MAILING LISTS

Jennifer,

When classes get over a certain size (50-ish, or so), doing the formation in class just becomes unworkable.  Many teachers just assign students to teams and announce the team rosters.

As long as you share why you made the teams as you did (to be fair across student backgrounds and give each team the best chance to succeed that you could) students seem to quickly forget the formation experience and get on with the business of the term.

-M



-----Original Message-----
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jennifer Imazeki
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 12:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: team transparency

Hi all,

How important do you think it is to do the creation of teams in class?
I'm asking because I was planning to create teams in class by having
students line up according to different characteristics and then
counting off. However, I want to make sure that both 'good' and 'bad'
students are distributed across teams and I'm not sure how to do that
without identifying the less-good students (in my mind, I am defining
'good' and 'bad' students by how well they did in the lower-division
prereq classes, which are important preparation for this particular
course). On the first day, I am having them fill out a short survey
that I will use to gauge how to create the teams and I *could* just
create the teams myself and walk in the second day and tell the
students which team they are on. Does anyone think this would be a
terrible thing to do?

thanks,
Jennifer