According to Larry Michaelsen’s (@lmichaelsen) foundational work on Team-Based Learning, four essential elements—properly formed and managed groups, accountability, immediate feedback, and team development—are all critical for success. While each element is vital, implementing them can present unique challenges.
Which of these elements have you found most challenging to apply in your TBL practice, and why?
Don’t forget to share your experiences, strategies, or solutions in the comments!
- Groups – Forming and managing diverse, cohesive teams
- Accountability – Ensuring students are accountable for individual and group work
- Feedback – Providing frequent and timely feedback to support learning and growth
- Assignment Design – Creating tasks that foster both learning and team development
I chose Assignment design because it is too easy to have them focus on content and recall and more difficult to support both critical thinking AND team development. Students (especially with AI now) can get answers from computer and often “divide & conquer” - rather than work together. Finding meaningful assignments that also meet the learning outcomes, integrates the pre-content, makes them think and work together can be challening.
Forming teams means understanding your student body - but in some ways - if the applications do the above, and you prepare the teams to work together, it almost doesn’t matter how they are formed.
Accountability is built into the process - especially RAT - but again if applications are not done well it makes it more difficult to ensure accountability for team work - but facilitation also is important part of that (which was not an option)
Feedback is a technological challenge - and once that is settled, finding the type of feedback that works for student body needs is important but possible.
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The most important and the most challenging aspect of designing assignments is to make sure that the activity promotes both learning AND building team cohesiveness. I’ve found that using Backwards Design and making sure that I follow the 4-S principles helps a lot as long as the Backwards Design takes into account both learning and building team development/cohesiveness.
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For those of you who are just getting started—or looking to introduce your colleagues to TBL—don’t miss our upcoming free TBL Orientation with @TomJansen. It’s a one-hour beginner-friendly session that walks you through the essential elements of TBL, happening on April 2 (Wed) at 11am EDT and April 30 (Wed) at 9pm EDT.
We also have 2 exclusive offers for our participants. One of them includes an exclusive offer for our upcoming TBL certification program held in conjunction with the TBL Collaborative.
Feel free to share this with your colleagues. Register today:
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