Team-Based Learning in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Group Work that Works to Generate Critical Thinking and Engagement

Michael Sweet, Larry K. Michaelsen

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781579226121
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Team-Based Learning (TBL) is a unique, powerful, and proven form of small-group learning that is being increasingly adopted in higher education. Teachers who use TBL report high levels of engagement, critical thinking, and retention among their students. TBL has been used successfully in both small and large classes, in computer-supported and online classes; and because it is group work that works, it has been implemented in nearly every discipline and in countries around the world.This book introduces the elements of TBL and how to apply them in the social sciences and humanities. It describes the four essential elements of TBL – readiness assurance, design of application exercises, permanent teams, peer evaluation – and pays particular attention to the specification of learning outcomes, which can be a unique challenge in these fields.The core of the book consists of examples of how TBL has been incorporated into the cultures of disciplines as varied as economics, education, literature, politics, psychology, and theatre. The authors explain why they felt a need to change how they taught and why they chose TBL. Furthermore, each chapter provides examples of the assignments and exercises they use to help their students achieve the specific learning outcomes of their courses.At a time of increasing course sizes, and emphasis on learning outcomes, TBL offers the means to meet such demands while connecting students to their coursework, and stimulating their intellectual engagement.

PART ONE

Foundations

CHAPTER 1

Critical Thinking and Engagement
Creating Cognitive Apprenticeships With Team-Based Learning

Michael Sweet and Larry K. Michaelsen

The circumstances in which Larry Michaelsen began experimenting with Team-Based Learning may feel familiar to you. On the one hand, our classes keep getting larger. On the other hand, we want to see more critical thinking and student engagement. But beyond a we-know-it-when-we-see-it intuitive sense of critical thinking and engagement, what do we mean when we use those words? In this chapter, we explore these ideas and describe in practical terms how the four components of Team-Based Learning provide a frame in which the artistry of your instruction can cultivate a classroom full of engaged critical thinkers.

In 1979 Larry Michaelsen taught business management courses of about 40 students each, and he used class time mostly for in-depth discussions about case studies. The classes were small enough that he could count on a sufficient number of students to come prepared and be motivated by the lively give-and-take discussions about significant problems. In this format, he could hear his students thinking critically about the material, and he felt it was really helping them learn to think like business management scholars.

In a single stroke of policy change, however, his course enrollments jumped from 40 to 120, and large classes present an array of challenges to a mostly discussion-based class. Students can feel intimidated by a sea of strangers, anxious about appearing overeager (the “gunner” or teacher’s pet), and anonymous enough to feel comfortable coming to class with little or no preclass preparation. Faced with a situation where discussion seems to be out of the question, many teachers in large classrooms simply resort to lecturing. But Michaelsen was unwilling to give up the engaged critical thinking he had found so satisfying in his smaller classes. By experimenting and adding elements over time, he began developing an instructional strategy many teachers have since contributed to and that we now know as Team-Based Learning (TBL). TBL consists of basic elements, each of which emerged as relevant for practical reasons.

First, in a moment of desperation, Michaelsen tried an experiment to help motivate students to read assigned materials before coming to class. Students always read right before a test, he thought, so why not begin the unit with a small test? Furthermore, because his academic discipline stresses the importance of group communication skills, he thought that perhaps letting students take a test on their own and then take the same test again in groups could give them insight into differences between the individual experience and the group experience of the same task.

He assigned the readings for the first unit, gave the individual test, collected the answer sheets, and held his breath as he listened in during the group test. Much to his relief and delight, he heard students giving each other the very lectures he had hoped to avoid giving himself. They were deeply engaged in the content, thinking critically about evidence from various perspectives, distinguishing among shades of meaning, consequences, and implications. They were sharing the answers they had given as individuals and comparing their rationales for choosing one answer over another. Importantly, they were also developing into cohesive social units in the process—transforming from groups into teams. Having borne unexpected fruit, this experiment in motivating students to prepare grew over time into a practice we now call the Readiness Assurance Process (RAP): an individual Readiness Assurance Test (iRAT) followed immediately by a team Readiness Assurance Test (tRAT). With a little extra tweaking, readiness assurance became the first of the four practical components of TBL.

Knowing from the scholarship in his own discipline that relationships in groups develop and become richer over time, Michaelsen decided to keep students in the same teams all semester so these relationships could continue deepening and becoming more effective for learning. Indeed, as they got to know each other, the students became better able to argue their way to the right answers on the tRATs. This practice of forming students into permanent teams also underwent some important fine-tuning over time, ultimately growing into a second pillar of how we practice TBL today.

To address the perennial problem of freeloaders in these permanent groups, Larry decided to add a mechanism that allowed students to actually weigh in on the performance of their teammates and do so in a way that had a real impact on their final grades. This practice, generally known as peer evaluation, fit into the evolving system and grew into the third major component of TBL.

Michaelsen’s teaching practice had always included assignments that forced students to make the kinds of decisions they would face in the future when applying the material in a job setting. He felt that grappling with the specifics of a situation in which one’s course material is useful gives students critically important experience applying that material in real contexts. Over the years, he and many others learned a great deal about how to effectively design application-based assignments, and these methods became the fourth principle component of TBL. These four elements—readiness assurance, properly used (permanent) teams, peer evaluation, and application exercises—have developed over time into a synergistic system that has exploded out of the business management classroom and found implementation in virtually every discipline around the world.

In this chapter, we describe the four elements of TBL working together as a frame. We chose the metaphor of a frame for two reasons. First, TBL is like the frame around a piece of artwork because the purpose of that frame is not to draw attention to itself but rather to provide structure and focus to what it surrounds. Second, the frame of a house consists of several mutually supporting elements that combine to create a structure that none of them could create alone. Each of the four pieces of TBL is essential, but within the frame they create, you bring your art to the nature of the experience. In fact, if you switch to TBL, there’s no reason you can’t keep using many of the materials you already use. Every teacher is different, and every implementation of TBL is a creative act. The diversity and size of the community of teachers using TBL today is a testament to that fact.

But before we get into the practical mechanics of how TBL works, let’s step back for a minute and consider two laudable goals: critical thinking and engagement. These words arise again and again in conversation with teachers about what they want for their students. But what do those enticing words really mean?

CRITICAL THINKING: WHAT IS IT?

It’s safe to say we all want our students to become better critical thinkers. Most of us have an intuitive sense for critical thinking—we know it when we see it, like Michaelsen did as he listened to his students taking their first team tests. But beyond that general intuitive sense, what constitutes critical thinking? What elements do we seek to cultivate if we want to develop our students’ critical thinking abilities?

The literature on critical thinking goes all the way back to Socrates, though much contemporary scholarship on critical thinking in education builds on a study by Glaser (1941) in which he identified three aspects of critical thinking: a thoughtful attitude or disposition, a range of reasoning skills, and the ability to apply those skills. Later scholars, such as Paul (1995) and Halpern (2003), added a fourth element: a habit of reflecting upon one’s own thinking to continually improve it. Halpern is a former president of the American Psychology Association, and her book Thought and Knowledge brings a great deal of empirical evidence to bear in validation of this four-part framework. As a result, the critical thinking framework we have found the most useful consists of four major elements:

1. A critical thinking attitude

2. The ability to use specific critical thinking skills

3. The ability to apply those skills in new contexts

4. Habits of reflection upon one’s own thinking

To lay the foundation for later discussions about how TBL cultivates these four elements of critical thinking, let’s unpack each of them briefly.

Critical Thinking Attitude

According to Halpern (2003), a critical thinking attitude is a habitual willingness or commitment to engage in purposeful deliberation about claims or ideas rather than simply accepting them at face value. It is the foundation of critical thinking behavior and consists of the willingness to (a) engage in and persist at a complex task, (b) use plans and suppress impulsive activity, (c) remain flexible or open minded, (d) abandon nonproductive strategies, and (e) remain aware of social realities (such as the need to seek consensus or compromise) so that thoughts can become actions. Once these pieces are in place—once students are motivated to think critically—then they are ready to acquire specific thinking skills.

Ability to Use Specific Critical Thinking Skills

Most authors agree that critical thinking is an umbrella concept comprising many specific skills, but ideas about which skills belong under the umbrella vary from author to author. Paul and Elder (2008) described the critical thinker as one who raises vital questions and problems, formulates them clearly and precisely, gathers and assesses relevant information, then uses abstract ideas to interpret that information and draw well-reasoned conclusions. The critical thinker then tests those conclusions against relevant criteria, thinks open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizes assumptions as well as implications and consequences, and communicates effectively with others. In contrast, Halpern (2003) used somewhat more technical language. In her view, critical thinking includes deductive inference, argument analysis, hypothesis testing, understanding probability, decision making, problem solving, and creative thinking. Clearly, there is a great deal of overlap between these taxonomies, but to the classroom teacher, teasing out differences at this level can feel like nit-picking. The point here is to identify precisely the intellectual skills we want our students to acquire in our classrooms and to use our content as the landscape where these skills will be learned and used.

The good news is that we do not need to neglect our content and start teaching classes exclusively about how to think critically. In fact, not only can we teach critical thinking skills in the contexts of our disciplines, but it works best when we do. A meta-analysis of the research on critical thinking instruction found that critical thinking skills are actually best taught alongside or in combination with concrete disciplinary subject matter (Abrami et al., 2008). Across the 117 studies included in this analysis, subject matter courses with explicitly stated critical thinking learning goals had greater pre/post–critical thinking effect sizes than critical thinking courses whose only goal was to teach critical thinking with no specific disciplinary subject matter.

Ability to Apply Critical Thinking Skills in New Contexts

What originally was referred to as the ability to apply critical thinking skills in new contexts, cognitive psychologists now call transfer. Regardless of the label used, as teachers we clearly want to avoid filling our students’ heads with inert knowledge, that is, knowledge that one has no sense of when or how to use. Alfred North Whitehead first described inert knowledge in 1929, and it stands in marked contrast to knowledge that is easily retrieved and used to guide one’s actions in the moment. To learn to do this, Halpern (2003) argues that students require structure training where they learn the important cues in a situation in which a given thinking skill is appropriate. This way, they’ll be able to recognize those features in new contexts and be prompted to use the right thinking skill at the right time. As you’ll see in later pages, TBL is built from the ground up with the goal of application and transfer in mind.

Habits of Reflection Upon One’s Own Thinking

Finally, having acquired a critical thinking attitude, learned some critical thinking skills, and applied those in new contexts, good critical thinkers are “brave enough to risk being wrong, and wise enough to realize that much can be learned from errors and failed solutions” (Nelson, 2005, p. xiv). Simply put, good critical thinkers will think about their own thinking, which educational research calls metacognition. In TBL, team experiences are designed not only to push students into moments of metacognitive reflection but to do so in conversation with their teammates as the team pursues consensus on a specific question, thereby making various kinds of thinking explicit and open to exploration by the members of the team. As these kinds of thinking increasingly approximate the kinds of thinking common to your discipline, your students can more accurately be considered cognitive apprentices to your field—a notion we explore in the following section.

To an experienced teacher, this four-part framework of critical thinking feels comprehensive; it includes motivation, specific thinking skills, the ability to transfer those skills, and habits of reflection to keep the process in constant evolution. As teachers we are powerless to help our students learn to think more effectively unless we are able to see and hear their thinking. Once we know whether and how they are actively engaged with the content, we can more fully diagnose and participate in their development as thinkers.

How then can we use classroom time to best stimulate that engagement? How can we organize classroom activities to give students the kind of intellectual participation in our fields that will not only reveal their thinking to us, but also help them firmly grasp—and make use of—the intellectual tools vital to our disciplines?

ENGAGEMENT AS COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP

Barkely (2010) explores engagement as a process that begins at the intersection of motivation and active learning:

Motivation and active learning work together synergistically, and as they interact, they contribute to incrementally increase student engagement. Rather than a Venn diagram where engagement is the area of overlap between active learning and motivation, thereby limiting the influence of each, engagement may be better described as a double helix in which active learning and motivation are spirals working together synergistically, building in intensity, and creating a fluid and dynamic phenomenon that is greater than the sum of their individual effects. (p. 7)

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Foundations
• Part Two Voices of Experience
• Contributors
• Index
• Backmatter