Dear Mark,
The answer to your question is not a simple one. If you want teams (and once you have them, you have a very real asset to help you in your attempts to promote learning), you have to do things in a way that will promote team development. You can choose how you form the groups and what you ask them to do but, you can't choose the outcome--that somply happens as a natural consequence of your choices.
If you follow ALL of the TBL prescriptions (see the course scorecard at <www.teambasedlearning.org>.), your groups will develop into teams pretty quickly. If you decide against following all of them (depending on which ones you decide to ignore) the process will be longer and, some groups will never become teams. Thus, if you don't go "all or nothing", what you decide to do that isn't TBL will make a big difference in the outcome. For example, if you decide to assign groups to create a lengthy document very few, if any, will ever become teams because the only thing they will really even partially together is to decide how to divide up the individual parts of the work.
In my opinion, if you only want to do one aspect of TBL, the most beneficial thing would be to use "4-S" group assignments (Significant problem, Same problem for all groups, requiring groups to make a Specific choice that assesses students' ability to USE course concepts, Simultaneous reporting of groups' choices). Using "4-S" assignments is both very low risk and will produce positive outcomes in any setting in which you use groups.
Beyond that, I'm not sure but, I think using the Readiness Assurance Process would probably make the most difference overall but, if you don't purposefully form the groups, you are adding a great deal fo complexity to both your job of managing the groups and their job of overcoming the barriers on the way to becoming a team.
I'd add one caution. The most common reason that students get really upset at what the teacher thinks is TBL (but really isn't) is that he or she gives a whole lot of quizzes (that might even be called RATs--Readiness Assurance Test) that follow one after another. In doing TBL, you are making sort of an implicit agreement with you students. You do your part (prepare for class) and I'll do mine (reward you by doing something meaningful in class that will promote deeper understanding of WHY the material is important or HOW it can be used to accomplish something worthwhile. If you don't deliver on your end, the experience studying for a quiz, only to be "rewarded" by more studying of meaningless terms that are only useful because they help with preparation for, Yes, another quiz or a mid-term or final test over a whole bunch of meaningless terms. This often results in teams but, instead of promoting learning, the teams' goal is to stop the professor from giving, Yes, one more quiz.
I hope this helps.
Larry
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Larry K. Michaelsen
Professor of Management
University of Central Missouri
Dockery 400G
Warrensburg, MO 64093
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