Keep the same teams build then carefully and try and encourage other faculty to use the same teams as the ones you do.

There is an art and science to creating teams and it would be bad to lose that and have to recreate it several times a year.

We keep our student teams together for a full year in our medical program.

Good luck!

Cheers,

Charles

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From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Raeker-Jordan
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 10:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Different Teams or Same Teams?

Although I am the only faculty member at my law school who uses TBL, I am hoping to spread TBL throughout the first-year curriculum.

At our law school, all first-year students take the same classes and have the same classmates in all of their casebook classes. The only exception is Legal Methods, which is an analysis and writing class. Legal Methods is a smaller class; the first-year students are divided into 3-5 Legal Methods sections, depending on the size of the first-year class. Only the first year is structured this way. The second-year and third-year students choose their own classes and make their own schedules.

Given that the first-year students are with the same people all day, all semester, I'm wondering which is the best way to use teams under these circumstances. I can think of two major options.

First option--each professor creates his or her own teams. This means that students would switch from one team to another as they went from class to class during the week. This means that their teamates in Legal Methods class would probably be on other teams in other classes.

Second option--we assign teams in each Legal Methods class and then use those same teams in all other first-year classes that use TBL that semester. (Of course, this would require the agreement of all of the first-year professors who use TBL.) This means that students are on the same team in all of their classes where the professor uses TBL.

I can think of benefits and detriments to both options. Have any of you faced this situation and, if so, how did you resolve it? How did your solution work? What did students think of it?

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

-----------------

David Raeker-Jordan
Legal Methods Professor
Widener University School of Law
Harrisburg, PA
717.541.1996