Back on December 15, 2010, I posted the following to Spirit of Inquiry:

Who’s Using Team-Based Learning?

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

As I prepare to transmogrify (that’s right, transmogrify) my teaching strategy for English 1311 to team-based learning (TBL), I wonder who else on campus is using TBL. I know that Rhoda Reddix and others teaching pharmacology use it, but I would like to hear from others. Speak up if you adhere to Michaelsen’s “Four Essential Principles of Team-Based Learning”:

• “Principle 1: Groups Must Be Properly Formed and Managed”: The instructor forms diverse, permanent groups of 5-7 students, making every effort to ensure that “member resources” (assets such as work experience and previous course work; liabilities such as negative attitude, lack of experience/courses; as well as cultural factors such as gender and ethnicity) are evenly distributed (28-30).
• “Principle 2: Students Must Be Made Accountable”: The instructor designs the course so that students have obligations to their teammates (as well as their usual obligations to themselves and to the instructor). Students are evaluated on the basis of the preparation for class, their contributions to the team, and their team’s collaborative work (as well as on the basis of individual work) (30-32).
• “Principle 3: Team Assignments Must Promote Both Learning and Team Development”: The instructor designs collaborative activities that require student teams to make group decisions based on input from every team member. The instructor avoids creating activities that allow groups to divvy up the work and work independently (32-33).
• “Principle 4: Students Must Receive Frequent and Immediate Feedback”: Students must know whether they prepare well for class, how well their teams perform on collaborative activities, and how well they perform on individual tasks. Feedback should be “immediate, frequent, and discriminatory (i.e., enables learners to clearly distinguish between good and bad choices, effective and ineffective strategies, etc.)” (33-35).

Keep in mind these possibilities:

1. You have read Michaelsen and are fully committed to TBL.
2. You have been using (or moving toward) TBL without calling it that or doing much research on it.
3. You have colleagues who use TBL.
4. You think TBL sounds good.
5. You think acronymns are annoying and TBL stands for “That’s Buh-Loney.”

Wherever you stand, I’d like to see your comments.

How I Found TBL

Here's an entry I posted to the Spirit of Inquiry in December of 2010:

On to Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink

L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences has led me to a book he co-authored with Larry K. Michaelsen and Arletta Bauman Knight: Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching.

Team-based learning is, of course, a way of creating significant learning experiences. It is also one of those things you read about and think, “Oh yeah, I already sort of do that.” However, as Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink emphasize, team-based learning goes beyond the casual/occasional use of small student groups or the more systematic use of groups in cooperative learning; team-based learning “is an instructional strategy, not just a teaching technique” (9), one that “calls for procedures that support the transformation of newly formed ‘groups’ into ‘high-performance learning teams’” (8).

Rhoda Reddix and other faculty teaching NURS 1310: Pharmacology in Nursing have been using team-based learning and have seen significant measurable improvements in student performance. I suspect others on campus are using team-based learning as well, though I have yet to find out who they are (who are they?).

My goal is to revise my approach to teaching ENGL 1311, to move from the casual use of small groups to a full commitment to team-based learning. Doing so is no small task, as it will mean eliminating some assignments and creating new ones, writing several RATs (Readiness Assurance Tests), and doing things differently in every single class period (while generally taking care not to throw out the baby with the bathwater). But the potential advantages are significant in size and number.

One of the advantages has to do with student motivation. For students to write well, they must have motives. It can be a challenge to get students to care about producing quality writing (and caring is one of the domains in the taxonomy of significant learning): to care enough to plan a piece of writing carefully, draft it well in advance, take seriously feedback from others, truly revise (not just “tweak”) the text, and edit it thoroughly. In my classes (and in most writing courses universally), it is up to me to motivate students, and it is up to each student to motivate herself. With team-based learning, a third party comes into play: the team (of several fellow students). If I can implement team-based learning the way I hope to, student writers will have not only their own and my expectations to meet, but also their teammates’.

Welcome to T-BLog

I have decided to start a blog about using team-based learning in my writing course, WRIT 1311. I'll begin by importing some posts about TBL from my teaching-and-writing blog, The Spirit of Inquiry. Stay tuned.