Getting Started with Team-Based Learning

This book is written for anyone who has been inspired by the idea of Team-Based Learning (TBL) through his or her reading, a workshop, or a colleague’s enthusiasm, and then asks the inevitable question: how do I start?

Written by five authors who use TBL in their teaching and who are internationally recognized as mentors and trainers of faculty making the switch to TBL, the book also presents the tips and insights of 46 faculty members from around the world who have adopted this teaching method.

TBL is a uniquely powerful form of small group learning. It harnesses the power of teams and social learning with accountability structures and instructional sequences. This book provides the guidance, from first principles to examples of practice, together with concrete advice, suggestions, and tips to help you succeed in the TBL classroom. This book will help you understand what TBL is and why it is so powerful. You will find what you need to plan, build, implement, and use TBL effectively. This book will appeal to both the novice and the expert TBL teacher.

Jim Sibley is the director of the Centre for Instructional Support at the Faculty of Applied Science at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He has 30 years of experience in faculty development, facilitation, and educational software development.He is an active member of the Team-Based Learning Collaborative (TBLC). He has served on the TBLC’s Board, Train the Trainer committee, Membership committee, many TBLC Conference Organizing committees’, and the Web Strategy committee (as a member of the Web Strategy committee, he served as the original webmaster for www.teambasedlearning.org). He continues his work as a mentor in the TBLC’s Train the Trainer program. He is an international TBL consultant, having worked in schools in Australia, Korea, Pakistan, Lebanon, the United States, and Canada to help others develop TBL programs. You can learn more about his work at learntbl.ca.

Pete Ostafichuk is a professor of teaching in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His primary teaching area is engineering design, but he has taught a variety of other topics including aircraft aerodynamics, naval architecture, engineering principles, and even some physics, math, and statistics. He is the co-creator and former coordinator of the multi-award winning Mech 2 program that integrates 15 previously disparate courses into a fully-integrated, hands-on, team-taught curriculum.From his first course as a new faculty member at UBC in 2004, Pete has been teaching using TBL. He has taught almost 2000 students, from sophomore to doctoral level, in 20 TBL courses in the years since. He has delivered numerous faculty workshops, conference papers, and webinars on the use of TBL. He also helps to mentor faculty members making the switch to TBL.

Larry K. Michaelsen is Professor of Management at Central Missouri State University and is David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, a Carnegie Scholar, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and former Editor of the Journal of Management Education. He is active in faculty and staff development activities and has conducted workshops on teaching effectively with small groups in a wide variety of university and, corporate settings. Dr. Michaelsen has also received numerous college, university, and national awards for his outstanding teaching and for his pioneering work in two areas. One is the development of Team-Based Learning, a comprehensive small-group based instructional process that is now being used in over 80 academic disciplines and on over 200 campuses in the US and in eight foreign countries. The other is an Integrative Business Experience (IBE) program that links student learning in three core courses to their experience in creating and operating an actual start-up business whose profits are used to fund a hands-on community service project.

Bill Roberson directs the teaching and learning center that serves the Albany campus of the State University of New York. A former faculty member and now faculty developer, his career has focused on the integration of critical thinking into the university classroom. To that end, he has been a practitioner of Team-Based Learning since 2000, and has consulted with faculty at approximately 75 institutions, in North and South America and Europe, on course design for critical thinking, active learning, assessment of teaching, and the use of TBL to promote critical thinking. He has held positions in faculty development at UNC-Chapel Hill, Indiana University and the University of Texas at El Paso, where he was founding executive director of that university’s division for instructional technology, classroom design, digital media production and distance learning. He came to New York in 2006 to create the Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Academic Leadership at the University at Albany, State University of New York (www.itlal.org).

Billie Franchini is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Teaching, Learning and Academic Leadership at the University at Albany (SUNY). She entered faculty development after more than a decade of teaching at the high school and University levels. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses using TBL and has worked with scores of faculty to support them in implementing TBL in their own courses.