With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Team-Based Learning (TBL) Module for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training. This session will be presented by Suzan Kamel-Elsayed, Deirdre Pitts, Sarah Lerchenfeldt, Tracey Taylor and Robin Rivest. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Team-Based Learning (TBL) Module for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training
Presented by: Suzan Kamel-Elsayed – Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Deirdre Pitts – Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Sarah Lerchenfeldt -Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Tracey Taylor – Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Robin Rivest – Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Eastern

Over the last several years, schools, colleges and universities have established offices of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to promote and support an equitable and inclusive environment. Academic and healthcare institutions have implemented unconscious bias training to inform individuals of the natural inclination to hold biases based on each individual’s background and experiences and to, provide tools to adjust automatic patterns of thinking, and ultimately eliminate discriminatory behaviors. Institutions must navigate from raising awareness to fostering an inclusive work and learning environment. One way to go beyond bias awareness and effectively engage the institutional transformation process is by developing a program that supports the growing need to recruit and retain underrepresented minorities (URM) throughout academia and health care institutions. In OUWB, an innovative Diversity Champion Certificate Program was developed to ensure everyone within our community has a voice and a sense of belonging. Since the team-based learning pedagogy by itself enhances diversity and inclusion, a TBL module focused on issues of bias, diversity, equity and inclusion was developed for the program training curriculum. The TBL aims to enhance active learning and critical thinking surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion. It also allows Diversity Champion trainees an opportunity to apply their knowledge to solve real-life DEI-related scenarios that commonly occur in the workplace and learning environment within a team setting.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.

With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Use of Vignettes for the Application Exercises During TBL to Enhance Reasoning and Decision-Making Skills in the Health Sciences Education. This session will be presented by Sarah Lerchenfeldt, Sandeep Bansal and Mark Hernandez. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Use of Vignettes for the Application Exercises During TBL to Enhance Reasoning and Decision-Making Skills in the Health Sciences Education
Presented by: Sarah Lerchenfeldt – Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Sandeep Bansal – TCU & UNTHSC School of Medicine
Mark Hernandez – Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern

Educators who use team-based learning play a variety of roles in the educational institutions in which they work. Regardless of their specific roles, many of them are connected in a direct or indirect way to the processes of curriculum development that can influence the success of TBL activities in enhancing reasoning and decision-making in health sciences education. The proposed workshop is designed to provide innovative strategies that will equip participants with the skills to develop valuable case scenarios to elevate their students’ reasoning and decision-making skills. Most educational institutions had to transition to virtual learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During this time, they learned to acclimatize with the unique situation rapidly by adopting remote teaching. The aim now is to leverage those experiences to enhance reasoning and decision-making with in-person interactions during TBL sessions when it is safe to return to in-person exercises. This highly interactive workshop will introduce participants to a step-by-step process of developing case scenarios, the necessary tools, and sample approaches such as the use of pre-recorded simulated scenes, or Matchy-Matchy exercises to enable them to successfully enhance critical thinking and decision making. A toolkit consisting of instructions on what has been presented at the workshop will then be provided to the participants.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.

With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Facilitating Transformative Learning through TBL. This session will be presented by William Ofstad and Cortny Williams. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Facilitating Transformative Learning through TBL
Presented by: William Ofstad – West Coast University
Cortny Williams – University of Western States
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern and Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 9:00 PM – 11:00 PM Eastern

To cultivate a culture of deep learning, a facilitator must create a positive and challenging learning environment that fully engages learners and teams (Smith & Apple, 2007). Well-designed TBL modules offer opportunities for rich discussion and feedback. To fully realize the benefits of this process, learners and teams must feel safe to collaborate and reflect within and between teams despite discomfort and disorientation. How learners choose to embrace challenges is critical to their long-term growth and transformation. Transformative Learning (Mezirow, 1996) offers a systematic approach to embracing challenges and making meaning of one’s experience in order to guide future goals and actions. In this workshop, we will discuss the art of prompting engagement and improving accountability to self-and team goals through a structured discussion of regulating discontent that promotes the transformative learning process. Participants will engage in applications to: 1) Identify questions that prompt discovery, examination, and commitment of ideas toward promoting individual accountability. 2) Apply an inventory of the learning environment that builds trust and transparency for collaboration. 3) Develop a structure for teams of learners to discuss their discontent when facing challenges and plan solutions to common barriers.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.

With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Improving How We Grade: Motivational Tiered Assessment. This session will be presented by Mark Serva from The University of Deleware. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Improving How We Grade: Motivational Tiered Assessment
Presented by: Mark Serva – University of Delaware
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 13th, 2022, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern

College grades are supposed to differentiate the exceptional from the competent and the competent from the incompetent—yet students, employers, and even faculty struggle to connect a specific set of skills to a specific grade. Employers complain that GPA fails to differentiate once students are hired. Traditional grading is time-consuming, frustrating, and prone to inconsistencies across students. Grade inflation has become so problematic in academia that most students are no longer just above average: most are exceptional.

To address these assessment concerns, this workshop will introduce motivational tiered assessment (MTA), a new grading approach that builds on specifications grading. For grading assignments, MTA eschews partial credit in favor of simpler credit/no credit approaches. MTA also integrates opportunities for student revision and learning from mistakes. MTA reduces faculty workload, because faculty need only to assess assignments against a list of specifications—not use partial credit. And to add meaning to letter grades, each letter grade is assigned to a competency tier, which reflects specific levels of student achievement.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.

With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Are Your Learning Objectives More Difficult or More Complex? What’s the Difference? This session will be presented by Cynthia and Paul Standley from The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Are Your Learning Objectives More Difficult or More Complex? What’s the Difference?
Presented by: Cynthia Standley – The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
Paul Standley from The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern

As educators, we are tasked with writing learning objectives that are specific, measurable, realistic, and observable behaviors of what the learner is to do. We rely on Bloom’s Taxonomy to do this. With the advent of the flipped classroom, there is an ever-increasing need to incorporate higher-level learning objectives as students engage in active learning. This workshop will focus on writing those higher-level learning objectives. In writing these higher-level objectives, there is a tendency to write more difficult objectives, rather than more complex. Just because a learning objective is difficult doesn’t make it more complex. Students can be exerting great effort to achieve learning, but still processing at the lowest level of thinking! To move up Bloom’s taxonomy, we must engage more complexity. In this workshop, we will first review the difference between complexity and difficulty and complete a group activity to determine if the examples provided reflect increased difficulty or complexity. Then, we will move on to taking a simple, familiar task and describe questions or activities that move the task up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Finally, we will end by taking a concept students need to learn and describe questions or activities that move that concept up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Through this stepwise approach, we should clear up any misconceptions about the difference between difficulty and complexity and be better prepared to write those more complex, higher-level learning objectives!

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.

With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: An Easy Guide to Teaching TBL with Engaging Online/blended Activities for STEM Students. This session will be presented by Stuart Clark from the University of New South Wales Sydney. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: An Easy Guide to Teaching TBL with Engaging Online/blended Activities for STEM Students
Presented by: Stuart Clark – UNSW Sydney
Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Eastern and Tuesday, April 19, 2022 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Eastern

Engaging students virtually and in mixed online/face-to-face environments can be difficult, especially with STEM activities. In today’s world, teachers and lecturers have access to an ever-growing number of online tools to support the delivery of their teaching, but the number and complexity of tools can be confusing to many educators. Multiple platforms can also be a problem for students who are required to split their attention between complex information presented and solved in different tools. In this workshop, we will examine one type of tool – interactive notebooks – that allow lecture material, videos, equations and coding to be integrated into one place.

STEM students can use the notebook by adding notes, do their own calculations or solutions and sharing their solutions with educators. Interactive notebooks work well at different stages of TBL – they can be used to create preparation material and provide application exercises that already perform some calculations and allow team members to adjust their results by discussion and interaction to provide answers to the application exercise. Elements of cognitive load theory can help us design these interactive notebooks to reduce the demands of working memory for students and carefully build long-term memory. Interactive notebooks allow for careful balancing of cognitive load, with worked examples being developed that gradually increase the amount of input the student contributes. Interactive notebooks can also be used to provide faded worked solutions. For example, educators can use interactive notebooks to hide a formula but allow students to play with parameters. This workshop will go through the basics of cognitive load theory and interactive notebooks and put you in the place of educational designers working to improve interactive notebooks for your students.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.