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