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| Reply To: | Kirkpatrick, Michael Scott - kirkpams |
| Date: | Wed, 1 Oct 2014 21:42:09 +0000 |
| Content-Type: | multipart/signed |
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I'm using TBL in a 400-level Computer Science (CS) course this semester, and it is working beautifully for 9 out of my 10 groups. But then there's the one…
I'm not sure how familiar members of this list are with CS courses, but CS courses (even flipped classroom models) always require significant amounts of work outside of class writing software. The way that I've structured my TBL class is that class time is spent chipping away at key pieces of these projects. But in the end, the teams still have to put everything together. The projects are structured such that the out-of-class work *can* be divided if needed to accommodate people's schedules. As I said, this is working very nicely with 9 groups.
My problem group has 5 members: one highly motivated and very capable, two good, and two that are concerns. I had an intervention with this team last week (4th week of the semester) because three of them were contributing nothing to the projects (one has since shown immediate and drastic improvement). Here we are halfway through week 5 and the last two students have fallen hopelessly behind. They have not even set up their work environment, which was required to be done in the first week of class. This would be like a 400-level biology student coming to me at this point of the semester and saying they don't know how to operate a microscope. The behavior of these two students is wholly unacceptable for a CS student at this level.
The three have now contacted me to, essentially, throw the other two overboard. They flat-out refuse to acknowledge the other two as team members. Any advice on how to handle this? As I said, the three are (mostly) in the right. While the three could, in my view, learn some very important lessons here about interpersonal dynamics, these two students participate acceptably during class time but are failing otherwise. As for another analogy, their behavior would be like a student who attends a literature class and engages in discussions, but makes no attempt to write the required essays.
I'd appreciate any thoughts that any of you could share.
-msk
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Michael Kirkpatrick
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
James Madison University
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