Pbl

[vc7777]

---

Members do not see this ad.

LOs are presented the following session and can take almost any form imaginable.

We have had USMLE board style multiple choice questions, Jeopardy with teams, arts and crafts (coloring and pasting different cells and functions of the stomach onto a page), board talks (aka "chalk-talks"), posterboards, videos, pics of arm-wrestlers snapping their humerus, and more. Powerpoint is allowed for presentations at CCLCM.

 

[nlax30]

Ok, there seems to be a significant difference in what people mean when they say 'PBL'. Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem like the people who've 'done' PBL and hate it are attending schools where you occasionally meet in a 'small' group (smaller than lecture, anyway), are introduced to a new problem, and are expected to solve it (investigate it?) while you're sitting there in the 2-3 hour session (or by the next time you meet, which isn't often).

While that strategy may involve a problem, it doesn't seem to involve a lot of learning.

If your school does this, your curriculum is not PBL-based. Think of it as something your school's course directors threw in to make the LCME say "ooh, how progressive" when they do the accreditation dance (or the impress-the-applicants-with-fancy-buzzwords dance). It is a terrible way for most people to learn and I'm not really sure what anyone could possibly get out of it other than a mild to moderate headache and an unhealthy dislike for your facilitator or classmates.

+3.

That's really what I've been saying. I think there's a huge variation in how PBL is done and structured, and in a lot of cases where it's looked down upon is, IMHO, mainly because it's being used just to have small sort of "new" curriculum style as opposed to using it like it should be used.

In the medical school sense, PBL is just a framework where you identify the basic science concepts you need to learn, on your own, in order to understand a problem or clinical case. The only real learning or teaching that went on in our group sessions was if someone had a quick question to clarify something we read about from the last meeting, or sometimes the facilitator would throw out some clinical tidbits that we wouldn't have gotten on our own or to point out something on imaging studies if we had those.