Dundee, 26th June 2019
There were two masterclasses running in Dundee – an introductory and an advanced session. This was the advanced session. Although the number of attendees was small at around ten, everybody had some experience of running team-based learning.
All the activities and discussions of the day were run in a team-based format and this included the usual items such as:
- Individual readiness assurance test
- Team readiness assurance test
Having read papers about this approach to teamwork it initially seemed unnecessarily complicated to me but, now that I’ve been through it a couple of times, I can see the value in it. It’s actually very straight forward in practice. In all cases the tests have been quite challenging in that they ask for the best answer when several of the answers could be correct. This prompted discussion in the teams (and it meant we didn’t get everything right first time). This made me think about my own approach to teamwork questions and how valuable this aspect is. The ‘appeals process’ was then a discussion about our thoughts before moving on to consider how to address team-based situations like the same person verbalising a team’s answer and different methods for students to evaluate each other.
As is often the case with these sessions, it is the people you meet who are often the most interesting part of the day and their experiences gave me some ideas for the upcoming team-based work we will be starting in the School of Chemistry next term. One colleague talked about how she got the students to give their team a name and draw up a social contract. I’d been thinking about how we would need an introductory session to the team-based format and these seemed like great ideas to help cement a group together. I’m going to incorporate these ideas this year.
Several resources from the Masterclass are included but additionally here is some useful info:
This website has all sorts of information and resources for team-based learning but needs a subscription to access most of the materials.
Dr Simon Tweddell is a National Teaching Fellow and Consultant-Trainer in Team-Based Learning. Contact him on: s.j.tweddell@bradford.ac.uk
Other class organisers were Dr Prabha Parthasarathy from Imperial College and Joy de Vries-Erich from University of Amsterdam
Further resources on team-based learning can be found here.
Paul Wyatt, July 2019.