Team-Based Learning (TBL)

Team based learn­ing (TBL) is a com­pre­hen­sive instruc­tion­al method, invent­ed by orga­ni­za­tion­al behav­ior pro­fes­sor Lar­ry K. Michaelsen, which puts stu­dents into roles of greater auton­o­my and respon­si­bil­i­ty for acquir­ing and using infor­ma­tion.

Critical TBL Components

  1. Teams that are per­ma­nent
  2. A process to ensure indi­vid­ual stu­dent readi­ness for group work
  3. Assign­ments that require stu­dents to work col­lec­tive­ly on rig­or­ous appli­ca­tion of course con­tent, and
  4. Peer eval­u­a­tion. A cen­tral strat­e­gy of TBL is to shift the use of class time away from instruc­tors trans­mit­ting con­cepts in class (which can be accom­plished more effi­cient­ly, indi­vid­u­al­ly, out­side of class), and towards stu­dents work­ing in teams to apply course con­cepts. The team struc­ture is an essen­tial con­di­tion for requir­ing stu­dents to per­form at high­er cog­ni­tive lev­els.

Lots of people use groups. What’s so special about a “team”?

Groups are col­lec­tions of indi­vid­u­als who might or might not coop­er­ate. Teams are groups with a shared pur­pose and sense of col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­i­ty. Groups evolve into teams when con­di­tions are right. Mem­bers start out as indi­vid­u­als who may or may not func­tion well togeth­er, due to hitch­hik­ing mem­bers, dom­i­nant per­son­al­i­ties, and poor­ly designed assign­ments. Well-designed tasks plus strate­gic course design teach group mem­bers to lis­ten to one anoth­er, val­ue each other’s con­tri­bu­tions, learn from mis­takes, rein in inef­fec­tive behav­ior, and even­tu­al­ly trust in the team’s abil­i­ty to out­per­form any giv­en indi­vid­ual.

What are the principles behind TBL?

TBL emerged out of research in orga­ni­za­tion­al and cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy. Among the prin­ci­ples that dri­ve the method are the fol­low­ing:

  • Stu­dents learn best and are more moti­vat­ed when feed­back is fre­quent and imme­di­ate.
  • Work­ing in groups cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ties for fre­quent, imme­di­ate feed­back and reflec­tion among peers.
  • Groups need time togeth­er to learn to func­tion as a team, hence the use of per­ma­nent­ly assigned groups.
  • Effec­tive­ly func­tion­ing groups need very lit­tle instruc­tor over­sight or man­age­ment. TBL is there­fore a more effi­cient use of an instructor’s time, and can be scaled to class­es of any size.

Web­site: https://www.teambasedlearning.org/

Team-Based Learn­ing from Cen­ter for Teach­ing and Learn­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas.

Key Authors and Researchers in TBL

Jim Sib­ley
Retired Engi­neer­ing Pro­fes­sor and Direc­tor of the Cen­tre for Instruc­tion­al Sup­port in the Fac­ul­ty of Applied Sci­ence at UBC who facil­i­tat­ed Team-Based Learn­ing Work­shop at NIC in late June, 2017, has wrote a and numer­ous arti­cles on team-based learn­ing and has been sup­port­ing fac­ul­ty for decades about how to do TBL.

Michele Clark
Uni­ver­si­ty of Neva­da Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in Psy­choso­cial Nurs­ing who eval­u­ates the effi­ca­cy of team-based learn­ing as a teach­ing strat­e­gy in improv­ing the stu­dents’ appli­ca­tion of new learn­ing con­tent in solv­ing com­plex clin­i­cal prob­lems.

Bri­an O’Dwyer
For­mer con­sult­ing, bank­ing and air­line CFO who went to teach­ing air­line man­age­ment and real­ized that lec­tures and class­es need­ed an over­haul – so took the work of Duke Med­ical School and found­ed Cog­nalearn, a com­pa­ny that helps teach­ers replace lec­tures with Team-Based Learn­ing and cre­at­ed the cloud soft­ware called InteDash­board – lots of oth­er help­ful com­po­nents to this site to doing dig­i­tal TBL.

Michelle Clark AND Bri­an O’D­wyer and many oth­ers wrote a white paper which sum­ma­rizes a lot of good ideas for imple­ment­ing online TBL.