TBL talk on open-ended team activities
Some short notes I presented to the Iowa State “TBL” meeting; it went over one of the team activities I’ve done with my econometrics class. I got lots of good feedback and suggestions. I presented the contents of this outline, but as slides.
Background on the class I teach
- Started TBL this semester
- Teach PhD Econometrics (basically a statistics class)
- Core required class in the Econ department
- Mostly Economics PhD students (one or two students from other departments)
- 19 students this year (fairly typical class size)
- 3 teams with 6 to 7 students
- In first lecture, I sold TBL as a way for the students to get experience with “open ended and poorly defined problems,” which will help them in their research
Example of one team activity
Some comments
- There is no “right answer” but there are many, many “wrong answers”
- Potential for an answer being /wrong/ seems more important for team’s internal discussion than whether or not it can be /right/
- I’m having trouble getting much discussion between teams, though
- If teams all choose wildly different approaches, they don’t have a lot to say to each other
- This might be addressed with better homework & preparation
- For HW, students come up with different potential approaches
- Decide on a list of allowed approaches early in the class period
- Teams are required to choose and defend one of those options
Last comments
- Don’t expect students to magically figure out the “right way” to handle challenging problems
- “Problem solving” needs to be taught as well
- Early on, you may want to split a problem into several small steps and lead the students through it
- Or, make “planning” something that the students are required to do and are graded on before “acting”
— Gray Calhoun, 03 Oct 2014
Copyright (c) 2014–2015 Gray Calhoun. This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and any source code listed in this document is also licensed under the MIT License.