PBL and teamwork: Promises and problems

This paper examines the educational promises of, as well as the problems in enacting, intra- and inter-team collaboration within a PBL curriculum at the Republic Polytechnic in Singapore. The Republic Polytechnic has instituted PBL in every module where students complete one problem per day every day. Class size is limited to 25 students with five teams of five students. At the end of the day, each team shares their approach to solving the problem with the whole class and students from other teams are encouraged to ask questions and discuss the presenting team's ideas. Ideally, this structure would promote both intra- and inter-team collaboration and learning. At its optimal, each team would act in a way similar to a jigsaw classroom - whereby the team would identify areas that each individual would become an expert and then all members would come together and discuss these various areas and mould a holistic approach to the problem. Then, at the end of the day, the presentations would allow individuals to reflect upon the different approaches in a more integrative fashion. These are the promises of such an approach. However, in practice, there are problems within this context. Two examples include (1) social loafing that breaks apart the potential jigsaw nature of collaboration afforded in this PBL context and (2) the competitive nature of teams clouding possible integrative thinking. This paper examines the promises and concrete problems in instituting such an approach in this context - and propose possible solutions to these problems.