New teaching, better learning
At VIU, team-based education approach gets high marks
Marilyn Funk taught resource management and environmental law for 10 years and came to know too well “that glazed look” in the eyes of tuned-out students.
Funk, an instructor at the Vancouver Island University, experimented with longer and shorter lectures, and tried to make them more fun. She tried power point slides, putting in more information and less. Results hardly varied.
“I made minor changes, major changes, always with an eye for student engagement,” she said. “I just found students’ eyes were glazed over.”
About three years ago, Funk heard of a different approach to teaching called team-based learning. Instead of listening to lectures, performing laboratory experiments, field work, and writing reports and exams, students were expected to engage with the material together and in groups.
Funk said the results were outstanding.
“I could see this contrast from the glazed students, with maybe one or two nodding off,” she said. “All of a sudden, the classroom shifted and the students came alive.
“And it makes me more excited and more energized,” said Funk. “I’m not going to see that glazed look anymore.”
According to Bill Roberson, curriculum teaching and learning specialist at VIU, team-based learning protocol has been around for decades. And while only about 30 of VIU’s 800-odd instructors use it consistently, the university is a provincial leader in introducing it to those faculty who are interested.
Roberson said the team-based learning protocol works because it turns around the relationships between instructors and students, and course material and students, to always put the students in control.
[Students] “see very quickly they own it all,” said Roberson. “As soon as they see they own it, their motivation goes up and their ability to consume and process information goes up at the same time.”
The protocol works with students simply assigned the course material as reading assignments. Instead of a lecture, they are expected to read it for themselves.
When they show up in class, they are first of all, given a short quiz on the material.
They are then divided up into teams (in Funk’s resource management class, the teams have six students each). Each team must first answer the same quiz, but this time as a group, discussing, disagreeing and debating to reach consensus on the answers.
Students are later marked on their answers to the quiz, how they did individually and how they fared as a group.
Finally, after the quiz work is over, the teams are assigned problems based on the course material for the remainder of the class. Each team is expected to debate, discuss and reach a consensus on each problem.
For example, when Roberson was still teaching students, in his case historical political philosophies, he would assign readings based on thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Then, after the two quizzes, he might offer the teams a recent newspaper editorial and ask them to identify elements of the various thinkers at play.
And while students discuss the problems and work through them, the teacher simply walks about the class, listens in, once in a while interjects and sometimes answers questions. There might even be moments when the instructor stops the class to address all students on a particular issue.
Exams and tests are still used and each student will receive individual grades.
But most noticeably, during a course the instructor who adopts the team-learning protocol almost never lectures again.
“When you do it right, there is no need to lecture,” said Roberson.
He said, however, that team learning does not mean less work for an instructor. Instead of writing lectures, they are assigning appropriate readings, devising quizzes and then establishing appropriate problems based on the material.
“You can’t just throw out a question and expect it will gain traction,” said Roberson.
“You have to think quite carefully about the questions that will force them to think about what they have learned.”