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Michael,

I have used TBL since fall for a couple of my upper-level accounting courses. The course structure is such that my units are 3 to 5 50-minute class periods long. I have a RAT at the beginning of each unit. At the end of the past two fall semesters, I have asked students in the course evaluation instrument whether RATS should be conducted out-of-class on Moodle and have received a resounding no. Each of my quizzes is 10 best-response multiple-choice items. There are a few items which are relatively straight-forward, however, most of them require critical thinking and analysis to identify the best response given the factor(s) in the stem. The RAT process takes 25 to 35 minutes -- the remaining time I have a mini-lecture on unit components which have given students difficult in the past. Student teams have until the beginning of the next class period to file appeals on the items. At the beginning of the next class period I review the difficult items for the first 5-10 mi
nutes {t

If you are not getting to the second half of the reading until the next week, it seems to me an option would be to assign the reading you expect to discuss in that week. I would then have a RAT at the beginning of each period -- one benefit of this is that the discussion during the tRAT to agree on the best-choice often includes a discussion of the items I used to lecture on before moving to TBL.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Kramer
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 7:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: First time using TBL

My plan is to implement TBL for my upcoming Introduction to Philosophy class. This class is designated "writing intensive," so writing formal papers is required to be 40-60% of the grade. The class size is limited to
26 students. The class meets once per week for 170 minutes. We take two 10-minute breaks, for an effective class time of 150 minutes.

I have read the TBL book for college teaching (and have the social sciences book on order). One of the key messages that I have understood is that doing one RAT per week is a big mistake.

So, let's say that I have 6 2-week units. That implies that on half the weeks my students have a double-sized reading load and on the other half of the weeks they have no reading assigned. I recognize that on the "no reading" weeks they should be rereading the texts in order to complete assignments.

I am leery of giving my students a double-dose of reading when, in fact, we probably won't get to the second half of the reading until the second week of the unit.

Please let me know what would be wrong if I did the following:

1. Have students do iRATs weekly online using course management application (Blackboard). They would not find out which answers were right or which were wrong. Also, if I am able, I wouldn't even let Blackboard show them their total grade for the iRAT until the tRAT was completed.

2. Have students do tRATs weekly at the start of each class.

My reasoning is that this would allow the reading to be assigned in smaller, more digestible pieces.

By the way, I have posted videos for every reading assignment. Before coming to class they are supposed to do the reading and watch the videos. I have concept mapped the readings and in the videos I walk them through these maps.

One possible answer to my question might be: the students can watch two videos and do two weeks of reading so that they have a general sense of the territory. It is better to do multiple, ever-deepening, passes over the same longer material than fewer, shallower passes over shorter material.

I must admit that I am finding the task of restructuring the entire course daunting.