Christine:

We had some nice dialogue on this awhile back, the issue being TBL in a
required GenEd class (economics) for working students who did not want to be
there.  The underlying problem/challenge, as we identified it, was the same
as yours --- students who don't want to learn can end up resenting a
teaching strategy that "forces" students to learn.  Or, more specifically,
the challenge is in how to protect those students who do want to learn from
the sabotaging influence brought in by a large portion of students who don't
want to learn.

First, you want to make sure that you're implementing TBL well enough.  Not
too many RATs, good selection of teams, good design of team exercises, etc.
After that, my suggestion was to be careful not to put too much grade weight
on team-based exercises.  You'd still want to use them but, if you truly
feel that 40% of your students will want to sabotage anything that works at
getting them engaged in class, then you might want to limit the scope for
them to do this.  Team RATs seem to be immune to these problems.  Thus, what
I do when this starts to happen (which is not for every class), I tend to
start mixing in more teacher time with team time.  Basically, if teams
simply don't want to do the exercises, I'll try various interventions.
(1) Can the exercises be improved? (2) Can I go around and work with groups
to talk them through things a bit?  (3) can I joke around and get people to
be motivated, encourage rivalry or comeraderie, etc?    If these don't work,
then I'll start talking through the exercises more at the board.  The net
effect of this board work is that it will break the exercises down into 1 or
2 minute chuncks.  Plus, it will increase the quanitity of class-wide
discussion at the expense of team-level discussion.

Best,

Fritz Laux
Economics, Northeastern State University

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Christine Kuramoto <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> I am just finishing up my second course using TBL and have had some
> disappointing feedback.  I teach medical English (in Japan), so basically
> it's an English as a Foreign language class concentrating on medical
> terminology.  The negative feedback came mainly (I think) from students who
> hate English as a subject.  They basically have English foisted on them
> from junior high through high school as a means to the end of passing
> university examinations.  Many of them don't want anything more to do with
> English after entering university, so would prefer to be left alone to sleep
> through lectures.  I got some pretty strongly worded comments in the student
> feedback to the effect of "how dare you expect us to use English in class in
> our teams?!"  They are calling for the class to be an elective rather than
> compulsory, which is something I agree with,but don't have any control over.
>
> So, my question is, *do any of you teach students using TBL in compulsory
> courses where a large number of students would rather be taking any other
> subject but yours?*  I honestly think it has nothing to do with TBL and
> everything to do with their feelings about English--but *what is a
> conscientious teacher to do?*  I think that TBL is great for the course
> --100 students who would be sleeping if they weren't in teams. But even the
> enthusiastic students are making comments like "you should divide teams into
> students who want to use English and those who don't"-- which would
> basically nullify one of the important principles of TBL.
>
> On a brighter note, my boss has decided to use TBL in a course next
> Fall--so there is hope for the spread of this excellent teaching strategy
> here at Kyushu University.
>
> (heavy sigh)
> Christine
>
> --
> *******
> Christine Kuramoto, Assistant Professor: Medical English
> Kyushu University, Department of Medical Education
> Faculty of Medical Sciences
> 3-1-1 Maidashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, 812-8582 Japan
> Phone: (+81)92-642-6186 Fax: (+81)92-642-6188
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
>
>