Erica, you note:
"I feel like I have a hard time convincing my students about the benefits
of TBL. Half are on board and the other half make it hard. I'm discouraged
at times, my midterm evals had comments like "Stop the team stuff" and "quit
teaching" in them. I feel the norm in my department is heavy based on
lecture and students are not expected to read (or at least are not held
accountable for reading). If you have any ideas for readings, activities,
etc that might help me out that would be great."
First, don't feel alone ... my class evaluations dropped substantially, albeit student learning has increased, upon introduction of TBL for the first time last spring in an undergraduate (natural resource, environmental and ecological economics) class, 200-level (although lots of juniors and seniors in the class, about 1/2 of them actually) of 45-students. To put this in context, I have been teaching for over 2-decades!... and have never had lower evaluations, but, also, I have never had students learn more. More specifically, I have never had such extremely negative statements about my teaching as I received with the introduction of TBL last spring, along the same lines of "quit teaching", "didn't learn anything", "total waste of my time", etc... from a small minority. There were also extremely complementary comments, however...and we should not ignore those... I am sure you also have them... like the best course they had ever taken! Yes: about 1/2 love it, 1/2 hate it... the latter making things hard, like you point out.
Second, we are trying it again this spring, with 58-students, 9-teams. This time we followed the suggestions in the paper by Smith(2008; attached), with better results so far, albeit one student wrote on the first Exam.. "you didn't teach us this" .. for a question in which they had to really understand the construct in order to apply it... and he didn't even try to answer it ... even though they had worked on the identical problem in a Team activity, and, we had lectured to it, as well as used both the iRAT and tRAT to work on the basic constructs needed. Actually, what he is saying, it seems likely to me: "you didn't tell me what to memorize and put back on the test." I honestly do not know what to do with students like this... We (the TA and I) even offered to meet with him, try to help... which was declined... we, instead, are "not teaching" ... it is all our doing, not his. Yet, I am also hoping that our use of the Response clickers this spring is helping, overall, and that we have reduced the number of these students having issues like this. With the clickers, we are much better able to react quickly, have discussion on issues/problem areas in the material right away, and they can see class results on the screen... etc. Hopefully the extra, better informed dialogue during class is helping...
I am not overly confident that we have solved the problem... am not holding out for a much higher evaluation... albeit we already know from the first Exam and the first Team Case study they have so far completed, that, overall, there is more learning going on... As an economist used to thinking in terms of costs and benefits, the benefits of TBL > costs of TBL, albeit how they are distributed among the students continues to be an issue.
I look forward to comments by others, especially from those who have far more experience with TBL. Still learning...
Gary D. Lynne, Professor
Department of Agricultural Economics and
School of Natural Resources
103B Filley
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68583-0922
Website: http://www.agecon.unl.edu/facultystaff/directory/lynne.html
Phone: 1-402-472-8281 Cell: 1-402-430-3100
"We are always only one failed generational transfer of knowledge away from darkest ignorance" (Herman Daly)
"We do not just have our own interests. We share interests with others. Empathy is neither altruistic nor self-interested. It rather exemplifies the implicit solidarity of human nature" (Robert Solomon)
(See attached file: Smith(2008)FirstDayQuestionsTBL.pdf)
----- Forwarded by Gary D Lynne/AgEcon/IANR/UNEBR on 03/07/2009 01:52 PM -----
Sent by: Team-Based Learning <[log in to unmask]> 03/07/2009 01:06 PM
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