On 18-19 July, I went to the European Team Based Learning (TBL) conference in sunny (yes, really!) Manchester. I even managed to have a couple of lovely morning runs along the canal.
The conference was opened by the creator of Team Based Learning Larry Michaelson who provided an inspirational keynote on the past, present and future of TBL.
I was interested to learn that Larry’s original motivation was to preserve the use of meaningful applications (team class challenges) and interpersonal skills – keeping those key outcomes alive in larger cohorts. In an aside, Larry revealed one entertaining story – one (unnamed) university worked on the that assumption student will miss classes – ie overbooked the lecture theatre. TBL, because it is so engaging, increases attendance – ie the students show up. As a result, the lecture theatre overflowed giving a ‘positive dilemma’ for that institution.
Larry’s view is that the key barrier to TBL adoption is an incomplete or incorrect implementation. For example, use of large (10 member teams), self selected teams, self selected assignments, out of class work, unstructured work (if you are sceptical about TBL, it might be worth considering if your point of reference contains any of these characteristics). Also there is a need to hold students accountable for their work. On this point, peer evaluation was another topic being explored, particularly by Kristina Medlinskiene. I offered my thoughts about supporting students to give constructive feedback, including the use of Situation-Behaviour-Impact (SBI) framework and appreciation circles.
There were so many other talks I will not go through them all, but just highlight a few notes of particular interest to myself.
A number of organisations shared their TBL journeys, with some impressive statistics about faculty engagement and TBL embedding into the curriculum. Brunel and Nova are both examples of great progress. It was inspiring to share best practice about which approaches have worked.
There was lots of attention on mental health. TBL appears to be highly beneficial here – in one institution, the faculty that had implemented TBL has had almost no referrals for mental health, this has been picked up and commented on centrally. A number of institutions also reported on TBL reducing student anxiety. There is quite a lot of work on neurodiversity and TBL, with Rachel Wood providing a really nice list on how to make TBL more autism friendly. Also at another institution, TBL is closing, or eliminating, the attainment gap across a range of measures eg WP, gender, ethnicity, fee status. Some very impressive statistics were shared.
CRAFTing your genAI prompt
There was an fascinating and highly interactive workshop on AI hosted by Ernie Ghiglione from LAMS : we experimented with prompting to creating TBL activities. Given the techniques we tried, I CRAFTed a good acronym – Context, Role, Audience, Format and Tone (and yes, I know that prompt engineering is an art and not a science) You can change the output of genAI by changing any of these – for example, from Y1 student (audience) to Y5 student. Some great innovative ideas were shared – for example, using AI to create a ‘virtual patient’. This patient would have all the reticence of a real patient – ie could be an ‘unreliable witness’. – This is great for students to learn how to talk to a patient appropriately to elicit accurate results. The idea could also work for eg a company representative for a group of business students carrying out a consultancy project. I think Ernie’s most ambitious idea is to simulate students, perhaps at scale (MOOCS), working alongside real students to create a virtual team. This is perhaps an opportunity to model team working skills in challenging environments.
I was intrigued to note that Brunel are creating teams that are stable not just across the year, but across all the modules/units/topics in a year (the teams change in year 2). It appears to work very well. Typically I do not take this approach (I have different teams for each unit of study), but it bears closer consideration.
My own talk was about assessment – the relative merits of formative versus summative. The overall finding was that students score higher on summative RATS (as one might expect) but there are a number of potential reasons for this, it doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of engagement. There is also considerable value in the formative tests, including reduction of anxiety, risk taking and assessment for learning. It stimulated a wider thought for me which is around how to encourage a growth mindset. This has a wider implication for assessment. For example, if we genuinely succeed in encouraging a growth mindset in all students, and if all students are genuinely treating assessment as opportunities to learn, then our worries about the use of genAI to cheat become irrelevant. While this is, of course, a platonic ideal, it nevertheless provides an important different perspective on assessment.
It is great to be part of such a supportive, friendly and innovative community
Steve Cayzer 