Mike:
You might be fine without the appeals. My
suggestion is to keep them and here are two perspectives.
1) Some teams finish earlier than others, thus I like the appeals as a
way for the early finishers to occupy their time.
2) I give a demonstration iRAT with T-RAT. For this, I deliberately
mess up one of the answers on the scratch-off IF-AT form (i.e., for one
question, the star is located under ‘c’ when ‘d’ is
clearly the correct answer). Students complain and I explain, “well,
there’s an appeal process.” Then, at your discretion, you can do
this again with, perhaps RAT 2. Then it becomes a joke with the students never
really being sure if they should trust the answer sheet or if they should do
the research to mount an appeal.
Best… and my congratulations to you
on being a history professor,
Fritz
From: Team-Based
Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Renock-Welker
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009
10:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RAT challenges??
Hello all!
Happy to be on this list with all you other TBLers :) I am not alone!
;)
I have a question/issue with my TBL implementation which I am hoping
the assembled wise brains here can help me out with...
I teach History courses online occasionally but mostly via
video conferencing to 3 remote sites around our 2-year college "service
area" in addition to students at the main site with me. After noting the
intense "us v. the world" bonding mentality of the remote video sites
and trying to find some way to turn that remote site 'separate and not
equal" weakness of the medium into a strength, I literally lucked into
winning a copy of the TBL book at a conference :) My video teaching life has
been changed by this technique with a much more learning and application
centered classroom, but more crucially for this medium, a much more interactive
and inclusive class experience for ALL sites. Each site is a team and all
in-class activities (or 95% of them at least) are team based application
activities.
Only hitch in the giddyup I have is with the RAQs (Readiness Assessment
QUIZZES which based on recent dialog here I will be changing to a different
title next quarter!). My RAQs are only 4-5 questions long (in large part due to
the structure of the text chapters and density of material) yet I have never
had much luck with the challenge piece post quiz OR in getting
"educatative" dialog going about the questions vs. fishing for
parsing answer choices to win some points back. So much so that I have in
recent quarters, simply ditched the appeals process and instead,
"harvest" data from missed questions to then drive the following
sessions' activities and focus. This has been working good, with me emphasizing
the following class period that we are focusing and doing what we are as it is
the areas the RAQs spotlighted as weakest as a class. However, I am concerned
that this break with TBL orthodoxy is costing the class
an opportunity or I am missing out on some key dynamic for even
better TBLing??
Thanks in advance for any advice or counsel as well as for all the
excellent dialog here :)
-Mike Renock-Welker,
History Adjunct Instructor & Distance Learning Instructional
Designer
"Remember, I'm pulling for you... we're all in this together. Keep your
stick on the ice." -Red Green