UBC Mailing Lists 17.0 - TEAMLEARNING-L Archives

1) Provide reading guides....good modelling of supporting your students to succeed

2) Look at the NMBE question writing manual and get a handout of question leaders vs. bloom's levels....helps with writing RAP questions

3) If you have faculty working together to develop classroom activities....I would combine them by discipline....I tried a Application Exercise Development Activity with diverse discipline groups and got strong feedback against doing it again

From: Team Learning Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Wager, Walt
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:26 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: peer feedback

I am offering a TBL workshop for 16 faculty this summer and my aim is to use TBL as much as possible to teach about TBL. To this end, the 16 faculty will be put into 4 diverse teams. The workshop meets 4 times over 2 weeks (Tuesday-Thursday, Tuesday Thursday), for 3 hours each meeting (9-12). The goal of the workshop is that faculty leave with a team-based learning activity that they can use in one of their classes in the Fall – we will stress, however, that TBL should be considered as a course level strategy rather than simply a single learning activity.

The participants will be assigned to read an article on critical thinking by Diane Halpern before they come to the workshop and at the first Tuesday meeting they will take an individual RAT over the reading, and then team RAT, and then a team critical thinking exercise. We will discuss what happened during the activity, and reflect on the components of the RAP. Then all of the participants will receive the TBL book, and be assigned to read Chapters 2 and 11 for Thursday.

When they come in on Thursday they will take a RAT over Chapter 2 and have a short critical thinking activity. Then, as a team, they are to develop 3 RAT questions and a critical thinking exercise for Chapter 11. Teams will hand in a worksheet with their responses to that activity before leaving. The assignment for the next Tuesday is for each of them to choose a unit for one of their courses and develop a reading activity, RAT and critical thinking exercise for that Unit.

On the first Tuesday of the second week they would get into their teams and get feedback on the team activity from the previous week (Chapter 11 exercise). Following that, they would discuss what they came up with for their course, and get input from their team members. This is where I have a dilemma – It doesn’t seem like a team-based learning activity. However, I can see that this might be a common type of thing instructors might want to do – that is have students work on individual projects that are meaningful to them – or that involve personal research.

The last day (second Thursday), Each team was to choose one of the activities from among those their team members developed and try it out with one of the other teams. Since we have 4 teams, we would have two tryout sessions: (9:00 – 10:15 team 1 with team 2; team 3 with team 4) (10:30 – 11:45 Team 4 with team 1, and team 2 with team 3). So each team would have a reading assignment to do between Tuesday and Thursday for the Thursday activity. We plan to follow up in the fall visiting each professor’s class to see how they use TBL in one of their courses.

I guess my question is does this seem like a good approach, or are we trying to do too much in too short a time? If so, what suggestions would you have for modifying the workshop.

BTW, I’d be happy to share the Halpern RATS and Critical thinking exercises, and the TBL Chapter 2 RAT and critical thinking exercise if anyone is interested.