The teacher usually assumes the role of a metacognitive coach. Encourage testing ideas against alternative views and alternative contexts. Constructivism says that understanding is socially negotiated, meaning that only by testing one's understanding against the views of others can growth occur. While not considered essential to PBL, usually cooperative teaming is used to promote the generation of ideas and refinement of strategic thinking during a PBL unit. Provide opportunity for and support reflection on both what is learned and on the learning activity.
Reflection helps students to develop metacognitive awareness.
In PBL, reflection is one of the goals of the teacher's questioning of students' plans, processes, and opinions. Situated Cognition An assumption common in education today is that knowledge exists independently of the contexts in which it is acquired, and that once a person learns something, he or she knows it and can apply it to any relevant situation. This assumption that knowledge can be separated from the context in which it is learned and used has come under criticism in the past decade. Brown, Collins et al. argue that cognition is fundamentally situated. By this they mean that the activity in which knowledge is developed is an integral part of what is learned, and that by divorcing knowledge from the context in which it is used, schools take away the meaning and purpose of learning that exists in real-life situations.