MAILING LISTS

Here is how I, as an education professor and not a medical or health professions educator, would define these terms.

Project based learning (PBL)  This is the oldest term. It has its basis in the work of John Dewey, a 20th century American educational theorist. The idea here is that learning should be grounded in experience and driven by student interest. In other words, students, with the guidance of teachers, should learn by completing projects. They should be active learners rather than passive partakers of information. The learning theory basis for this idea would be the work of Piaget and Vgotsky.

Team Based Learning (TBL) was developed by Dr. Larry Michaelsen, a business professor. It incorporates many of the the ideas of cooperative learning, a teaching strategy for k-12 students. The major developers and researchers in cooperative learning are Drs. Roger and David Johnson. As a middle school teacher for many years before I became a college professor, I used this strategy in my teaching. I still use some of the elements of cooperative learning with TBL in my college classroom. I believe some of the ideas, like group processing, are helpful in developing teams. I see TBL as a model for effectively implementing cooperative learning with adults, a more structured version of cooperative learning in some ways.

Flipped classroom – this is the newest term. I would not group the other strategies under this strategy. The flipped classroom is a teaching model developed as  way to more effectively use technology in teaching and learning.  The idea came from the TED conference. Its major proponents are k-12 teachers, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann.  The idea here is that students spend time viewing and gaining information outside of class, before class actually, and then during class time is spent applying what the information.

If I were to have an umbrella term for all of these strategies I would use the term, Active Learning. Another term used in the field of education is student centered instruction. (Teacher centered instruction is passive strategies like lecture, where students are partakers of information.) They idea that all of them share in common is idea of active application. In addition most of these strategies have the idea that students will learn collaboratively. Project based learning and flipped classroom usually do involve collaborative learning strategies but it would be possible to use these strategies individually and not in a collaborative learning environment. This is another reason that I would not consider flipped classroom an umbrella term.

Karen

Dr. Karen Milligan
Professor of Education
Carson-Newman University
Jefferson City, TN