As Hunter rightly says, it's not just the defective content of the old national curriculum that is the problem.
The real solution to senior slump should be to engage students in the excitement of learning through a challenging curriculum, heading off the problem before it begins.
In September, the government introduced a new curriculum to target the problem, which included making languages a compulsory element of primary school learning, but the impact has yet to be seen.
At Dalhousie the curriculum is problem based, and for 5 weeks the focus is mental health and psychotropic medications.
In the Save the Seabirds curriculum, students were faced with the problem of reducing dependence on petroleum, which can spill and harm seabirds.
In the Save the Penguins curriculum, students were faced with the problem of saving penguins by designing better-insulated houses to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that are a result of heating homes with fossil fuels.
This was in line with Kern's first step in curriculum development, which entails identifying the problem and doing a general needs assessment by establishing the difference between the ideal and the current teaching approach.
The course used a number of educational strategies, as defined in the Kern model, to deliver the content of the curriculum including lectures, problem solving, discussion, group learning, demonstration of real life experiences, digital learning aids, prescribed reading and standardized patient experiences.
Donald Fraynd, the public schools' turnaround officer, said previous reform efforts had attacked only parts of the problem, like the curriculum.
Staff who are planning for curricular conversion to standard PBL need to set a timeframe in the order of years to allow sufficient time for designing the curriculum, constructing the PBL problems and educating the staff in medical pedagogy and PBL skills.
