Megan Yih Chyn A. Kek

The power of problem-based learning in developing critical thinking skills: preparing students for tomorrow's digital futures in today's classrooms

This article describes problem‐based learning as a powerful pedagogical approach and an aligned teaching and learning system to explicitly and directly teach critical thinking skills in a broad range of disciplines. Problem‐based learning is argued to be a powerful pedagogical approach as it explicitly and actively engages students in a learning and teaching system, characterised by reiterative and reflective cycles of learning domain‐specific knowledge and doing the thinking themselves. At the same time, students are guided and coached by the problem‐based learning teacher, who models critical thinking skills in the acquisition of the domain‐specific knowledge. This article will explore what critical thinking actually means. What are critical thinking skills? How best to teach such skills? What is the potential role of problem‐based learning in teaching critical thinking skills? Finally, the article reflects on how critical thinking can be developed through problem‐based learning as a pedagogical approach in an aligned learning and teaching context.

Agile Student Development and Engagement for Learning

Within an agile PBL ecology for learning, there are four interrelated systems or environments that feed into each other and depend on each other. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the exo-environments surrounding the students’ immediate formal micro-environment where learning, teaching and assessment interconnect to initiate the development of students’ ways-of-being and them becoming change ready for supercomplex future contexts. Our imagining of the ‘new’ university for learning will not be complete if we do not discuss these environments and systems. While students are not directly situated in them, the decisions and actions of actors and systems situated in exo-environments can influence the development of their by enhancing student engagement. In this chapter, we discuss strategies and practices in student development and engagement in pursuit of developing a ‘way-of-being’ and of becoming an agile PBL university that is serious about its position in the overall ecology and recognises its associated responsibilities.

Agile Curriculum Sustainability: Continuous Improvement

When it comes to implementing a curriculum that aligns with an agile PBL ecology for learning, there are a myriad of elements and factors to consider, and they all impact to some extent on the ultimate success: graduates who can demonstrate the desired learning outcomes and are empowered with agile twenty-first-century skills that allow them to contribute to society with agency. The development, implementation and teaching of an agile PBL curriculum are ideally at the very least a whole-of-institution endeavour, which involves the micro- and exo-systems, but the goal from the beginning should always be to consciously involve all systems in the ecology. Excluding, for example, the macro-system from curriculum and pedagogy exposes the curriculum to the risk of not achieving the desired learning outcomes identified and required for a twenty-first-century supercomplex world. However, we do realise that a fully functioning curriculum in alignment with an agile PBL ecology for learning is an ideal situation, whereby the whole institution is on the same page and ‘every duck is lined up’. This whole-institution implementation represents one end of a continuum, whereas agile PBL implemented in single courses taught by individual enthusiastic lecturers is considered at the other end of the continuum. The case we outline in this chapter leans towards the former, and the idea is that readers treat this as the ideal scenario, as something to work towards. In this chapter, we discuss some of the factors that are involved in an overhaul of the curriculum towards an agile PBL. This is followed by an outline of how to make this practice sustainable and how to create a culture of continuous improvement, so that the agile PBL curriculum and pedagogy stay agile in the long term.

Agile PBL Research: Developing a Sustainable Research and Scholarship Agenda

Traditionally, there has been, and continues to be, a huge dichotomy in the university between research on the one hand and teaching on the other. Barnett (Understanding the university: institution, idea, and possibilities. Routledge, Abingdon, 2016) calls this dialectic of function, one of seven forms of dialectic that a university faces. Universities have seen themselves primarily as research institutions, and teaching has always played second fiddle. This is partly due to the status awarded to research in comparison to teaching. Furthermore, and related to this, funding has always been intimately tied to research output. The result of all this is that research is a much more profitable pursuit for those in search of career advancement and promotion than teaching, despite considerable efforts to change this. Even within research, educational research has had a struggle to gain recognition as a legitimate field of research, especially when it comes to applied educational research. In a broader sense, the nature of knowledge itself is changing: the way it is accessed, digested, consumed, engaged with and disseminated. Inevitably, this has an impact on teaching and learning, and it has created the possibility, and indeed the practice, of ubiquitous learning (Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M, Ubiquitous learning. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009). As we have argued throughout this book, it is important that we engage with this seismic shift and that we develop a curriculum and pedagogy that is agile and adaptive enough to stay relevant and is continuously evaluated and improved. The research and scholarship agenda that we outline in this chapter is a collaborative pursuit and involves all stakeholders, including teachers, employers and students, in other words, all systems of an agile PBL ecology for learning.

Towards an Ecology for Connected Learning

This chapter revisits PBL and examines new types or ‘constellations of PBL’ (Savin-Baden M, J Excel Coll Teach 25(3&4):197–219, 2014) that are being proposed to meet yet unknown and uncertain challenges of the twenty-first century and to develop a mode of knowledge creation, application and management that is suited for an ‘age of supercomplexity’ (Barnett R, & Coate K, Engaging the curriculum in higher education. Mc-Graw Hill Education, Berkshire, 2004). It then introduces an ecology for learning model that is underpinned by a student development worldview. We have adapted Bronfenbrenner’s ecology of human development (Bronfenbrenner U, The ecology of human development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979, 2005b; Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2005b; Bronfenbrenner U,& Morris PA, The bioecological model of human development. In: Damon W, Lerner RM (eds) Handbook of child psychology, 6th edn. Wiley, Hoboken, pp 793–828, 2006) to imagine agile PBL operating in an ecology that positions students at the centre of multiple, evolving and interconnected environments, ranging from the proximal (micro-system) and the intermediate (meso- and exo-systems) to the distal (macro-system) (Bronfenbrenner U, The ecology of human development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979, 2005b; Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2005b; Bronfenbrenner U,& Morris, PA, The bioecological model of human development. In: Damon W, Lerner RM (eds) Handbook of child psychology, 6th edn. Wiley, Hoboken, pp 793–828, 2006), where liquid knowledges and learning can be activated. This model allows us to reposition PBL-based learning as a ‘holistic’ approach to connected learning, in which boundaries between formal and informal learning environments, between work and study and between public and private spaces are continuously blurred, and they frequently morph into each other and impact on each other.

Agile PBL and the Next Generation of Learners

This chapter explores the characteristics of a new generation of students and the idea of twenty-first-century skills. The particular emphasis here is how the two are, or should be, aligned and how an agile PBL provides opportunities to both draw on skills that a new generation of learners brings to the universities and empower these learners with the skills and attitudes they need to succeed upon graduation. An agile PBL ecology for learning allows us not only to recognise the myriad of factors, elements and layers that impact on learning but also to respond to these in both a responsive and proactive way, so that the learning environment is optimised for everyone involved.

Focusing on Learning Outcomes and Authentic Interdisciplinary Problems

In Chap. 3, we have identified the challenge in designing a technology-supported agile PBL environment that stays true to the original intentions of PBL and that leverages technology to enhance the impact of learning in teams, rather than reducing it. We have also imagined what we called the ‘next generation of learners’ and began to identify the characteristics that they may bring to the formal learning environments. Of course, the flipside of considering student characteristics as they enter a particular learning environment is that we also need to define and clarify what we want them to learn and be able to do, once they have moved into and through this formal learning environment. In other words, what do we imagine their characteristics to be when they move out of the university? How do those characteristics align with what they are likely to encounter when they complete their university studies? And how do we ensure that we draw on students’ prior learning and strengths while simultaneously empowering them with the skills, dispositions and knowledges to engage meaningfully and productively in the present and future twenty-first-century context? In this chapter, we begin to imagine what curriculum design in an agile PBL context might look like, and we begin to imagine how interdisciplinary PBL problem may be conceived.

Assessing Agile PBL

As suggested in Chap. 4, the learning outcomes we imagined for an agile PBL ecology for learning in this book not only do include (inter)disciplinary skills and knowledge but instead constitute a whole way-of-being, which includes an attitude and disposition. Agile PBL serves as a curricular and pedagogical vehicle to facilitate the development of this way-of-being among students so that they learn and develop adaptive expertise while in their current studies and beyond the micro-context of the university as lifelong learners. This also brings with it the need to reconceptualise assessment, as it raises the question of how we can, or should, assess such learning outcomes, in particular, the intangible ones such as ‘attitude’ and ‘disposition’, which are notoriously difficult to measure. The traditional testing assessment paradigm and practices do not align with Barrow’s essentials of PBL conceptualised 50 years ago, particularly not as they relate to the continuous and reiterative participation of students in the teaching and learning process and activities, in assessment activities and in authentic assessment problems or tasks. They align even less with agile PBL. In this chapter, we discuss the challenges faced in transforming assessment practices, recent thinking around assessments that are aligned to agile PBL’s intentions and goals of developing a way-of-being, and the tensions and possibilities associated with assessments for learning. Central to all of this is the position of assessment in the context of an overall agile PBL ecology for learning.

Agile Staff Professional Learning for Learning

A human resource crucial to the success of an agile PBL curriculum and pedagogy is the academic teaching staff who are also known in the PBL literature and field as PBL facilitators. Facilitating or teaching students in an agile PBL environment is hugely important, yet it is a role that is very challenging for many academic staff involved in PBL, regardless of their educational contexts. In this book, we prefer to term this important human resource ‘the agile PBL teacher’, as they are a central element in an agile PBL ecology for learning. Being a facilitator of learning is of utmost importance in any PBL context or curriculum; however, an agile PBL teacher also performs a number of other academic tasks that are equally important, in that they prepare students and induct them into a particular way-of-being and becoming. In this chapter, we explore characteristics deemed important for an agile PBL teacher with a focus on activating (facilitating) student learning and developing. We also discuss academic or faculty development and issues involved in preparing agile PBL teachers.