers act as facilitators or tutors.
- A problem forms the basis for organized focus and stimulus for learning.
- Problems stimulate the development and use of problem solving skills.
- New knowledge is obtained through means of self-directed learning.
Advocates of PBL claim it can be used to enhance content knowledge while simultaneously fostering the development of communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and self-directed learning skills.
PBL may position students in a simulated real-world working and professional context that involves policy, process, and ethical problems that will need to be understood and resolved to some outcome. By working through a combination of learning strategies to discover the nature of a problem, understanding the constraints and options to its resolution, defining the input variables, and understanding the viewpoints involved, students learn to negotiate the complex sociological nature of the problem and how competing resolutions may inform decision making.
Current Issues
Accountants must stay up to date with current issues in reporting and disclosure.
PBL can also promote the development of critical thinking skills. In PBL learning, students learn how to analyze a problem, identify relevant facts, generate hypotheses, identify necessary information/knowledge for solving the problem, and make reasonable judgments about solving the problem.
Principles
- Problem-based learning: Use problems encountered in the course of work as the context for learning.
- Point of the Wedge: Push responsibility combined with support to the most junior person possible
- Teach, Don't Tell: Use inquiry (i.e., Socratic Method) to teach rather than just giving the answer or solving the issue
- Owning the Client or Project: Individuals have a heightened sense of accountability and motivation because they have their own client or project with support from more experienced team members
Routines
- Rounds: Meetings where a less-experienced team member presents an issue or challenge and recommends a course of action.
- Team Workshops: A team member leads a developmental event for other members focusing on a specific technical or service topic.
- Shadowing: Less-experienced team members accompany a more experienced member to a meeting that he or she would not normally attend.
- Observation and Feedback: A specific activity is observed, and coaching is given using the Socratic Method.
- Lessons Learned Forum: A thorough review and discussion using mistakes and successes as a situation to learn from. This is similar to an After Action Review.
Making It Work
The mission of a teaching hospital is to develop doctors. While businesses earnestly espouse a desire to develop their people, such activities are too often seen as separate from work and something that interferes with getting work done. Businesses are not as motivated as teaching hospitals to develop people on the job. For that reason, the transfer of approaches used in teaching hospitals to a business context might have failed if not for the fact that the new processes create side benefits that motivate the business team members.