Engage, Energize and Empower Your Students with Team-Based Learning (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Even when we believe the research that shows that active learning is particularly helpful to both engage and empower students--they learn better, they learn deeper and it addresses issues of diversity--it's often not clear to us how we can implement it while keeping the quality of our course high. At UAlbany, courses taught using TBL including: computer programming, data structures, databases, web programming, networking and others. TBL is a structured method that can help instructors improve student learning and energize their classrooms. Team Based Learning (TBL) is an approach to course design that takes advantage of research into what helps students learn. Students work in permanent teams and course meetings are organized around application exercises. Courses are divided into units, and students are held responsible for the core reading in a beginning-of-unit test taken both as individuals and as teams. Application exercises conform to core principles (4S): Teams all work on the SAME problem, teams make a SPECIFIC choice, the problem must be SIGNIFICANT, and the teams must make a SIMULTANEOUS report of answers. A variant of the flipped classroom, the TBL course spends far less time covering the material in class, allowing course time to be spent on skill development and feedback on student work. In this hands-on workshop, participants will experience a model TBL learning sequence and learn active learning techniques that they can adopt in any classroom while learning the basics of the TBL method.