Barbara Duch
University of Delaware

Barbara Duch teaches Physics at the University of Delaware, but she doesn't teach it like she used to. "I lectured for years," says Duch, "but there's something so powerful in Problem-Based Learning. you are never quite sure what's going to happen."

The uncertainty she speaks of is the exciting uncertainty built into discovery and learning. It is an excitement as nourishing as it is intoxicating. It has "restored intellectual excitement and saved faculty who said they had been burned out," says Duch. After working as a teaching consult in Delaware's Center for Teaching Effectiveness, Duch now serves as associate director of the mathematics and science education resource center and is involved in investigating the effectiveness of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) under a large grant to the University of Delaware from the Pew Charitable Trusts. She has become one of PBL's most visible spokespersons.

The Excitement of Uncertainty

Talking to Duch, one feels the excitement of a promising experiment in progress, for although PBL dates its modern origins to 1972 and reforms at the medical school of McMaster University in Canada, it still feels very new. When Delaware decided to investigate PBL, it found little "out there," as Duch puts it. There were a few efforts however. Medical faculty at the University of New Mexico had been working with PBL and Delaware brought in a team of three from New Mexico for a three-day workshop on what they'd discovered about PBL. That was the seed. Now, people interested in PBL come to Delaware which maintains a Web site filled with articles and information on its investigations into this approach to teaching (including one of Duch's own problems from her introductory Physics course). Indeed, Duch and colleagues at Delaware have been leading workshops for the last several years which have lit fires of enthusiasm in the hearts of many faculty in the Delaware area.

All the Way or Part Way?

After we'd discussed the nuts and bolts of PBL, I asked Duch a question faculty frequently ask: Can PBL be implemented as a module within a course or must whole courses be taught via PBL in order for it to work? When Duch started using PBL, she revamped an entire course and it is the whole-course approach she favors, though she acknowledges the approach can be used in a modular way.

Her reasons for favoring a whole-course approach include very practical considerations . "Students need to be working in groups on complex problems through the whole semester. That doesn't mean that's all they do, but a group needs time to build. It [PBL] can be a shadow track, but shouldn't be an isolated experience," says Duch.

With any new pedagogical innovation, faculty often find student resistance to be as significant an obstacle as any they face. How to face it with PBL? First, problems must be authentic problems, says Duch. If they're not, if there's mere fill-in-the-blanks sorts of problems, students won't have the same motivation and won't enjoy the same learning.

Student Resistance and Authentic Problems

Faced with authentic problems, students still feel anxiety learning in this new say. "Let them know why you are teaching this way," says Duch. "Give them all the data--what business and industry say, what they want and what they need from graduates, what graduates say help them most in their lives, namely communication skills and team skills.

"Assure them they are not alone, that you are there with them, learning with them.

Says Duch, "It's important to be able to say 'I don't know.' It defines where we have to go next in our learning, and it's not scary then." This being able and willing to declare what you don't know goes back to Duch's sense of excitement in not knowing what's going to happen next in PBL learning, and it connects with some core issues in how PBL works. The first steps in unraveling a problem focus on defining "learning issues," which is a fancy way of describing the process of figuring out what you know and what you don't know in the face of the problem. What are the knows and what are the unknowns? And beyond that what are the assumptions and how might one go about finding out the answers to the unknowns and double-checking the assumptions?

The ability to frame good questions, says Duch, rates very high in peer evaluations done by PBL teams. Questions lead the way in learning.

Junior Elders

At Delaware, they've been doing PBL long enough now so that they have upper division students who've had PBL courses who they can tap as "peer tutors" to work with freshmen courses. "They get the freshmen going and help erase the doubt," says Duch. "It's now almost a capstone learning experience here for juniors to come back and help freshmen."

Indeed, Duch points out that bringing the attitudes embedded in student resistance to the surface and then changing them may well be at the heart of the learning experience on its deepest level. "The whole idea is that it's about attitude transformation for students," she says.

To objections that PBL creates metaphysical distortions, that life is more that a series of problems to be solved, experiences to be objectified, defined and dismembered, Duch says quietly, "The whole idea of PBL in medicine where this all started was to get medical students to be more humanistic, not more objectivist."

"Working in groups makes you appreciate the human and what everyone brings to learning," she says.

Contact:
Barbara Duch
E-mail: bduch@udel.edu