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I would have a section in my "Skill Development Activities" component of the course grade -- discussion of current  topics.  This could be defined as a 5- or 10-minute discussion of a current item.  I would give the teams the discussion prompt at the beginning of class and have them discuss and then report.  If you have primed that current events are valid discussion items, they have been "warned" or informed that they need to pay attention to real-life events.  One possibility is to use a posting on the course LMS or an email of what the topic is and the length of the discussion period the next day.

NOTE:  My Skill Development Activities includes, the RAT scores, team application exercises, team maintenance points (if the class decides this is preferred to other methods of group evaluation), and individually submitted homework items.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bill Goffe
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 11:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Discussion of Current Events?

I use TBL in two of my courses (economics) and have been quite pleased.
But, there is one thing I haven't really figured out how to incorporate -- current events. In these courses it is pretty important to read and discuss events right as they occur, but how might I incorporate this into TBL? If there is a story on tomorrow, I don't really want to wait until the next RAP process; instead, I'd like to talk about it in the next class. Plus, current topics rarely fit exactly into what we're currently doing.

Ideas?

      - Bill

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Bill Goffe
Department of Economics
SUNY Oswego, 416 Mahar Hall          
Oswego, NY  13126                               
315-312-3444(v),  315-312-5444(f)
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http://cook.rfe.org