Brandon is a faculty member in Computer Science who you met in a previous interview about his teaching. This time, I wanted to learn more about how Brandon has integrated Team Based Learning (TBL) into his courses. “I learned about team based learning while I was taking a PIDP course.” Brandon also spoke to Emah Christiansen, who, after completing a TBL workshop, had transformed her lowest rated course (by students) from boring to engaging, making it her highest rated course. Brandon was sold. When he asked Emah to explain how she did it, she told him “There’s a methodology. But if you just ‘wing it’, it won’t go very well.” Emah advised him that following the methodology not only helps the process work, but also helps gets buy-in from students. Brandon also participated in the TBL workshop facilitated by Derek Murray (then CETL, now Writing Centre/Learning Skills) and Monique Brewer (CETL). “The Camosun workshop was brief and just meant to get you interested in trying a few things. Of course, I can’t do that. I have to go all in. But while taking a longer workshop would have been beneficial, I needed to use my Scheduled Development time to redevelop a Database Systems Management course. So, I organized the content into four modules, then developed 4S activities and the process of readiness assurance protocols as per TBL. I turned the course on its end, moving it away from a lecture format, and delivered it in September.”
I asked if Brandon could describe how he introduced TBL in this newly redesigned course. “During the first week, we modelled how the course would run for the term. On day one, I introduced the course concepts, and asked students to read the syllabus as their homework. On day two, students completed a practice readiness assurance test individually, then as a team. I was able to create balanced teams because I knew the students from previous courses. During that first week, we experienced the TBL process. Some students were anxious because they realized that weren’t doing as well as they thought they should be, but once they completed the team readiness assurance tests, their scores improved. And as the weeks went on, I noticed that the more-prepared students were raising up the less-prepared students. Then, after the introductory week, we started the first module of the course.”
And what did TBL look like through the term? “How TBL works is that students prepare before coming to class. In this course, they had to review a prep document, containing links to readings and videos, before they came to the first class of a module – usually every 3-4 weeks. On the first day of a module, they completed a test individually, then completed a test as a team (in this class there were four teams of five). The team would start to score points, and we would log those points for the teams. One team would come out ahead one week in one module but then later in the module, it would be another team in the lead. I gamified the points (not a typical TBL method), giving teams points for correct answers and for activities that we would do throughout the week and I told students that the team with the highest points at the end of the term would have a couple of their individual test scores bumped up a bit.” Over time, Brandon said, the teams began to gel. “Students bought into the TBL method early, and over the term attendance was exceptionally good. And while most of these students already knew each other, new students were welcomed in and found a role within the groups.”
On days they did not complete a readiness assurance protocol, students would do 4S activities. “That stands for Same, Significant, Simultaneous, and Specific. These activities are real-world scenarios designed to test students on their pre-course readings.” And real-world scenarios in the context of this course, logic-based computing, can sometimes be challenging, with no clear ‘answer.’ “Over time, the questions became more and more contextual often leading to more than one answer being “right” based upon the context – this spurred debate within and among the teams.” Teams had to come to consensus and justify why they chose the answer they did.
I asked if Brandon could describe one of these scenarios. “In one, I posed a situation where they were working at a company with a co-worker who couldn’t troubleshoot a problem, but added an interpersonal situation. The question was: is the problem a database issue, or an interpersonal issue? I had fun crafting this human aspect in the scenario because often what muddies up real-world scenarios is that there are people involved. Sometimes a scenario had two right answers, but I had to explain that industry would see only one as ‘right.’” For the scenario debates, Brandon found his role was as a facilitator or guide rather than the subject matter expert.
Now I was interested in what Brandon saw as some of the highlights from moving to a TBL model. “Watching the learning happen during the activities where students read the problem and the answer choices, committed an answer to a piece of paper, then moved work in their teams. In the teams, often the stronger students would explain what was probably the right answer to students who didn’t understand the context yet. And it was amazing to watch students sharing knowledge and different viewpoints with each other. The strongest students were becoming even stronger, but they were bringing up the rest of the group so that unsure students were gaining confidence, something I, as an instructor, had never witnessed before in one of my courses. That was the first big highlight for me in this course. Another highlight was getting feedback from students who were struggling through different scenarios prompting me to come up with different ways of doing the activities to allow them to get more out of the process.”
Then, towards the end of the term, Brandon noticed students beginning to burn out, so he decided to make week 13 fun. “My students cringe when I say ‘fun’ because they think I have a weird sense of fun. I tell them there’s type-1 fun, which is fun all the time, then there is type-2 fun, which is not fun while you’re doing it, but when you reflect back you realize it was kind of fun.” But this time Brandon meant type-1 (or as he said, maybe a 1.2). “This group of students was into Dungeons and Dragons. So, we tweaked the activities for the week, moved to a classroom in the Center for Health and Wellness (CHW), and ran the class Dungeons and Dragons style – but it was Dungeons and Database. The Dungeon/Database Master read the scenario, then each of the students in that group would act out personas in the scenario. And there was laughter and there was learning. I laughed so hard at one point when somebody decided to ad-lib, we all had to pause. It was just such a great cathartic moment. And it was still a TBL 4S activity. If you’re creative enough and brave enough and you have students who trust you, great things can happen.”
Brandon said that by about halfway through the course, he had identified core types of people in each group, each contributing to their team in different ways. “At the end of the course, I had each student do a peer assessment for their team. But I didn’t want them to rate their colleagues in a negative way. So, instead, I gave each student 100 points to distribute and spend in whatever way that wanted across the other four people in their team, giving them a maximum four or five points for the following traits: reliability, engagement, collaboration, creativity, focus and organization, growth, composure, motivation, energy. They completed both a peer assessment and a self assessment, and I asked them to describe their teammates in one or two sentences, focusing on what they appreciated about how they showed up. What I was really planning, however, was to give each student a very specific award. My son helped me print 3D awards for various roles (for example bridge builder, navigator) which I painted a different colour for each team. After I handed them all out, I said, ‘This will probably end up in your junk drawer, but the next time you clean out your junk drawer, you’re going to see these colours and remember who was on your team and remember that everybody shows up differently and has something to contribute. You have no idea what’s going on for people outside of school, and maybe all they could do was just show up and we should be grateful that they’re showing up and being a part of that process however they can. Thank you all for showing up.’ It was very emotional, but I wanted to recognize that in teamwork there are different ways of contributing and making the team work.”
After drying my tears (I am not kidding…I teared up again as I was writing this,) I wondered what students thought of the TBL method. “They thought the prep was a lot of work, and next time I’ll curate the content myself rather than having students dig through voluminous documentation. And the final module was more complex at a time of the semester when students were facing other challenges, so I would probably revise that as well. One student told me early on that he was not thrilled about having to do teamwork, but during the first week, he found that he liked TBL teamwork. This was a student who I think would have struggled with the older, more traditional version of this course – a student who showed up all the time and received positive feedback from his team peers who observed that he had the largest growth.” Brandon notes that it’s hard to know if the TBL version of the course is ‘better’ “because students didn’t take this course in its previous configuration, but my impression was that they had a good time.”
I asked Brandon if he is planning on integrating TBL into any of his other courses, “TBL would be challenging in my coding courses, because there are very specific pieces of information you need to learn linearly that requires a different way of participating. While I think content-heavy courses are well suited for TBL, that is not true for every course, although I may change my mind in the coming years. But this particular course I will teach using TBL again – and would probably make it ungraded as well.” Brandon also shares his TBL experiences with colleagues all the time. “I believe I’ve convinced one instructor to move a first-year, content-heavy course into TBL, and we have other content-heavy courses in our diplomas that would be good fits for TBL.” And of course, once students have experienced and gained an appreciation for a new teaching method like TBL, the second time they experience it, they are more on board with it. “I’ve experienced this with ungrading because I’m usually the second instructor to deliver an ungraded course, and thankfully the instructor who came first has laid the groundwork in a good way.”
Finally, I asked Brandon what advice he had for instructors thinking about engaging with TBL in their courses. “First, take a workshop if you can. And remember that you don’t need to move completely into TBL like I did – you can integrate TBL for specific activities rather than for your whole course. At this point, I would be interested in attending the longer workshop because I would like to learn more about the subtleties of TBL because I did deviate a bit from what I learned in the shorter workshop. But I think it worked well for my students and did not take away from the TBL experience.”
And Brandon’s final words? “I remember how little fun I had teaching this course before TBL, and I know how I feel now after this opportunity to present students with an idea that teamwork makes the dream work, that everybody has a part to play and has strengths to offer. And that’s a really important lesson for everything in life – that showing up in the way that you can will be good for you and for everybody else.”