Seven Tips for Successful Team-based Learning
by John on 26/09/09 at 11:21 pm
Holly Bender is a professor of Veterinary Pathology at Iowa State University (ISU). But don’t let the fact that Holly is a veterinarian lead you to believe she’s not a great teacher. Among the numerous modalities of teaching approaches she uses in her clinical pathology class, team-based learning is one of her favorites. She’s known at ISU for her team-based teaching techniques and recently shared her approaches at the 2009 University Teaching Seminar in Ames.
Drawing on Holly’s experiences in teaching the clinical pathology course in the veterinary school, here are seven of her tips for successful team-based learning.
- Make the teams as heterogeneous as possible. Diverse teams tent to generate more alternative solutions to problems, and in Holly’s experience, the best learning for students has come from teaching one another. This has been a staple of the successful team development in the Design Division at Stanford’s School of Engineering, where Doug Wilde has written about Jungian cognition theory to construct and organize problem-solving teams.
- Keep the teams intact throughout the course. This works really well if your course is suited to having teams meet every week to work on a problem set or other term-long project. Mixing up teams in middle of course is not recommended, as the opportunity costs high and as risks losing the learning leveraged by a long-term group structure. Holly cited the work of Koppenhaver & Shrader (2003) which noted that stable teams outperform temporary teams. In terms of size, a range of 5-7 students per team is recommended. Holly uses six.
- Implement a peer evaluation component wherein each student evaluates the others contribution to the team. In Holly’s class the student evaluate each other at midterm (which doesn’t count) and at the end of the term (which does count).
- Give students a voice in assigning the weights of the assessments which, in Holly’s class, are comprised of an individual academic performance, team academic performance, and a peer evaluation score.
- Create exercises that include both individual and group accountability. For instance, one can give quizzes on case-based homework, wherein students take the quiz individually then take the quiz as a team. In the team situation the students will begin to pose and defend answers, provide rationales for one answer over another, and create a rich dialogue space for learning.
- Develop rigorous and unique assignment that require team interaction.
- In class exercises ensure that teams will work together better than out of class exercises. Holly believes that time spent in class on project work is time well spent.
Citation
Koppenhaver, G., Shrader, C.B. (2003), “Structuring the classroom for performance: cooperative learning with instructor assigned teams”, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, Vol. 1 No.1, pp.1-21.
