Actively Learning to Teach: confusing the teaching strategy with the professor and course content

At the Augustana Campus, a number of us have been using team-based learning (TBL) for a number of years and it is interesting how different students and colleagues respond to its implementation. Most students, when confronted with TBL for the first time are open to it but unsure. At midterm, many students are frustrated with the course but seem to confuse the difficulty of the course content with the teaching strategy blaming the strategy rather than the difficulty of the course. By the time the course ends most students appreciate the incremental and developmental nature of TBL realizing that the daily/weekly requirement to attend to learning the course material ends up making studying for the final exam more efficient because TBL has structured their learning such that they are studying for the final exam throughout the course rather than leaving the learning to cram it in during the week before the exam.

But, there is a very vocal minority who are frustrated with TBL as an instructional strategy and are convinced that their instructor has abandoned them to have to learn it on their own instead of understanding that ultimately, learning does occur on one's own but that TBL has structured class time to practice their learning thereby revealing to students those areas that still need their studious attention. It can be heartbreaking to receive student evaluations of instruction at the end of the term that harshly denigrate the course, instructor, and instructional strategy after working hard to develop appropriate in-class assignments (apps or applications in the language of TBL) for students to learn the course material and accompanying skills through practice under the guidance of both peers and instructor.

I think some of the frustration experienced by students with TBL is misplaced and should actually be placed on the course content itself. I use TBL to teach biochemistry, molecular cell biology and first-year functional biology. Each of these courses was a challenge for students before I began implementing TBL in my courses. It is just that students' frustration with learning difficult course content has shifted from blaming the nature of the course content to blaming the nature of the instructional strategy used to teach the course.

Now, don't misinterpret what I am saying here. Most of my students learn to appreciate what TBL does for them. But the minority who passionately dislike TBL as a learning and teaching strategy is incredibly vocal about it assuming that most students think like them when the data from my student evaluations of teaching make this clearly a false assumption.

The other interesting response is how colleagues respond to my use of TBL as an active learning strategy in my classrooms. Many are very interested, some are little sceptical, and a very few are very annoyed that this teaching and learning strategy persists on our campus. My sense is that these annoyed colleagues are taking the vocal dislike of the passionate few students at face value and accept their opinion to be the common judgement of the inability of TBL to promote student learning outcomes. I find it interesting that colleagues who are rigorous about ensuring that the conclusions they make in their own research are based upon evidence end up making vocal judgements about a teaching strategy on their campus based on hearsay. And when introduced to the vast literature which provides the evidence of its efficacy, dismisses the entire published body of evidence on the basis of a few poor studies.

Part of the issue of a few colleagues negatively responding to TBL being used on their campus is, I am sure, because the ones who first implemented it on our campus, followed by myself who adopted it a few years later were rather vocal in its efficacy making it seem as if those who were not using TBL to teach their courses were somehow teaching with an inferior instructional strategy. There is nothing as infuriating as the zealousness of the recent and naive convert and I confess to being a TBL zealot when I experienced TBL on the road to Damascus back in 2010.

In order to promote active learning on my campus in all of its marvellous and effective forms, I need to rebuild some bridges after unleashing the rhetoric of TBL. Teaching and learning is a wondrous activity to be engaged in. To be part of someone's learning journey and see the lightbulb come on when a concept, principle or skill finally clicks into place and becomes integrated with the mental model of the world ... that is a wondrous thing to behold. And as instructors, when we experience our own "aha" moment while realizing that a different instructional approach works for a different student who was previously struggling to understand, that is our own lightbulb experience that I am so grateful to experience again, and again, and again.