Designing and Implementing an Innovative Problem-Based Teacher Education Course

Recent educational reform movements emphasize preparing teacher candidates for pedagogical problem solving in the classroom. This study aims to design and implement an innovative teacher education course Materials Evaluation and Adaptation based on the principles of problem-based learning (PBL) for the prospective teachers of English in the teacher education department of a state university in Turkey. The participants were 28 teacher candidates. To determine teacher candidates’ perception of their experiences of this innovative approach, data were obtained from reflective journals, problembased projects, and end-of-the-year interviews. Teacher candidates’ responses indicate promising results because PBL promoted teacher candidates’ construction of the problem, relating their solution to the problem and using multiple sources to solve the problem. The implications of these results for the teacher education are discussed.