MAILING LISTS

Greetings TBL folks,

Glad to come across your group; I look forward to sharing ideas. I came across 
this forum while searching for a student guide to TBL that I can modify and 
translate into Japanese for a research project. 

I have an opportunity to conduct Action Research to assess the viability of 
group-learning methods with freshmen Japanese students at a private 
university in Northern Japan. For those of you who know anything about 
Japanese higher education, you know that calloboration and higher education 
are mutually exclusive concepts. The university has agreed to provide me with 
resources to conduct three 90-minute workshops with 30 student volunteers. 
These are students who have spent their higher education in lecture/test hell, 
and have no experience with collaborative processes in the classroom--
especially since the faculty is so strongly opposed to anything but lectures. 
The students will likely be characteristically reserved and highly hesitant to 
break rigid cultural restrictions against engaging with others in class.

I am designing each workshop to be a full TBL cycle [assigned reading, 
individual and team RAT, feedback, team application exercise, team 
presentation, team evaluation; the team evaluation will also include self-
evaluation, satisfaction survey, and comments for improvement]. The emphasis 
is to measure Japanese student ability to develop one another in a 
collaborative environment, so faculty feedback will mostly be limited to review 
of RAT results and coaching the students in collaborative processes. This will 
be a non-graded environment, so I am hoping that social dynamics emerge as a 
primary motivator.

A key challenge is seeing if students can adapt to and show marked 
improvement with collaborative processes in only three sessions. In attempt to 
hit the ground learning, I will use the first workshop to teach team dynamics 
through TBL. For this reason, I am looking for a student guide to TBL that I can 
modify for Japanese culture, then translate into Japanese. Of course, I am also 
interested in hearing if anyone has conducted similar research using single 
workshops as complete TBL cycles. 

I look forward to your insights.

Regards,

Brent