Bernie, I was *so* inspired by your post! The phrase that kept going through my mind as I read it was "force for Good." I hope I can meet you some day. Thanks for doing what you do, and taking the time to share it with the rest of us. :-) -Michael -----Original Message----- From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of bmillar Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 1:21 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: TBL - teammate conflicts and culture - a possible solution Hi Sophie I understand your problem, and think I may have something for you to try. I teach at a South African University and am using TBL in very diverse groups - multicultural as well as multilingual. Although we have been a democracy for 15 years now, the legacy of apartheid lingers on and people are still racially divided. I mix the teams up colour-wise and strengths-wise. So, it may be that there will be white students from excellent schools in the same team as black students from disadvantaged township schools, EFL and EAL in the same team. These are people who would normally not even talk to each other. Therefore, the very important thing is to get the teams to bond, so I spend the first class, when they are in their brand new teams, entirely on ice-breakers and team-bonding exercises (I can let you have a list of what I do) that I find work very well. I invest time on teaching the teams what a team is, time-management in a team, conflict resolution, team roles that are swapped for every task to avoid social loafing and how to communicate using "I"-language. I do all this in a fun way so that there is a lot of laughter and enjoyment. At the same time I explain to the students what I doing and what they are learning in the process. I do all this right at the beginning of the course and have found that the teams gel and work very well after that for the entire term. I have used Prof. Dee Fink's taxonomy of significant learning to design my course, which contains the element of CARING. I go through the whole taxonomy and explain to the students what I am doing, what the course is about and why it is so different from the other courses they have. I pause at the Caring section of the taxonomy and we brainstorm what caring can mean and then I explain how we are going to make this a core value of each team coupled with the African philosophy of Ubuntu (caring). Then the teams do tasks where they are given scenarios where caring has to be applied and as a team they have to work out how to do this, e.g. a team member's mother has suddenly died, how will the team respond? This takes the team through a discussion of the different cultural approaches to death and mourning, and then they come up with an appropriate response that is caring in terms of that person's personal Discourse. This is time-consuming, but without getting the team to bond first, TBL would be, in my opinion, a meaningless exercise. I just want to share some of the comments made by my students in yesterday's first Information Literacy TBL class: "I really enjoyed class today. I actually thought it was an odd way of teaching but very effective". "...for the first time I gave feedback and spoke in front of the class, not being shy of what I wrote." "It was great to listen to the other student and what their dreams entailed. One realises not everyone is the same and there is always more to learn about one another." "Today's class was a pleasant surprise. It was fun getting to know group members a little better". "I thought the class was interesting and did well for team-building. I also didn't feel the need to fall asleep coz I was actually having fun!" "It was a new way of learning, experiencing other people and what they are interested in...We get to know each other and get comfortable around each other and their beliefs. It was nice to get to know other people from different groups and diversities. Time flies when you're having fun". "I am a natural introvert, so it's very hard for me to be interactive and do these kinds of activities, but as we began, I started warming up to the group and wanted to be a part...I didn't feel like I was exposed or forced to do something". "The dreaming exercise was a good starting point as everyone of us has dreams...realising once again we may not all be the same age, colour, gender, but we are made-up all the same. We all dream." "In today's class I really had fun learning about other people in my class, what they do and what kind of things they like e.g. clothes, food, music. I also loved talking about the different music that my group listen to cause there's other kinds of music that I didn't know about". "I was always tense in class coz I'm that someone with low self-esteem but after this class all that is gone. I'm a new person...I am proud of who I am and where I come from..." I think the comments above (there are many more in similar vein, not a single negative comment)indicate the value of spending time getting the team to bond and to break down barriers. Hope this helps a bit. Regards Bernie Millar Cape Peninsula University of Technology Bellville Campus Cape Town