Improve Student Comprehension with Team-Based Learning

Team-based learning (TBL) has become a popular method for tackling challenging concepts in healthcare education. TBL offers more than just a conventional learning approach; it's a pathway to immediate feedback, collaboration, and even interprofessional education (IPE) activities. Through TBL, students learn essential skills for their future careers.

TBL is frequently applied as a "flipped classroom" method of instruction where students are given time to prepare ahead of time for a problem-solving exercise that includes many readiness "tests." From the work-ahead preparation to the assessments, Leo, our enterprise software platform, can help simplify the TBL experience for your students. 

Benefits of TBL

A key benefit of TBL lies in its dual impact: providing instantaneous feedback on knowledge application and fostering collaboration among peers. Student collaboration helps promote interprofessional education (IPE), which is a critical discipline among healthcare professions. TBL simulates real-world scenarios where professionals collaborate to solve complex issues. Participating in mixed-discipline teams helps students gain insights into other specialties, fostering a holistic approach to problem-solving and ultimately improving patient care.

Empowering TBL Through Leo

• Leo's Small Groups feature gives you a quick way to break down larger student groups into smaller teams, facilitating TBL activities. Small groups can be used across courses and easily modified. And since Leo is calendar-based, students are automatically assigned to their groups. 

• Leo also makes it easy to facilitate online TBL through video conferencing tools like Zoom and WebEx. You can save links to online meetings either at the course/section level or at the event level. 

A core aspect of TBL revolves around formative readiness assessments – the individual readiness assessment test (IRAT) and the group readiness assessment test (GRAT). These assessments are pivotal in evaluating students' grasp of concepts and encouraging teamwork. 

• The GRAT assessment, when employed with Leo's digital scratch-off tool, transforms the learning process. The GRAT assessment associated with Leo’s digital scratch-off tool allows you to create questions designed to accommodate group collaboration and consensus among the group, with a single team member (team leader) submitting the responses. Leo then associates each response submitted by the team leader with the other members of the group. 

• As students engage in a GRAT assessment, they will receive immediate feedback for both a correct or incorrect response. If their response is incorrect, the students have the opportunity to revisit the conversation, discuss why it is incorrect, and re-engage with the content and resources for evidence of the correct answer. Once a new answer is determined, the team leader selects the new answer choice.

The most critical part of TBL is the practice activities that come after the GRAT. Zoom (or in-person) and audience response tools can help with this. Fortunately, Leo makes it easy to embed elements such as Poll Everywhere and Nearpod for teams to respond to the questions. 

TBL is a great way to prepare your students for the demands of the healthcare field. And having a platform like Leo can help you manage TBL exercises anytime, anywhere. Contact us today to learn more about how Leo and our friendly team of experts can help you improve student learning through TBL.