Facilitating facilitators to facilitate, in problem or enquiry based learning sessions

Abstract

Problem based learning (PBL) has been used in dental education over the past 20 years and uses a patient case scenario to stimulate learning in a small group setting, where a trained facilitator does not teach but guides the group to bring about deep contextualized learning, to be empathetic to each other and to encourage fair and equitable contribution from individual learners. Learners are encouraged to appreciate that they individually perform better when they actively participate in the group and share resources, than when they learn in isolation (Bandura, 1977, Freire, 1972, Lave and Wenger, 1991, Kolb, 1984 and Vygotsky, 1978).