Greg, I've been using TBL in history of science classes for the last year and a half. I, too, have struggled to work out a format that I am comfortable with in a humanities class. Last semester I used TBL with a class of about 70 students in a history of science survey course. On the whole it was successful, and I will use this method again. The typical history class consists of lectures and discussion sections, and the switch to TBL completely changes the way that I must think about the questions I give to the students and the things I expect of them. Questions for them are very challenging to make--the idea of coming up with objective questions over readings is something that I was unconsciously taught to avoid, because such a focus was (I imagined) too much associated with memorization of facts and did not allow for critical thinking. I'm finding, however, that the initial RAT work must be based on understanding of the most basic information. Otherwise the students rebel and complain that your questions are tricky and unfair. This is the time that you want to make sure that the students really pick up on the material. For three semesters I wrote RAT questions that called for a much more detailed understanding of the material than most students could get on a first reading without any substantial classwork on it. So I suggest that for the RAT questions you should stick to some of the most obvious and basic facts and themes of a work in question. Do not try to ask them about interpretations or anything that you would normally associate with a critical thinking question. Those questions must come later. The group projects that I use give tend to be variations on the normal essay questions that I would have the students write on tests at the end of a unit. The difference is that these questions must be answered in a single class period (or sometimes one and a half periods) and can only be produced after extensive discussion among classmates. So you have to modify those questions to ask for very specific kinds of information. I have come to use outlining extensively for these answers: have the students, for example, outline a letter that they might write in response to one of the authors, or outline an essay that they would write in answer to a question. Here you have to be very specific in your instructions to them to use complete sentences to explain the main point of each section of the outline. (I used to get a lot of sketchy sentence fragments that I had a very difficult time grading.) Also be sure that you are very clear in your own mind what you think would constitute a good answer to the question. Too often, I think, in English and history and humanities classes we judge essays on subjective qualities that are difficult to place in an outline form (writing style, coherence of the essay, etc.). One has to always remember that these projects are written by a committee and they are done in class without much time to proofread and polish. What you are looking for is a condensed argument, and you must be very clear about what arguments will work and what arguments will not. I've had students also fill in grids with individuals mentioned in a work. I just did this with Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages, asking the students to place individuals that Gould talks about into one of four categories that he uses to classify them. This forced the students to remind each other about different individuals and then discuss where they fit in Gould's schema. Finally, it is important to go over the results with the students after you've looked at them and thought about them. I often write up short commentary about each group's projects and distribute it to all students of a group along with a copy of the project that the group did. If I've done a good job explaining why they didn't do as well as they should have, the groups improve dramatically over time on subsequent projects. It is always good to have the groups create a poster for other groups to see, but for the more complex projects toward the end of the semester, I've found that it is necessary to have the students write out their answers on notebook paper (which can be copied along with the comments and distributed to all students of a group). I will often do this along with a poster that has one or two sentences on it that give the group's final analysis. The poster is discussed in class and the outline on notebook paper is graded by me. If you are meeting with TBL only periodically throughout the semester, I'm afraid you will find it much more difficult to utilize it effectively because so much of the work relies on the groups building on work that they are doing daily. I don't use TBL excercises everyday, but I almost always have the groups think about a problem for 5 minutes once or twice in the class. If nothing else this keeps the groups together to build working relationships and it brings needed focus to the topics that I'm lecturing on or that I'm leading a class-wide discussion on. In general, I find that throughout the group work, the students return to a focus on the texts we are studying in a much more sophisticated way than they ever did before. They mine the text for material that they've read and want to repeat. In general, I find that it promotes engagement with the material. I know that it can be used effectively in the humanities, we humanists face challanges that those in the sciences--in which worksheets and problem-sets with discrete answers are common--don't have. Stephen Weldon ------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen P. Weldon, Ph.D. History of Science Society Bibliographer Assistant Professor Department of History of Science 601 Elm St., Room 622 The University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019 Personal email: [log in to unmask] Isis Bibliography: [log in to unmask] Phone: 405-255-5187 Fax: 405-325-2363 ------------------------------------------------------------