TBL Woes

Let me first just say that I "get" the idea of working in a team.  It mimics the "real workplace" where one doesn't necessarily have the choice of who they work with, blah blah blah. Most highly-functioning students hate group work because they feel they always end up doing all the work for a good grade while the rest of the "social loafers", as they are called, just sit back and watch.  Oh, to be a social loafer.

Well, here comes the white knight, TEAM BASED LEARNING (TBL), developed by a professor at the University of Florida, to solve all our woes. Make students work together productively!  Everyone will smile and glitter will shoot out their noses!  Everyone will do better in the class and all this sounds like rainbow marshmallows in my ears! The winner gets a diamond-encrusted pony!

I have taken a lot of pedagogical approach training, and in theory TBL seems great.  It involves this idea of a flipped classroom, where the students read a chapter and watch a video/do some assignment in order to prep for class.  Once in class, the student takes an individual quiz.  Then, the students are placed in their teams, and they retake the same quiz, this time as a group.  You're supposed to be able to get a better score on the team quiz because everyone is prepared for class, right?  As a teacher, I love this idea.  But now I'm a student being subjected to such tomfoolery, and I don't love it. Evidently I am also an 85 year old lady who uses the word "tomfoolery".  Anyway.

I am taking a Research Integrity course this semester (required as part of my fellowship), where TBL is the approach. There are ten class meetings, a quiz at each one.  Each individual quiz is worth 40 points, and each team quiz is worth 40 points, so there is a possibility of receiving 80 points per class.  We have to have so many of these  points in order to pass.  Ok, that's fine. And honestly I am not worried about failing this course.  How sad would it be if I FAILED ETHICS?

However, I am worried about my team.  There is me, three grad students from varying programs, and a pediatrician on our team.  They tried to make us diverse. 

We took a "trivia" quiz as a team, and got two out of two questions wrong.  And here is how it went.

Question 1:

Where was the first business school located?

I don't remember all the options, but Boston and Philadelphia were both options.  We were supposed to discuss then hold up a card with our answer and team number on it.  

Keri:  I think it's Philly (the Wharton School of Business). (My first thought was Benjamin Franklin, who I associate with businesspeople as well as with UPenn--these associations turned out to be more of less wrong, but my answer was right.)

Group:  Rabble!  Rabblerabblerabble!  It's totally Boston because of Harvard.  (I have to admit they at least backed up their answer better than I did.) We should vote Boston!  Boston Boston!

The answer was Philly.  So of course we were wrong.

Question 2:

What year was the Wharton School of Business Founded?

Again, I don't remember all the options, but one of them was  (1860-1870), followed by (1880-1899), followed by some other time periods that would have obviously been too late for a "first-founded" something-or-other.  

Keri: I think it's (1880-1899), because the 1860's was during the Civil War, and the other options seem way too late.

Group:  Rabble!  Rabblerabblerabble!  It's totally (1860-1870) because that one is separated from the others by 10 years!  Definitely that's it!  (This time, their reasoning was totally absurd and I probably should have argued more.)

I was outvoted again, and again we were wrong.  There were only two questions, so if we had been scored, we would have gotten a zero.  A ZERO.  This is NOT OKAY with me (except that time I took calculus as a college freshman.  Then it was totally okay because calculus is stupid).

Now, I know I'm supposed to "make the case" for my answer, etc.  And maybe this will work better when we were to have actually prepared for class..

I suppose I will have to keep you posted.  I'm not ready to write TBL off just yet--I think I need the whole semester to see how this whole thing plays out.  The guy teaching it is great, and it's obvious he put a ton of work into the class to make it way more interesting than "some dude telling me what is okay to put in my publication" lectures.  This, I super-appreciate, especially since the course meets for 2.5 hours every Friday.