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Dear Marla

I teach the cardiovascular pathophysiology to the second year pharmacy
students. I recently had my first exam and an assessment of TBL in the
class. The feedback I got from the students about IRAT/TRAT was actually
positive, and they thought having IRAT/TRAT at the beginning of every
class was very helpful to prepared them for the class applications. One
suggestion I can make is that the questions on IRAT should be fairly
straight forward and just assess them on understanding the basis of the
big picture. Where they need to apply critical thinking and synthesizing
a thought seems to be more relevant to applications and of course the
exams.

I hope you continue with exploring the TBL, it is a very powerful
teaching /learning technique

Good Luck

Parto

 

Parto Khansari Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Pharmacology

California Northstate College of Pharmacy

10811 International Drive

Rancho Cordova, CA  95670

916-631-8108 Ext. 226

Fax: 916-631-8127

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www.californiacollegeofpharmacy.org
<http://www.californiacollegeofpharmacy.org/> 

 

 

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From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Marla
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 7:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TBL a disaster - help appreciated

 

Hello-

I am an adjunct psychology professor at a local university.  I have been
teaching the same class for 6 years and just this semester decided to
try TBL.  I thought it was going well until I asked for feedback from
the class after their first RAT - it turned it to a 30 minute discussion
where about 8 students became very hostile towards me (saying that the
questions were too hard, they understood the readings but shouldn't be
held accountable to synthesize the material before we even talked about
it in class, they wanted to re-visit the distribution of grades and when
I said 'no' they said that was unfair, etc.).  One student is still
arguing with me about one question that their team appealed which I
denied (this is 1 point among many for the semester).  While I love the
idea of TBL, I am tempted to resort to the boring-yet-familiar lecture.
These students' whining is really wearing on me and instead of enjoying
teaching (it is a part-time job I do, and certainly NOT for the money) I
am counting the days until the semester is over.

Any advice, words of encouragement, etc. would be very much appreciated
at this point!

Thanks.