CBL, PBL, and Design Thinking

Good question Jay and one we all think about as we decide which frameworks will work best for each of our educational goals.  It’s helpful to hear about what educators use, like your approach to Literature of Chemistry.

During my high school teaching career I used PBL often (as DT and CBL were not yet invented 😊.) And in my role now in professional learning I’ve used Design Thinking and Challenge Based Learning.  

On my part, I used PBL for students to solve a specific pre-defined  problem. The students were to do research  and create projects centered on the curriculum we were covering.  

The way I use DT and CBL are much more learner-centered, involving students in active problem-solving and self-directed learning.  With DT we focus on an innovative user centric solution to a problem and prototype the solution for testing, reflecting and redoing based on user feedback.

For CBL (which is now my preferred framework) I center on the CBL “motto” Take Action Make a Difference.  A lot of the CBL I’m privileged to read about or facilitate   encourages collaboration and community involvement, it is authentically local but can be a global challenge. It promotes deep investigation into that challenge using technology to support the research, the investigation, the proposal and the sharing of and reflection on the solution. Be sure to look at some of the CBL challenges here: https://education.apple.com/forum/apple-groups/challenge-based-learning/cbl-challenges. Also scroll down and visit the Challenge for Change Series.

CBL is also flexible so one can also use the framework to teach content standards. I took a stab at sharing Using Challenge Based Learning to meet Curricular Standards & Objectives

And Jodie Deinhammer, who does an amazing job with her science curriculum using Challenge Based Learning, has a wonderful assessment guide: Assessing Challenge Based Learning in the Classroom

Thank you for your thoughts and links Cheryl. I am also making my way through the different frameworks. I agree that PBL is suited well when students are asked to solve a specific problem.

Like you said for broader more diffuse nebulous problems CBL or DT is better I think. In my class I provide the following six key words: Energy, Water, Food, Medicine/Drugs, Air, and Human Health and ask students to discover global issues related to the keyword assigned to the group, to settle on a specific issue they would like to solve, to ideate possible chemistry/science related solutions, and then share these solutions with the class (a more or less abbreviated DT approach). What I like about CBL is the use of the word "Challenge" which captures better what I want the students to do rather than the DT approach.

While we do this 4-6 week module we go over how to access chemical information (database searches) how to read papers, how to summarize information, how to make presentations, etc. If anyone is interested the overall design of the course is shown below:

Nice Jay, thanks for the detail of your process. Agree - the word “challenge” really sets the tone and the engagment.

Hi Jay,

Great question. I use CBL and Design Thinking together in my class. They are different but interrelated. CBL is how I frame the overall challenge or lesson, and Design Thinking is a detailed guide for working through the challenge.

For example, our recent project was to "reduce waste in the cafeteria." In the Investigate phase of the CBL, the students started by generating guiding questions and then guiding activities. Design thinking gave them the structure to ask good questions and design activities, providing useful data and outcomes. The students iterated through the design thinking process until they felt that they had enough data and information to propose a solution. That led to more iterations in developing and testing the proposed solution.