When I finished this week’s readings, I felt huge “flexibility” of this approach. Teachers can use cases as merely stories to tell students something they should know or as incentives to motivate students to find answers by themselves. The teachers can also design well-structured cases, ill-structured ones, or one represents anywhere between this two extremes, according to students’ abilities and needs. Moreover, they can decide to use this approach for the whole semester or just a part of a course. In my opinion, CBL is the most flexible approach so far in this course.
Because CBL includes so many theories that we have learned in ECI 517, I cannot help thinking it combines all those approaches advantages in it, such as allowing students to learn in an authentic context, which makes learning more engaging and more fun. Also, it also has the disadvantages of those theories such as huge workload for teachers to design a course. Besides, because of the characteristic of CBR is to help students to activate their prior experiences that similar to the problem in hand, the biggest challenge for me is to find ways to provide appropriate experiences when students don’t have any in their real lives. In my imagination, since this is the first time I’ve ever heard about this approach, I think I need to find a great amount of resources in different levels in order to meet different students’ understanding levels. Of course, I’m also thinking that if my students are old enough to conduct research by their own, I can shift this work to them. That way, not only they can learn more through the researching process, but also I can reduce my own work.
In addition, I really like CBR’s 4 REs and the idea of case library. I think if I could have my own case library for my courses, that would be awesome, but I feel a little bit pressure at the same time because it seems a lot of work. But you’ll never if you don’t try it out, so I think I’ll definitely give it a try in the near future. Like many context-based theories we have learned, I think many web tools can help design this approach. Maybe use simple web pages for case library and use multimedia can be used for story telling, maybe opposite! Since it’s flexible, I think I can be creative! ☺
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Miya,
ReplyDeleteI will agree with you that this approach has a huge Flexibility, through Stories teachers can educate students in very creative ways and I believe that this is applicable to all age students.
One need to have a very good collection of resources, to implement this approach. At the beginning this may be a little bit hectic and time consuming task but eventually with great collection of resources, it will be a fantastic approach to implement.
Dipali
Miya,
ReplyDeleteYour post, as always, made me think. I guess I had thought of CB as a real extreme version of problem solving. You offered up the idea that educators can take this model in a lot of different directions. Thanks. rachel palmer
Hi Miya,
ReplyDeleteI agree, CBL does appear to be super flexible. I like this model and think it is appropriate for lots of situations. Having a case library would be so awesome! Just a thought - maybe your students can help put one together. A little at a time...each year students can add more and more to the case library. Kindof like the Turfgrass example.
Mary Ellen
Rebecca Kirstein: Ohhh that is a great idea. I love that Mary Ellen. It is hard to come with a story for every topic you have to cover in a course. What a great learning experience and it will let you see their interpretation and understanding of the lesson.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about how students could be central in the process of collecting the "cases" - at least in the beginning stages of your implementation of cases. You could come up with a few good, core cases... and then part of their assignment could be to go out and collect more cases. Think of the knowledge-whatevers in the Wang? article (don't remember their title) - the ones who went out and collected the stories? Kids could be trained to do that. What an amazing experience for them as well!
ReplyDeleteFrom Jennifer Knott: I like your idea of designing poor cases for students as a challenge - but I'd include a well-designed one as a starting point first!
ReplyDeleteMatthew,
ReplyDeleteAgreed on using the students as central to collection of (or design of) additional cases. In mathematics, I can see students constructing particular cases of examples that illustrate certain content. On the flip side...having them create cases of incorrect approaches or flawed examples, may be a nice approach as well. I likey...
Jennifer: Also agree that it may be misleading to have them work only on flawed constructions as cases as these might "stick" as the "only" examples they know. Start with cases that are correct and suitable :)
I was confused during my reading of this and then encouraged after reading Matthew's blog...now I feel like I need to go reread everything! You are able to pick so much out of the reading that I definitely missed! Guess I'll be doing double reading this week!
ReplyDeleteElizabeth