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.