Guidelines for problem-based learning instruction planning

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an effective tool to foster students developing critical and creative thinking skills, as well as enhance their innovation capabilities, through the process of problem solving. It has been adopted as an instructional method for decades in which the teacher builds his/her instruction around a practical problem and encourages pupils to discuss the problem in small groups, with the aim to cultivate active learning, critical thinking and problem-solving skills among them. In this paper, the authors address some guidelines to show how to plan a PBL teaching curriculum efficiently. These guidelines are structured in procedural steps to design accordingly a PBL instruction plan, namely: understanding curricular outlines, structuring modular curricula, designing a comparative table of modular curriculum levels, selecting appropriate themes or unit titles, transforming a scene, and determining learning goals. The authors have also developed a checklist as a tool to evaluate the results of curriculum design.