PBL Cycle 1 Day 1 The pedagogical content knowledge of assessment and instruction for the learning of mathematics.
Last week, the secondary school mathematics preservice teachers explored professional learning models as they exist in various professions, for example, we had a guest speaker from medicine who learned through PBL at McMaster for her MD, and some preservice teachers related engineering learning through variations of PBL, like project-based learning and case-studies.
Wednesday (yesterday) was the first day of the first PBL cycle for five PBL teams made up of 48 secondary school mathematics preservice teachers and five Tutors. It was exciting to hear the engagement and rich discussions from the teams as they figured out what the problem was, what they knew and didn�t know, and what they needed to learn before the next class to progress farther into the problem.
This first PBL cycle is designed with a little bit more structure than usual, because it is their first time using PBL as a learning model. Learning Goals for the preservice teachers working through this PBL task are provided to give them a bit more insight into their work on this task. This PBL cycle is also designed a bit longer than the usual 3 days to give everyone time to acclimatize to this learning model. Additionally, some materials to help their learning along the way will be introduced as the days progress.
This is the Task page given to the PBL teams:
