Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: The Essential Elements of Team-Based Learning
A Broad Overview of TBL
The Four Essential Elements of Team-Based Learning
Implementing Team-Based Learning
Chapter 2: The Social Foundation of Team-Based Learning: Students Accountable to Students
Accountability: The Conceptual Bridge Between the Student and the Team
Chapter 3: Knowledge Is No Longer Enough: Enhancing Professional Education with Team-Based Learning
Cultivating Competencies: What Small Group Learning Brings to Professional Education
Team-Based Learning: A Powerful Form of Small Group Learning
In Their Own Words: How the TBL Process Develops Professional Competencies
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Teaching Skills for Facilitating Team-Based Learning
Teaching Competencies
Facilitation Strategies
Personal Instructor Characteristics
Chapter 5: Peer Assessment and Evaluation in Team-Based Learning
Pedagogical Merits of Peer Assessment and Evaluation
Student Perceptions of Peer Assessment and Evaluation
Guidelines for Implementing Peer Assessment and Evaluation
Assessment Instruments and Approaches
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Technological Alternatives to Paper-Based Components of Team-Based Learning
Readiness Assurance Tests
Reporting Complex Team Assignments
Providing Feedback on Peer Evaluations
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Team-Based Learning in Asynchronous Online Settings
Setup
Outcomes
Conclusion
Next Steps
Appendix: Key Teaching Activities for Team-Based Learning
Index
Team-Based Learning: Small-Group Learning’s Next Big Step
Larry K. Michaelsen, Michael Sweet, Dean X. Parmelee (eds.)
New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 116
Marilla D. Svinicki, Editor-in-Chief
Copyright © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, c/o John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River St., Hoboken, NJ 07030; (201) 748-8789, fax (201) 748-6326, http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Microfilm copies of issues and articles are available in 16mm and 35mm, as well as microfiche in 105mm, through University Microfilms, Inc., 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1346.
New Directions for Teaching and Learning (ISSN 0271-0633, electronic ISSN 1536-0768) is part of The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series and is published quarterly by Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company, at Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94103-1741. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, California, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94103-1741.
New Directions for Teaching and Learning is indexed in CIJE: Current Index to Journals in Education (ERIC), Contents Pages in Education (T&F), Current Abstracts (EBSCO), Educational Research Abstracts Online (T&F), ERIC Database (Education Resources Information Center), Higher Education Abstracts (Claremont Graduate University), and SCOPUS (Elsevier).
Subscriptions cost $89 for individuals and $228 for institutions, agencies, and libraries in the United States. Prices subject to change. See order form at end of book.
Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor-in-chief, Marilla D. Svinicki, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, One University Station, D5800, Austin, TX 78712.
www.josseybass.com
Preface
Until the first book on team-based learning (TBL) was published in 2002 (Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink, 2002), this unique and powerful strategy was often seen as nothing more than another variant of cooperative learning, even though Michaelsen and a number of other faculty had been using, researching, and publishing about TBL since the late 1970s. In 2004 a slightly updated paperback version was published (Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink, 2004) in the more appropriate format as a trade book (rather than a reference book), with a more readable font and a more affordable price. As a result, the paperback quickly became the more commonly used version of the book. It has made TBL more visible to a wider range of audiences and has expanded its use to hundreds of disciplines and thousands of schools in at least twenty-three countries.
The question now, a half-decade later, is, “What else have we learned about TBL?” The answer is, “A great deal!” Although the essential elements of TBL have remained stable, more faculty have used TBL in a wider variety of disciplines, with a wider variety of student populations, and in a wider variety of educational settings. These efforts have resulted in a clearer understanding of what it takes to capture and retain the unusual educational power of TBL and avoid practices that can limit its effectiveness.
We begin this volume with a few cautionary tales about what TBL is not, then discuss briefly the new settings in which TBL is being implemented, and finally introduce the chapters that follow.
Treatment Fidelity: Cautionary Tales About What Team-Based Learning Is Not
When a new idea comes along that promises significantly better results than current practices, at least two problems can arise. The first is that people try only some parts of the idea. The second is that people do not heed best-practice advice about what is required to implement the process for success. The danger is that those who fall into either of these traps can conclude and tell others, “I tried this idea, and it did not work.” Both kinds of problems have been reported to us, and as a result, we believe that a major contribution of this volume is informing potential users what they need to do—if they in fact want to do TBL and enjoy the significant benefits it has to offer.
This volume is about what TBL is and how it works, from the first chapter on the essential elements of team-based learning all the way through the key teaching activities in the appendix. (In fact, we generated the list in the appendix after reflecting on reports we received of both kinds of problems described above.) We begin, however, with a consideration of what TBL is not.
When is a perceived implementation of TBL not really an implementation of TBL? To clarify this, we will describe some of the versions of TBL we have heard about that did not work, how it was a departure from TBL best practice, and explain why we believe the teacher experienced the results reported. (For readers who are new to TBL and not yet familiar with its terminology, a firm grasp of this concept is not necessary for the broad points we are making here.)
- If you overuse readiness assurance tests, it is not TBL. An example of the first problem with TBL is when professors become attracted to the ability of the readiness assurance tests (RATs) to motivate students to complete assigned readings but fail to use assignments that require students to apply the knowledge they acquire from those readings and RATs. When this happens, students wind up taking RATs followed by even more RATs. Then they complain about the process because the course has been transformed into a pattern of test after test after test and they feel cheated (we believe legitimately so) by being “rewarded” for memorizing meaningless detail followed by being expected to memorize even more meaningless detail.
- Without peer evaluation, it is not TBL. One respected psychology professor used readiness assurance tests and at least some application problems, but contrary to best practice, did not use also use student peer evaluations. The result? Although two of his three groups worked well and most students were very positive about their experience, one of the best students made the predictable (and valid) complaint: “I did most the work, and everyone in my group got the same credit. This is not fair.” Unfortunately, this professor concluded that TBL “did not work for good students in his discipline,” and in spite of numerous and well-publicized successes with TBL elsewhere on campus, it was over twenty years before anyone in his psychology department experimented with TBL again.
- If you do not properly introduce your students to TBL, they will likely perceive it as an alien way of teaching and will resist it. Sometimes a teacher implements the entire TBL system and is gratified to see students engaged in significant learning, but is then frustrated by surprisingly low course evaluations at the end of the term. In our experience, this occurs because the professor has, contrary to good practice, failed to spend time at the outset explaining what TBL is, why the course is being taught with it, identifying its benefits, and providing an early, nongraded practice exercise to let students experience for themselves the uniqueness and potential benefits of the process. Often these teachers simply announce that they will be using TBL and warn students, with a minimum of explanation, that they need to start studying because the next class will start with a readiness assurance test. This can make students feel confused, unsafe, and perhaps even a little ambushed. As a result, in spite of the positive evidence of improved student learning in TBL classrooms, some professors (and we suspect many of their peers) have come to view TBL as being a potential career risk.
These are just some examples of teachers not following best practice and attributing many of the resulting problems on TBL as a teaching method. Unfortunately, the stories these teachers then tell can prevent others from trying TBL for themselves and discovering what it really does have to offer. We are aware of at least one instance in which, contrary to Michaelsen’s repeated warning that lengthy group papers are the worst type of group assignment, one of our colleagues said to the class, “Because of Michaelsen’s success with TBL, I’ve decided to try it out this semester. So form your own groups, and pick a topic for a thirty-page term paper that will be due on the Friday before finals.” Results? The better students complained because the less responsible students did little or nothing; the professor concluded that TBL did not work in his subject area; and the majority of the students (who had not actually experienced TBL) concluded that TBL was a bad idea.
Expanded Use of Team-Based Learning
The publication of the original books on TBL in 2002 and 2004 led to much greater awareness and use of TBL, making the publication of this volume a timely update on current practice. Three areas in which this expanded use has been especially noteworthy are in professional education (the health professions and engineering, for example), internationally, and in mixed-mode and online environments.
TBL in Professional Schools.
Professional school educators have found TBL particularly attractive because it offers powerful solutions to several major problems they face:
TBL in International Settings.
Another exciting area in which TBL has grown is in international contexts. Based on personal contact with the authors of this volume and our awareness with professional publications, TBL is now being used in at least twenty-three countries outside the United States and on every continent. Furthermore, due in part to the impact of the Internet, we are regularly asked to present workshops on TBL at schools virtually worldwide. As a result, many of the chapters in this volume examine how and why TBL enables students to learn to work in diverse teams and to value differing opinions and why TBL is effective in such a wide variety of cultural settings.
TBL and Instructional Technology.
Instructional technology is increasingly affecting every aspect of higher education, including the use of TBL in various forms of technology-mediated instruction. As a result, two of the chapters specifically focus on technological innovations that have been applied to TBL. One outlines a number of ideas for using technology to enhance face-to-face implementations of TBL. The other describes two authors’ experiences with implementing TBL in a totally asynchronous, online environment.
Organization of this Volume
This volume is designed to address three questions:
- What are the essential elements of TBL?
- Why are these elements essential to TBL?
- What do faculty members need to do to implement these essential elements in a variety of different contexts?
These three questions are addressed in the following chapters.
In Chapter One, Michaelsen and Sweet outline the specifics of what needs to happen for someone to accurately say, “I used TBL.” In Chapter Two, Sweet and Pelton-Sweet use transcripts of student interactions to show how and why the readiness assurance process has such a powerful and positive effect on the development of lasting and productive interpersonal relationships within teams.
In Chapter Three, Sibley and Parmelee outline why TBL is ideally suited for dealing with the challenges of the professional school curriculum and describe, through the eyes and voices of students, what it is like to be in a professional school TBL course.
In Chapter Four, Lane discusses why facilitation skills are so important in TBL and provides concrete facilitation tools and suggestions, as well as describing certain teacher characteristics that can make TBL easier or more difficult to implement successfully.
Then in Chapter Five, Cestone, Levine, and Lane outline why peer evaluations are such an important part of TBL and describe a variety of options for collecting peer assessment data and providing formative and summative feedback to students.
The final two chapters deal with the impact of technology on TBL. In Chapter Six, Robinson and Walker outline a number of technical enhancement options for implementing TBL in face-to-face classes. Finally, in Chapter Seven, Palsolé and Awalt describe how they have successfully implemented TBL in purely asynchronous, online environments.
TBL Through the Eyes of Students
We have recognized for some time that TBL is about learning, not teaching. But in part because of the more widespread use of TBL, we have only recently realized the value of inviting the voices of students into the scholarly and practical conversations about TBL. As a result, a major feature of several chapters in this volume is that they reinforce many of TBL’s key ideas by using the very words of students who have experienced and are experiencing TBL.
Larry K. Michaelsen
L. Dee Fink
Editors
References
Michaelsen, L. K., Knight, A. B., and Fink, L. D. Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching. Sterling, Va.: Stylus, 2004.
Michaelsen, L. K., Knight, A. B., and Fink, L. D. Team-Based Learning: A Transformative Use of Small Groups in College Teaching. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002.
Michaelsen, L. K., Parmelee, D. X., McMahon, K. K., & Levine, R. E. (Eds.). Team-Based Learning for Health Professions Education: A Guide to Using Small Groups for Improving Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2008.
Larry K. Michaelsen is professor of management at Central Missouri, David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, a Carnegie Scholar, and former editor of the Journal of Management Education.
L. Dee Fink was director of the Instructional Development Program at the University of Oklahoma from 1979 until 2005 and currently is a national and international consultant in higher education.