TBL Facilitation

When do I need to provide facilitation during the TBL process?

TBL Phases and places where facilitation occure

TBL facilitation mainly occurs at the end of the Readiness Assurance and when reviewing the answers from Application exercises.

What do I need to do to facilitate a TBL lesson?

Essentially, to facilitate a TBL lesson, you need to:

• Engage students in an inter-team discussion.

• Elicit students and teams answers.

• Keep students accountable (and engaged).

• Challenging students understandings and assumptions.

What technique can I use to facilitate?

What you should aim to do to enhance their learning process is -as much as you can, engage students in elaborative Interrogation.

Elaborative interrogation is a strategy for enhancing memory retention during the process of learning.

As individual students come up with answers, they have to present, discuss and ultimately justify these with their team mates (during the tRAT and the AEs). Students are then questioning and challenging their own assumptions and understanding.

As a facilitator in the inter-team discussion, your role is to understand where the students' knowledge gaps (see analytics) and then continue questioning and challenging assumptions and knowledge.

The main idea is that you "push" the discussion to the students rather than you just providing the "expert" answers. It is always better to let the students come up with the answer by continuing the elaborative interrogation.

What other tips can I use for TBL Facilitation?

Dr. Charles Gullo has an excellent paper published on TBL facilitation where he lists 12 important tips:

Creating the right environment:

1. Use the 4S’s to craft engaging questions.

2. Watch the clock.

3. Strategise the process of facilitation with faculty before class.

4. Remember facilitation is NOT delivery of content.

5. Avoid giving away answers during facilitation phase.

6. Provide time for closure.

Enhancing active engagement of learners

1. Wait for students to respond to questions.

2. Ask neutral and open-ended questions.

3. Rephrase or restate for clarity.

4. Find the “student expert” in the room.

5. Ensure any lingering uncertainties or disagreements are addressed.

6. Hold each individual learner accountable.

Here's Dr. Gullo's full paper:

Twelve tips for facilitating team-based learningTaylor & Francis

Twelve tips for facilitating team-based learning

How can LAMS help me with facilitating TBL?

The key element to understand how to best assist with the TBL facilitation is to understand the students' misunderstandings and knowledge gaps.

LAMS provides you with real-time analytics. You can monitor the individual and the team answers as these are selected, thus getting an insight into which concepts the students are struggling with.

You will find the iRAT student's choices chart particularly useful. The charts shows you the answer distribution for each question and easily can see the questions that students are struggling with:

So even before the students get into groups for the tRAT, you already know where all your students stand.

During the tRAT, the All Teams Summary chart show you exactly how teams are answering each questions, just as they click on them. This gives you a thorough understanding on what concepts aren't clear to each team.

And even before the students complete the tRAT, get full insights on knowledge gaps and misconceptions.

How can I make sure that time doesn't run out during facilitation?

LAMS has a very thorough time management options for any activity. You will be able to set up time limits and clocks for all