Henriikka,
Oy. You have got quite a challenging instructional ecology there.
I am a firm believer in adapting TBL to fit the context, so I am going to recommend something I usually don't: straight-up, inter-team competition.
If you set up some form of competition among teams, teams will be motivated to huddle covetously over their IF-ATs and be sure other teams don't see them.
You'd have to play with the idea to find a model that fits you--some kind of curve on the tRATs, I am thinking. (Be sure NOT to make the individual tests competitive, though!)
The only reason I feel OK recommending competition among teams here is this:
1) You have tried lots of other things
2) It's a Business class, so competition is a familiar (and possibly enjoyable) context for your students in ways it might not be for others.
If you give up on the IF-ATs, consider trying clickers before giving up on TBL entirely.
Anyone else got ideas for Henriikka?
-M
________________________________________
From: Team-Based Learning [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Henriikka Clarkeburn [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 9:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: How to make large 1st year TBL classes work?
Hi,
We have been running TBL successfully in many classes in our Business school, at both under and post-graduate level. The one area where we are still looking for a real success story is our first year cohort.
To give you a bit of background:
1. Our courses have enrolments of 1200+ and run in several parallel streams with up to 50 separate tutorials a week.
2. Up to 70% of our students are non-native English speakers and many of them come from cultures where challenging knowledge and authority are traditionally not encouraged.
3. We teach in steep tiered lecture theatres seating up to 400 students, which are usually overbooked, so there are no spare seats and the rows are very long.
As a result of this we lack a shared educational culture and a sense of community in the first year (these things improve in the later years!). We have found both distributing material in the class a time-consuming challenge and cheating has been common enough to undermine the entire process. For example, students have no difficulty seeing IFATs on the rows in front of them and have used phones to text each other correct answers. We have tried using different IFATs on different rows, which resulted in an administrative workload and chaos in class if even one student group was sitting in the wrong row. Taking the RAP into the tutorials/online led to questions leaking from tutorial to tutorial no matter how many ways we tried to fix that by changing question orders, requiring question sheets to be returned, alternating forms etc.
So we are basically at the point of having to abandon TBL in our large first year classes before we burn out our staff and give TBL a bad name as a pedagogy that does not work. Any suggestions on how to make it work under these conditions, as we do believe in the value TBL would offer our students?
Best Wishes,
Henriikka
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Henriikka Clarkeburn | Lecturer
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