By Nelly Sander, AAU Communikation and Public Affairs
Photo: Colourbox

A bird flies into the school window and dies. For the third graders who found it, it will become the start of a project about bird life where they strive to increase the quality of bird life on campus by building birdhouses, planting berries suitable for birds to eat, and present their solutions to the rest of the school.

Such an activity is a far cry from traditional classroom teaching and is a good example of the type of teaching that researchers from AAU are immersed in along with teachers and management at the eight public schools in Rebild Municipality. The starting point is problem-based learning (PBL) and students learning by collaborating with others to solve real life problems .

The kids are motivated by project work 

Nikolaj Stegeager, Associate Professor at AAU, has been involved since the start of the project in the summer of 2021. He says that a large number of interviews with children from all levels in the public school system indicate that the children are more motivated and happier attending school when the teaching is based on PBL:

"The children find that it is fun to work on projects, and they like to work in groups. It makes sense to them. They say that they are more motivated to learn when they do project work than in traditional classroom teaching," he says.

All grades participate

In order to get the full benefit of PBL as a pedagogical model, it is important that the model is made part of the pedagogical work at all grade levels. If you start early, the students become familiar with the teaching method, which benefits students and teachers later on as the students progress through the grade levels. However, it is of utmost importance that the assignments are adapted to the children's level of competence.

"In the first grade you can work with the simplest form of group constellations. Groupwork might just be learning to work together  with one other child. You also have to adjust the level of independence imbedded in the learning process. At Aalborg University, students have to identify the problem themselves, find the appropriate literature and so on, but at the early grades levels in the public shool, independence might consist of choosing between two things," the researcher explains.

You can thus easily train parts of the PBL process without necessarily having to implement “the whole package”. As an example, Nikolaj Stegeager compares this way of working to training ballet dancers.

"Having an either/or approach to PBL is a bit like saying that the only way you can practice ballet is to go out and dance a ballet in from of an audience. But that's not how you train ballet dancers. You train small movements, you train your feet, you train your arms, and then you might practice dancing together and so on. The same with PBL. Problem based Learning can come in the form of a big project but it can also be something  we practice in a lesson or two," he explains.

PBL is one tool in the toolbox

Despite the many advantages of the PBL model, Nikolaj Stegeager emphasizes that PBL should  not be perceived as the "right" pedagogical approach. PBL is a tool, and as such it is very useful in a range of situations, but there are also things that the model is not particularly well suited for. Variety is extremely important. And according to the researcher, you become less receptive to learning if you do the same thing all the time - no matter the quality of a given pedagogical approach.

"I usually tell the teachers that a carpenter who only masters a hammer is a bad carpenter. Such a carpenter will face huge difficulties when trying to build a house, since you need to master multiple tools for such a task, he says.

Thus, The PBL model should not be understood as an all-encompassing and self-fulfilling mean to an end.

"The pedagogy can and must go hand in hand with other pedagogical approaches. The most important thing is that we are curious about how we can ensure the greatest opportunity for learning through our pedagogical approach, so that future generations acquire the skills that can carry them onward in the education system and into working life”, says Nikolaj Stegeager. 

If you want to use PBL in public schools:

Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication and Public Affairs

Contact

• Nikolaj Stegeager, Associate Professor, The Department of Culture and Learning, AAU og Institute for Advanced Study in PBL, AAU, phone: + 45 99 40 97 81, e-mail: nikolaj@ikl.aau.dk
• Lene Hvilsom Larsen, Head of Children and Youth Services, Rebild Municipality, phone: +45 99 88 77 95, e-mail: lhla@rebild.dk
• Nelly Sander, Project Manager, AAU Communikation and Public Affairs, phone: +45 99 40 20 18, e-mail: nsa@adm.aau.dk