PBL Brainstorm

Problem-Based Learning. Talk about a Problem. For weeks now I’ve relegated this assignment to the back of my brain. What am I going to plan? Doesn’t this type of unit seem ill-suited for English classes? Other than the idea of which new words to place in the dictionary, the back of my brain couldn’t come up with an original idea for a problem-based unit.
Since we read about designing units for class this Monday, the PBL scampered back up to the frontal cortex (or wherever our current thoughts reside). Bevin’s classroom discussion was fresh in my mind, as was the chapter in M&M about choosing literature. But because we’d just discussed the idea of choosing new books for a class, I don’t want to be a copycat by using that as my problem.

What else is there? I realize this is really boring, but I’m sort of using the blog this week to brainstorm ideas. One that occurred to me was to set up a committee (Students-in-Disguise) for determining if certain movies should be allowed to be shown in high school classrooms (ex. Blackhawk Down, Vera Drake, Juno).

But I did sort of want to be inter-disciplinary. Utah State’s got a PBL website, http://library.usu.edu/instruct/eng2010/pbl.php , and there are some good ideas on there, but I didn’t see any one that appealed to me. I thought maybe I could modify one of the problems to have the students decide if there should be a tax on junk food, just like there’s a tax on tobacco. The writing an researching components, along with the structuring of arguments, would lend themselves to desired English standards. But it sounds really boring, and I can’t imagine that my high schoolers would want to delve into this topic. And would it really take 2 or 3 weeks to come to a conclusion?

Despite my desire to find something original to do, I may just steal part of one of the units from M&M, the one on Media; I think it was in chapter 13. Just to flesh this out, I’m thinking of having certain students be engineers, like for GE Healthcare or for 3M. These students would have the problem of coming up with a product, an invention, because the company owners need something new to stimulate investor interest and to generate new cash flow. So that group develops the product and explains it to another group, who will be portraying marketers. The advertising/marketing people must then come up with print, radio, and television campaigns to sell the product. They must make the product appear useful, if not necessary, to the public--and they must make the product look cost-effective to the CEO, the CFO, and the upper management.

Should I have a third group be the upper management and company officials? Or will that be too boring. While the previous groups are working on their projects, this management group could be researching their roles, but that doesn’t seem like very much fun to me. Then again, I’m not drawn to business-y things; I don’t find justifiable expenditures and overhead and all that interesting, but some of the students might. Or should I let the students decide--maybe the first group (the engineers) could turn into the management group and could then judge the product and the ad campaigns.

But is this too structured? I really don’t know what the heck I’m doing here. I guess I’ll have to ‘work it out,’ Project Runway-style. Auf Wiedersehen.