 Okay, so welcome. I want to just take this moment to first recognize that I'm working today from the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam people. I welcome you to this virtual session, and I hope this is a wonderful opportunity for us to relearn and unlearn and improve our learning and teaching at UBC on the Vancouver campus or remotely or Okanagan, wherever you guys are hailing from today. Today's session focuses on preparing students to write, using team-based learning to boost student confidence. And to start things off, I just wanted to check in with all of you to see who's here and to learn a little bit about everyone. So I'm going to start with a waterfall activity. Some of you may be familiar with this. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, I will explain it. It involves answering the question prompts on the slide, on your screen, using the chat. But the trick here is to not press return until everyone has had a moment to type. And then I'll count you down and say go. And everyone actually presses return at the same time so we can see everyone's responses. All I'm looking for here is a quick check-in. Who are you? Where are you from? And how does your teaching and learning connect with writing used as a form of student assessment? So the two question prompts here. What discipline do you teach in? And what's one example of how you use writing to assess student learning? So I'm going to open my chat here and I'm going to type in my answer. There we go. And I'll give everyone a minute to type. And then I'll count everyone down and we can share. So I myself work in media and writing. We've got someone from Pharmaceutical Science using science reviews and their teaching, population and public health. Oh, they do elevator talks, fabulous formal oral presentations, proposals, public health interventions. We've got Evan from English and Cultural Studies working in ASCII 100. So that's an academic writing course, food science, it's Judy. And she's got end-of-term team projects. First year writing and research English, this is Erin. They write a letter about their relationship to writing, Asian literature. One writing assignment is an individual research and creative paper, physiology, journal writing, deconstructing seminars. That sounds fascinating. And Juliana in pathology and lab medicine, so students writing lab reports, fabulous. This is great. So we've got people from across the disciplines, which is what I always hope for. There's always something disconcerting about just the writing instructors attending writing workshops. I'm a firm believer in sort of distributing responsibility for writing teaching across the disciplines. So welcome and great. Thank you for joining us today. What I'm going to go through in today's workshop is some, a collection of teaching strategies that are useful across the disciplines. So what I'm hoping you'll come away from today's session with are three things. First of all, a general sense of how feelings of confidence can impact student writing. Second, a familiarity with some of the basic features of TBL or team-based learning, which is a very specific teaching approach that I'm showcasing today as a strategy to boost student confidence with writing. And then at the very end, some strategies for using TBL to boost student confidence as students prepare to complete writing assignments. So let's get started. What I'd like to start with is a quick teach piece just around student confidence and writing just to get us started. So there's a vast research literature on student confidence with writing. It's also called writing self-efficacy. And these are feelings of confidence, feelings of optimism around writing tasks. So I've got a quote up on the screen that reads, quote, students with strong self, here we go, I'm going to try that again, students with strong writing self-efficacy believe that they're good writers or can become even better writers with persistence or hard work. So this is entirely about belief and self-perception. Writing self-efficacy often has very little to do with actual writing competence or writing ability. It's entirely to do with how the students feel about themselves and about their capacity to write or capacity to learn. So the opposites here are self-doubt or apprehension or anxiety. Now, these beliefs impact our behaviors. They impact our students' behaviors. So if you experience self-doubt or apprehension as a writer, you're likely to do things like avoid writing, procrastinate, delay. You're more likely to experience what's quote unquote called writer's block where you just blank, you stare at a page, you stall, you get stuck, you feel like you're not sure what to do or where to go. And students who experience higher writing self-efficacy or more confidence in their own abilities, their behaviors are quite different. These students are more likely to participate readily in writing tasks. They're likely to put in more effort or just work harder, whatever that means for the students involved. They're more likely to persist longer when they're faced with challenges. And they're more likely to achieve better writing outcomes, with better writing performance. And so this is the belief translated into behavior. And it's these behaviors we want to foster. So it's important as instructors who use writing as assessment to try to set students up for success and really cultivate or facilitate these feelings of confidence, making them believe that they can do this and they can learn to improve. So one check in here with respect to writing self-efficacy. Whether you meant them this way on purpose or not, what strategy do you feel you currently use? Let's just see if they identify one. What's one strategy that you currently use to help students feel confident about completing the writing assignment? So again, just type something quickly into the chat here. And when I count down and press go, we'll share just like last time. So we've got one already in there. I'm going to type one and then I'll give everyone about a minute. We've got scaffolding, writing workshops, small assignments to build up their confidence. Yes, team settings. I emphasize everyone has something to share. The syllabus divides the task of finding pertinent literature, appraising it, weaving it into a block into manageable chunks. There's lots of different scaffolding strategies. The writing workshop is about peer learning. Judy's work with team settings involves her students reminding her students that they all have different things to share. So a lot of team and collaborative learning there. Excellent. So all of these things actually are echoed in the research. And they're generally called facilitators. So facilitators to writing self-efficacy or things that facilitate student feelings of confidence about their writing. So I've got a short list here. It starts by no means exhaustive. An emphasis on writing as process. So instead of having students think about just what they have to produce, highlighting the steps, the small manageable steps that are involved in reaching the final destination. So you break things down into manageable chunks. You scaffold students. Smaller and smaller or smaller writing assignments build towards a larger project. All of these things have to do with emphasizing writing as process. Part of that process is providing writers with constructive feedback and opportunities to revise. So this tends to prevent students from becoming paralyzed with perfectionism. If they see writing as an ongoing process of feedback and revision, they're more likely to be open to feedback and to be unafraid of engaging in that constant iterative process of improvement. Useful and authentic writing tasks. This has to do with giving students work that matters to them. Helping them choose topics or shape their projects in ways that they feel a sense of ownership over it. Giving them meaningful, real work, having them work with real data, produce real genres like grant proposals, elevator talks, things that they'd actually use outside the classroom. This can help motivate them, and the motivation is linked to confidence. Clear expectations and predictable outcomes, giving them rubrics, being transparent and open with them about what you're asking them to do and why, making sure they understand how and why they're being assessed. And then models, models of similar writing, models of success, what does success look like? Models of common pitfalls, maladaptive strategies. So you expose them to lots, diverse models so that they can see what works and what doesn't. And they can see that there's multiple pathways to successful writing. Models as peers. So team learning, team writing, team or peer feedback. Looking and comparing your work to the work of a peer, someone who's similar to you, watching their successes, learning what kind of coping mechanisms they use that maybe you should try. There's a huge emphasis on peer modeling and peer learning in the confidence literature because students can identify with someone who's similar to them as opposed to an instructor. And if they identify with a peer, they're more likely to be open to seeing the successes of their peers and then to transfer that feeling to themselves. If they can do it, I can do it. Feelings of confidence. And then the last one, talk. Now, in the context of writing, this can seem a little bit counterintuitive, but critical discussion about writing is very important. And I saw someone mention writing workshops. This is one of those places where talk can happen. Students aren't just leaving feedback online on each other's drafts, but they sit and they talk about strategies. They evaluate samples. They discuss, they critique, they evaluate. This kind of shop talk helps students think of themselves as writers and it boosts their confidence as writers. Now, some common barriers, monolithic writing tasks that students just don't know how to take apart. They just loom and they're not sure how to approach them or impact them. Boring topics where they don't feel motivated to engage. And then the fear of judgment. Sometimes that fear comes from feeling like the judgment is random or unexpected. They don't know what to expect. That unpredictability can actually make students feel anxious. But also, judgment that's corrective or focuses on mistakes or problems can, I guess, I'd put it as it makes it difficult for students to see pathways forward. And so they start to retreat. Now, as a writing instructor of probably 18, 19 years now, through my own experience and through my familiarity with the research in this area, I'm well aware that a lot of these facilitators are already built in to some really common teaching techniques that a lot of us already use. So the ones up on the screen there are facilitators, things that boost student confidence that many of us are already building in, especially to our assignment design and to the kinds of resources we make available to students. So we often emphasize writing as process by giving our students scaffolded assignments, giving them step-by-step instructions. We often try to create at the design phase authentic writing tasks, things that matter to students, topics they feel invested in and have ownership over. We're often very careful to be transparent and open with our students by using rubrics and posting our rubrics. And many of us post samples so that our students can see examples of what works and what doesn't. And students engage with these before they start the assignment. The last three, many of us already weave into our teaching in the review stage or the later stage of a writing project, most often in the peer review stage. So we allow or encourage or require our students to submit a draft and give each other feedback, opportunities to revise, opportunities to learn with and from their peers. And in the case of writing workshops where students talk, also opportunities to talk about writing and to think of themselves as part of a writerly community. These last three though are really, really important. And many of us mostly engage with these in the end stages of a writing assignment in the review phase. One of the strategies I've been using in my classroom for the past five years actually tries to move these facilitators earlier into the writing process when I try to help my students prepare to write before they've got a draft, before they've put pen to paper, before they've actually started any kind of concrete work with the writing assignment. And the technique I use to move these earlier into the processes called team-based learning or TBL. These facilitators are actually built in to TBL. So it's designed in a way that makes it easy to move these three facilitators early into the writing process. So TBL is what I wanna introduce you to. It's an approach that has students work as teams to learn about concepts and then to apply those concepts to solve problems. And I've got a quotation up there from Nicholson and Sweet who are often credited with doing some of the foundational work in TBL. So I'll read it out to you. Quote, the vast majority of class time is used for team activities that focus on using course content to solve the kinds of problems that students are likely to face. End quote. Now, TBL is used in a variety of subjects, pharmacy, health sciences, business law. It's used as a problem-based and team-based learning quite frequently. In the context of preparing students to write, it can be used in this early stage to get students talking and thinking about a writing assignment before they draft anything. So students can work in teams to learn about a writing assignment and apply the writing assignment parameters and rubric to samples, for instance, and then talk in teams and across teams about those samples, evaluating and critiquing those samples and actually deepen their understanding of the writing task well ahead of the assignment deadline and any kind of drafting. So this is the strategy I want you to play with a little bit today. So one final check-in. Now, this one's an annotate one. So for those of you who are a little unsure how to annotate, there should be a little bar on your screen that says you are viewing my screen. If you click on that, you can choose the annotate tool. And what I'm gonna ask you to do here is use an annotate tool to just mark a spot on the screen that indicates how familiar you already are with TBL. And I've given you three options that kind of reflect my conversations with people and reflect sort of the three positions people often take. So on the far left is I have students work in teams. Is that TBL? It's a common response I get. If that's you, then mark that column. In the middle, it says I'm aware of it, more of TBL, but I've not used it myself. And then the far right is I'm aware of it, I use it in my own teaching. It's kind of fair spread. We've got some people who know what it is you have or maybe have not used it and a couple of people who are already using Teams. So group work and teamwork in their classes, but aren't sure if that's what I'm referring to. Excellent. When I refer to TBL, that helps me a lot. So it's actually good to see that spread. Okay. I'm gonna clear the annotations. Here we go. Just so they don't follow me as I move my slides forward. So let's get everyone some hands-on experience using TBL. Okay. So what I've done is I've actually prepared a one page primer. And what I'd like you to do at this point is just take five minutes to review it. And we're gonna come back and we're gonna unpack it together as a workshop session here. And I'm actually gonna mute my microphone and put on a timer that's gonna count down for five minutes and give everyone five minutes to take a look. All right. There's my timer. So we've got five minutes and leisurely five minutes to go through a one-page handout, pretty straight forward. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is do a quick knowledge check and we'll see how much you remember or understand from that one pager. Now, I'm not adverse to anyone actually having the handout open at the same time. This is not a closed book exam. You are not being marked on this. This will not go on your permanent record. I'm gonna ask you three questions. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put them up into Zoom as a poll. And I want you to answer your, make your selections. They show up just as numbered questions, numbered one, two and three. And then there's three answer options for each one. See if you can make a little note of which answer option you chose because you're gonna actually check in with a team later. So see if you can actually keep a little record for yourself about how you answered these. Now I'm not gonna share the results. Judy's like, uh-oh. Not gonna share the results. I'm gonna launch the poll and I'm going to have you guys check in your answers. And then I see the answers and I keep them for me. Now I've got Erin asking the questions. How do I run my quizzes for in-person classes? Well, online I use Canvas quizzes. And in Canvas quizzes, I can see their results on Canvas. If you use the old school quizzes, not the new quizzes, you can actually see all the statistics immediately after students complete the quizzes. And you can see which questions they're experiencing success on. It's like, okay, they get that. I don't have to cover it. And then you can see the questions that they're struggling with. And those ones I flag and go, oh, those might need clarification. So Canvas quizzes really help. And to be honest, Erin, I use Canvas quizzes in-person right now too for individual quizzes because of that statistic assumption. So it grades everything immediately. I can hold back the scores so students don't know what their score is. But I can see how they're doing on the quiz. And it helps me identify concepts I need to clarify. So that becomes really important to help me create what's called a mini lecture, a triage or a target lecture where I ignore the stuff they all clearly understand. And I just focus on the concepts that are trouble spots. Now, for today, we don't have Canvas. We're just gonna use a poll. So here I go, I'm gonna launch it. Three questions, three answer options for each one. Okay, so on my end, it looks like we've got most people have answered all three questions. So what I'm gonna do as instructor is I'm gonna save the poll results for me. But at this stage in the TVL process, students wouldn't see the scores. So they would just have done the quiz, they'd have checked in. And sort of the next step that becomes really important for learning is that the students then join their team and go through the same questions as a team. And they check in with each other. So I'm gonna end the poll. I'm not sharing my results. I'm just gonna put them into a web viewer so I can see them later. And I'm gonna advance to the next slide and get you to redo these questions as a team. Now, what I'm gonna have you do to do these as a team, we don't have a Canvas website, we don't have a course website where I can refer you to some team activities. So that's not gonna work. And we're not in class. And in class, I would actually use scratch cards. So they're these lovely if at scratch cards where students as teams go through and they scratch off the answer, they're gonna choose as a team. And the scratch card gives them immediate feedback about whether they got the correct answer or not. And if they end up with the wrong answer, they keep scratching. So they have to keep working at it until they find the correct answers. So immediate feedback is really useful. We don't have those scratch cards. So what I've done is I've set up a, what's the word, a padlet for you guys to work from. And that padlet is something that you guys are gonna open and work through as a team in breakout rooms. These are gonna be short breakout room sessions of about, what have I got there, six minutes. So Charlotte's gonna open up breakout rooms and you're automatically gonna be scooted into either team one or team two. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna post a link in the chat for each team. There we go, team one. This is the link to your padlet. So everyone on team one, you can open the team one padlet and you'll see the same three questions there. And as a team, the idea is you go through the questions together, you talk them through, reach consensus and you choose what you think is the best answer and type it in as a reply. And when you're all done, you return to the main room. All right. So what I've got, I just wanna confirm with you, I changed my share screen. So what I've tried to put on the screen is a side-by-side view of the two padlets. Is that what you guys are seeing on your side? Excellent, okay. So if we were in person, I'd use these scratch cards and all the teams would huddle around the desks or sit back with physical distancing with masks on depending on the learning environment. And there'd usually be one designated scratch person and they'd scratch through and get immediate feedback. Now I can't recreate that on Zoom, but in Padlet, it gives me this little option to watch you as you progress through the questions. So one of the teams was a little slower to get started. So I popped in and I gave them a little nudge. It's like, how are you guys doing? And for both teams, I was able to follow you as you answered the questions and give you some immediate feedback. So there's a little grading option in Padlet here. And I was able to let you know if you've gotten the correct answer or not. So the two teams who answered the first questions, you guys both got the first question correct. So Hazal, you have read the handout. You've mastered this particular concept that in TBL, students do pre-work. So it's a basic flipped classroom approach. Students are held accountable for having done a little bit of pre-work before they show up. And the idea here is that any pre-work you give them is really focused and targeted. So this is not about giving them six chapters from a textbook and then asking them four questions, but figuring out what you need them to understand, to do what it is you want them to do. And the pre-work focuses. So what concepts do they need to understand in order to perform or to show you demonstrate the competencies you're after? So for this basic handout, I only covered the aspects of TBL that were really core, that were really vital, because that's all I need from you today, right? And then the RAT, this test, just is designed to test for recall, understanding and comprehension. So those lower level cognitive skills on Bloom's taxonomy, there we go. So recall, understanding, comprehension. Did they do the reading? Do they remember what they read? Do they understand the basics? So the first question, very basic recall question. And if you have the handout open, you can actually check and it's right there. It's almost verbatim. Students complete pre-work before class. Now in the second question, I asked you about the readiness assessment or readiness assurance process. So this is what students typically do in a TBL unit when they first come to class. So they sit down with their teams and they complete the readiness assurance test first solo. Some people do this on paper. If they're in a physical classroom, I like to use Canvas because of the immediate statistics. I can see exactly what's going on and I can also see everyone's completion time. So I can actually start flagging, well, everyone's done, we can move on because I'm watching their progress through the quiz. And then of course, it's linked to the grade book. So I can hold students accountable by keeping track of their grades on those readiness assurance tests, their individual preparation. In this case, I asked you a basic question about the purpose of this readiness assurance test and the questions designed to sort of dismiss some misconceptions and also to just reward the people that actually did the reading. So this is not a punishment and reward system. This is really about readiness. Did they do the work? Did they understand it well enough that we can actually put them into a hands-on problem-solving task where they're doing stuff with those concepts and they're making decisions, making choices, handling complex and messy problems that don't always have a clear answer. They need a certain readiness to move into that. And both teams got this correct. A key little misconception was represented by A here. The readiness assurance process is not a replacement for lecturing. So this is not about the instructor absolving themselves from responsibility. First of all, the readiness assurance process needs to be carefully designed so that it focuses students on the concepts they need and really is designed to help build readiness. So it requires a lot of course design and planning. And often these readiness assurance tests are tested. So I test them out on my kids. I test them out with other professors. I make sure they work. And it takes a lot of practice to get them right. And to create readiness assurance processes that you can't just guess your way through without having done the pre-work. That doesn't really help anyone. But they're also designed to flag for the instructor the stuff that still needs unpacking. So my job as an instructor is to watch and see where people struggle with on the individual test and see where teams are still struggling on the team test and to then target those concepts for a customized lecture and for examples and more work in the classroom. And it's my job to step in and do that kind of triage, right? So it requires more nimble, more flexible instruction but it's often really helpful for the students. Most of the time they can get through 70% of the material and they get it working on their own, working in teams. And my job is to step in and just carry them and will not carry them, support them through that final 30% that they need more support with. And so I can focus on those concepts. Now the third question asked about the application task. This is the part of TBL where the instructor gets students to do something. And this is where a lot of the learning happens. It's a very rich moment in a TBL called cycles. They're often tricky to design well, so they take practice but the idea is you give students a problem to solve with whatever they read about in the pre-work. And it should be a problem that's significant. It matters to the students, it will help them thrive in the course and ideally it's important to them beyond the course. So it should be realistic, it should be complex, it should be messy, valuable, useful, not a kind of stripped away, decontextualized textbook exercise but a real messy problem that they're going to learn from trying to engage with. The really well-designed problems aren't just significant but they're problems that force the students or ask the students to make a choice. So they're often framed as a multiple choice question and the prompt for the question gives them all the context, all the information they need about the problem and then the teams have to choose from say three to five choices. And it might seem really reductive but it actually forces the students to commit to something. And so the teams might actually be waffling, they might be torn between two options but you give them a certain amount of time and you say, no, commit. What as a team do you think you have the best case for? And then you get this rich team discussion and this back and forth. And the teams, mind you, are not trying to convince me or the instructor that they're right. They're trying to speak to each other and my job is to facilitate. Why did you answer A? What if we changed the wording in answer B a little bit? Would that change your position? What do you think is the strongest part of team one's solution or their argument? How would you combine your solutions? And see the instructor is facilitator and it's designed to provoke critical discussion. That is what's often missing from how we prepare our students from writing assignments. We lack that talk about writing and this is built right into TBL. Give them a messy writing problem. Have the teams come to the best possible solution they can in a limited amount of time and then have them unpack, hash it out, look at the merits and drawbacks of different solutions and you get them talking about writing not just offering pure feedback but discussing as writers, engaging with each other as writers. This is where I see that gelling between TBL and preparing students to write really, really flowering. It's a really great intersection of the two. So this final question, this was the question where on the individual poll you guys struggled with the most, there's less obvious everyone was getting the correct answer. Some of that has to do with not everyone having worked their way through the handout, which is a common reality in these kinds of workshops as well as in the classroom, right? So sometimes it means going back and revisiting the handout and making sure everyone is ready, of course, has that understanding in place. But the answer is we're also a little bit messier. Some of the three answer options were problems that are good for application tasks, problems that are the same, significant, they require a specific choice and teams reveal their choice simultaneously. A problem that students will be asked to solve in the final exam or final paper or a problem that requires students to do extra research beyond the pre-work. Now, does anyone want to volunteer? Both teams landed on A, but not all individuals, see how great you're here, you're correct. Not all individuals ended up finding these correct answers when you did this as an individual poll. Does anyone want to share what the appeal was about B or C? Sally? Yeah, I do have to share. We actually did have a lot of discussion on what the answer should be. So you designed that very well. And Judy, we're talking about that. Judy was going by elimination, well, you know what sounds intelligent. And I was going by rather stopping because I was trying to decide where I'm choosing what I do in my classes or what should properly be done. So we had a bit of a discussion about that. And I guess we felt, some of us felt that by just reading and cheating, having the handout, we could answer it. I still didn't feel that I have to confess, but a couple of us did feel that by cheating, we could find that answer. But I did think that it provided a rich discussion or at least it made me pause and consider what was going on. But it was really being biased by my own practice, yeah. Now, if I were to take away option A as an option and you were just left to consider the merits and drawbacks of B and C. So a problem that you're expected to solve in an exam or a final paper or a problem that requires you to do extra work, what would have been the, I guess, the merits of either one or the appeal of either one of those two other answer options that weren't just repetition from the handout, but were alternatives? Does anyone have an idea of like, what was it about the idea of, what's the appeal of giving students a problem that you're then gonna ask them on the exam? Yep. For me, I was floating on C because this scenario kind of lends itself to an applied task or an authentic learning experience. And if you give the students the content and then a problem, like you said, that's messy that has wider applications, then they have to do the work beyond the content, the basic content that they have to be able to answer the question. So that to me lends itself to like a deep learning, looking for extra information, critically evaluating that information and then applying it to the task. So C was where, I knew A was the answer, but I really felt that C had merit. It does have merit. I mean, if you think it back to those, so A is the correct answer. So you're looking for a problem that's the same, all teams are doing the same thing. They're all being asked to choose from the same choices and they'll have to report simultaneously. And the problem needs to be significant. It has to matter. So which of those things is absent from this idea of students need to do extra work beyond the pre-work to solve the problem. So what's violated? Which of those four S's? Same problem, specific choice, simultaneous response and a significant problem. Which of those four S's is violated in C? I mean, you just popped up. I know Sally's got her hand up as well. Evan, did you have an answer to that one? To the question? I do, but it was more of a question. It was about the same problem. That's the one that's violated to my eye. And I wondered about that. Like I wondered if you could speak to why it has to be the same problem and what the advantages are to that. Yeah, and that's, it's a good question. So the idea of giving students or teams the same problem, it's sameness across a multiple and multiple variables. So you give them the same resources. So if you're gonna give them say a writing sample or two writing samples or five writing samples, they all get the same samples. And it's so that they're all speaking to the same data set and they're all making a decision or a choice working from the same data. And that means that they can actually have a rich inter-team discussion where they're referring to the same things and not referring past each other. So they've all read the same pre-work. They're all applying the same concepts. They're all trying to deepen their understanding of the same concepts and they're all working with the same resources with the same time limits. So that really facilitates and supports good inter-team discussion where one team isn't reaching past another and bringing in evidence that no one else has seen. So it really helps support that discussion. And that's what you're after in the task is really rich inter-team discussion where they can learn from each other, not try to outmaneuver each other. You're not trying to get them to sort of give each other the slip. You're trying to get them to build collaboratively and reach consensus as a class about which option is messed, not trying to beat each other. And that's best achieved when they're all working from the same data set and working with the same resources. Yeah. Sally, your hand is up as well. Yeah, I was, and I totally agree with you. And I was maybe thinking at so many different levels at the level that you're mentioning, definitely. But I was applying this to a specific class that I have where students deconstruct the seminar in the classroom. And there's quite a several resources for them to do that in groups. And I was trying to see in the type of assignments they're going to then later apply to in terms of using what they've learned. They can apply to different things. They didn't apply to summarizing what they've read. They can apply it to their journals where they ask new questions. They can apply it to ultimately, they're going to do a proposal. So depending on what you're doing this for, you can take different approaches. But I'm so glad you're discussing this because it clarifies to me, what is it I'm going to use this TBL specifically? What stage and what is the ultimate goal? Because it can be modified for all these other, thank you so much for that. Yeah, you're welcome. I do find it mean TBL has a, it's not complex, but it's got a rigorous structure. And most of those elements of the structure are there for pedagogical reasons. So there's some really interesting scaffolding built into it. I really like the way they move students from individual pre-work to team and then inter-team discussion, but it is modifiable. And there's lots of ways you can adapt TBL to new situations. And as a writing instructor, that's one of my key interests is in pharmaceuticals and in public health, this is used all the time. In fact, a lot of schools require it to get their accreditation. All their courses have to be taught using TBL, but in a different kind of learning context, the adaptations become really important. So it's like, what's your goal? What, how are you trying to use it? What's it for? Yeah, and I actually, I wanted to ask your first name on Zoom, it just says Jay Kaurra, is that your- I forgot to change that. No, I'm Jessica. I'll change that in a second. But I just popped my hand up to answer your original question about what aspects of those four S's does C violate? I think you could still have the same problem. It could still be a significant problem, but in terms of having a specific choice and students, different teams working simultaneously, that would be harder to manage or harder to make sure that that part's happening in my mind anyway, but yeah. Yeah, and there's some really interesting challenges that come with those application tasks. And after, I mean, I've worked with instructors who are far more experienced with TBL than I am, but even after like five, seven years of experience, that the application tasks work best when they're very light and focused and they're designed to generate discussion. And so I think some of my own pitfalls in the past have revolved around or have involved creating tasks where I was asking too much of the students and they ended up spending all of their energy trying to solve the problem instead of having a light simple, well, deceptively simple problem to solve and then spending the majority of class time just having them unpack it in discussion and that critical talk is vital. If the task is slowed down by them doing research and pulling things up and doing all this legwork, then you lose all of that dynamic interaction and collaborative learning that happens through the rich inter-team discussion and that's where a lot of the magic happens, not with sending one person off to do some extra research and then pull them back. That means you have to explain all that to other teams in class and it derails, it derails the conversation. So if you keep it light and focused, you get a really good, rich discussion. Yeah, so less is more with those application tasks. I'm gonna actually give you one. So this is the last little bit of teamwork I'm gonna have you do. So I'm gonna change my share screen back to my slides for just a moment here and I'm gonna give you guys as a team an application task to work on yourself. So it's stripped down, it's fairly simple. Oh, and I should actually get it set up for you. But you're gonna have, let's do six minutes again, we'll do the same timer and you're gonna go back to the same padlet. And I'm gonna actually just mute my mic here for about 15 seconds and I'm gonna copy and paste the question into your padlet so you've got it. And I want you to try on one of these application tasks. So this application task, it's a fairly straightforward application task and in some TBL units or cycles, you'll give the teams a series. So you'll give them a batch of tasks like task one, task two, task three, maybe just one big task, just one for today for you guys to get a feel for this. The idea is you're giving them a problem to solve that isn't a measure of basic recall or understanding but that asks them to apply what they've learned to a situation. So here the question reads, an instructor assigns as pre-work, a writing assignment description, a set of instructions for the writing assignment and the rubric that will be used for assessment. Which of the following would make, oh, sorry, the most would be the most suitable for an application task. And look at that typo, isn't that glorious? So there were three options. Option A, each team collaboratively writes the assignment and submits it for peer review. Option B, each team reads a different sample assignment, evaluates it using the rubric and then presents their evaluation to the class or option C, all teams read the same two samples. And then they use the rubric to decide which sample is better. Now in the interests of a simultaneous report here, I see that team one has chosen C. Does anyone from team two wanna volunteer the answer, a consensus that you reached? I didn't see it in your padlet. So I thought I'd give you guys the opportunity to let me know when we came back. What did team two choose? We actually forgot to identify a spokesperson. So I'll start, but if anyone else in my team wants to say something, please jump in. We had a lot of discussion around this. And I think eventually I populated that answer with C as well. It was a little bit of back and forth around that, yeah. Okay, so let's open that up. So if it's okay with you, Jessica, if I can volunteer you on behalf of team two, what was it that made you guys ultimately decide that C was the best option here? And see if you can link it back to that handout. See if you can sort of show me how it connects back. I think the focus nature of C and the specificity of it, that's probably what we all kind of agreed that that was the answer. Where I had the most trouble was that I wasn't clear on what the assignment was. So if there was like a lead in sentence to say that this is a writing assignment or this is an evaluative process, then I think I would have been much more confident in C because A was kind of like, are they supposed to be writing or are they supposed to be reading samples, right? So if they're supposed to be writing then A made more sense. But if they're supposed to be reading samples and evaluating those samples and C makes more sense. But that's sort of what I was thinking, yeah. So how the task is phrased would matter here. So for C to make sense, what you're saying is it would make sense if what they've been asked to do is to actually compare and evaluate to and choose the best. Whereas A would make more sense if the actual prompt the problem they're asked to solve is complete the writing assignment. Do your best to actually complete this assignment and submit it. Now I'm gonna ask a question, Jessica. If the prompt, the assignment prompt was to write the assignment that's described and submit it for peer review. So if that's what their instructor asked them to do and said, this is the application task, complete this assignment as a team, write it and submit it. Would that be a good application task to have students work on? I'm gonna guess no. Just by the way you're saying it. And if anyone wants to jump in here. So what would, it's not necessarily, I don't want to imply that it's bad work or it's not something you should ask your students to do. We ask our students to write all the time. But what is it about it that might be a little problematic in terms of what TBL is designed to get students doing? That it wouldn't be the same from team to team. That would be my guess as to why that wouldn't work. Yeah. Yeah. And so you don't have the same problem. You know, they're all working on the same assignment but they aren't necessarily all producing the same thing. What other elements of an application task would be missing? If you've got teams co-writing or collaboratively writing something and submitting it for peer review. What else is missing from that process that's really important to an application task in TBL? I guess it doesn't really show if an individual learned from the team-based approach. You know, you can't identify if an individual has actually gone through this process and enriched and thrived within the team to be able to do that then in another setting with a different team. Yeah. They're highly dependent on that team. Yeah, so you aren't necessarily keeping track of individual learning. You've just got the team assignment. You'd have to build something in so that you've got some sense of what each student contributed or some measure of their individual learning. Yeah, yeah. Any other thoughts about what might be missing from having them complete and submit a writing assignment? I think you're also missing a specific choice and part of that goes with the light touch that you were saying to collaborative write assignment would be actually really high touch or complicated. Yeah, yeah. So you're not asking teams to look like to use resources to solve a problem and then to make a choice, to choose a choice, right? So they're all producing something very unique, something different and submitting it for review, but you're not asking them to gravitate around a choice and then to defend their choice and to talk about their choice. So that element of inter-team discussion, it's harder to accommodate in option A. Peer review means they might get some feedback, but peer review can mean different things in different classrooms. They might not ever talk to the person who's reviewing their assignment. Peer review might just mean checking things off and no detailed conversation. So that talk, that discussion around a choice where they explore the merits and drawbacks across teams and across the whole class, that's gone. So there's a real value to getting students to talk about writing, not just in their team, which they'll do in option A. They'll have to talk about their strategy, right? But to talk across teams and to try to reach consensus as a class-wide community of learners and in this case of writers. So teams can learn from other teams what they thought were good strategies and teams can persuade each other to try different strategies and you get more cross-learning. So inter-team discussion is great, inter-team. So team-team discussion is also a really rich place for students to learn about themselves as writers and in a community of writers. And that disappears when the teams are focused on creating a document and submitting it and then sitting back. So where's the talk? Where's that workshopping, right? So that sort of falls away. So one of the things with TBL is that you can actually work talk into a writing context. Writing workshops also do this and there's a lot of overlap there. But if you're just relying on peer review where you submit a document and you ask students to write up their feedback, you're missing that opportunity for talk and that talk about writing and the critical discussion about writing. So this is a really great opportunity to build more talk about writing into the classroom. Now I'm gonna ask another question here about option B. So with B, we've got each team reads a different sample, evaluates it using the rubric and then presents to the class. What parts of a good TBL task are present here? Are there any of those four Ss or that emphasis on discussion, any of those things present here? If they're all presenting at the same time or the timeline is the same then that would be present but that's the only thing that I could think of that would be. Yeah, I mean, so if you think of this, each team has a different sample. So they're not working from the same problem. They're using the same rubric, that's good. So they're all actually dealing with the same expectations and standards, right? So they all actually have a shared sense of what a good assignment looks like or it should look like. So they have the same rubric and they all have different samples. And if they present to the class, if they're presenting the results of their evaluation, that actually undercuts the potential for simultaneity because you can't just say, we all choose A or B or C, they have to talk it out. So that means one team presents at a time. Why would that be a problem? Can't we learn from successive presentations or are there limits to what can be achieved if each team presents their evaluation one at a time? What could happen in that space? The first to present could influence the last to present. There you go. Any successive presentation. And that doesn't, it's not a bad thing. We learn, we adjust, we shift our answers all the time, but there's a risk, it's called answer drift, so if you hear one group present and then the team or maybe even individuals on the team start to reevaluate their own position, they don't wanna interrupt the team presenting, so it's happening in their head and you lose the openness and the discussion. So that everyone's answer risks drifting and drifting in that introverted headspace where they can't talk it out. And so you lose opportunities to actually discuss the merits and drawbacks because everyone's processing in their heads while they listen. And so that's a great way to learn, but we lose the peer collaborative learning once we fall into successive presentations. And so one of the things you can do is just resist the temptation and get back to that forced choice. Everyone presents their choice and if they change their answers, they talk it out. So everything is more and more open and transparent. Yeah. This is the slide version of the handout, but I wanted to add a little bit, I don't expect you to read this screen. I wanted to add a little bit at the very bottom that just kind of reaffirms what this TBL process offers when it comes to those facilitators of writing self-efficacy. So the things that make students feel confident about their writing and that improves their capacity to persevere, their motivation to persist, to work hard, right? All of the benefits of student competence. The three facilitators that tend to get pushed to the end of the writing process into peer review have to do with peer learning and peer modeling, critical talk about writing. So talking about the writing and then opportunities for feedback and revision that aren't linked to a draft, but that might be opportunities to give each other feedback on how you're thinking about a writing assignment or to rethink the strategies you might have used. These three facilitators, peer learning, critical discussion and opportunities for feedback and revision about how you think, how you're approaching or strategizing for a writing assignment, these things are built into TBL and they let you get at them early in the writing process as you're preparing students to write. So all of this happens before post-work where the students actually write their own assignment. They go through this whole process before they actually possibly start drafting their own work. The pre-work is the assignment description, instructions, rubrics, samples. Do you give them all that stuff? You'd normally just post to Canvas. You say, read it. They come to class and you give them a readiness assurance test on the assignment. Do you understand the assignment, the parameters, the assessment, the rubric and you actually test their recall and understanding, hold them accountable for having gone through the assignment beforehand then reaffirm their recall and understanding through the team test and then give them an application task that centers around the writing assignment. A good one is give them two samples they haven't seen before and say, use the rubric and assess them, choose the best one, defend your choice to the team and those samples can be messy and complex. They might be short. They could be paragraphs, right? But they can have examples of successful strategies mixed in with examples of maladaptive writing strategies making ample opportunities for critical discussion. It's like, what about sample one works? What about it doesn't? What about sample B or sample two works? What doesn't? Get them to unpack and deconstruct real examples of the writing assignment you've given them and they go through this process before they actually start working on their own. So they've had hands-on work, problem-solving, discussion, peer modeling, peer learning all prior to actually tackling the writing assignment themselves whether it's an individual writing assignment or a peer like a collaboratively written assignment. So for me, this is something I do and most of my courses now I actually devote at least one class to all major high stakes writing assignments to make space for this discussion, this talk, this creation about a community of writers, right? Thinking of themselves as writers and looking at samples evaluating using the same rubric I'm gonna use when I evaluate their writing. Instead of seeing that final assignment with anxiety and apprehension and trepidation I've essentially moved them towards that final writing assignment cultivating confidence along the way. They read the assignment they're tested on their understanding they apply their understanding looking at samples before they head in to writing themselves. So the last little slide I wanna share with you is both encouragement and how would I put it? Not a caution, encouragement and a word of caution. TBL to do it well takes practice. So if this is a new technique I encourage you to try it out I encourage you to contact me I'm happy to brainstorm and work through this with you it's lots of fun that it takes practice and takes work and revision to make a good TBL unit. So a good place to start is the green box. If this is for a writing assignment actually choose one high stakes assignment you really want to cultivate confidence in your students as they enter it and create a TBL unit that devotes one class to unpacking that assignment and prepping them for it. If you wanna scale up scale it up to multiple writing assignments perhaps there are two or three writing assignments that all scaffold and you can have one dedicated class for each of them. The red box at the end would be the approach with caution I encourage you to explore but if you wanna revamp an entire course around TBL which can be done and is done quite frequently this takes a long time. So I wouldn't recommend you jump into the deep end and try to just completely restructure your course small steps. So just as you would scaffold your students towards a major writing assignment I would scaffold any application of TBL so you do small changes first and then you scale it up as you grow more confident with your own abilities. All right, we've got five minutes left. So I'll leave you with my last slide which is just some resources and I'm actually gonna drop a PDF of my slides into the chat. So you have this if you wanna refer to it. That's right. So there's lots of material on writing confidence there's a particularly accessible book that actually focuses on writing workshops with which one of you mentioned earlier it's called Empowering Young Writers The Writing Matters Approach and it talks about efficacy self-efficacy and competence as long as well as other concepts. And then with TBL I've put up two of the big introductory texts there's a nice article by Michelson and Sweet on the essential elements of team-based learning and then a manual like a book written by Jim Sibley and his collaborator I forget their first name of Stafford Chuck getting started with team-based learning Jim actually works at UBC and he's one of the people who've done some of the groundwork or the foundational work in the field and there's two websites at the bottom there. So learntbl.ca This is currently hosted by Jim and then team-basedlearning.org is the team-based learning collaborative and there's lots of resources that get you started sample tasks, sample rats lots of opportunities to interact and network so those are good places to start if you're curious. Yeah, I'll stick around if anyone's got any questions but otherwise I will let you guys go and have the rest of the afternoon to yourselves if that's the way you'd like to go. Oh, I see a question from David. Three questions. Okay, how large is your typical course enrollment? Is it a program elective or requirements? We'll start with that one. My current course enrollment my current writing courses are very small. So my cap is 30 but I've used TBL in writing classes where I've got students 60 like 60 students and one of the good things about TBL is you get really good energy in the room. If you have students working and say teams of five or six then you get really good rich discussion. You can have a writing class even of 60 students and lots of activity going on in the class as they talk out strategy and get those nice inner team discussions going. It's a really good way to leverage a larger class size and colleagues of mine, for instance, working in anthropology will use TBL in a class of 300, right? So it's a good way to get interaction and engagement built into a larger class. Now your second question, oh, and it's a required course. Second question, at what year of undergraduate or graduate education? I work right now with first year students but I've worked with all undergraduate students with TBL in the past. And your third question, David how do you incorporate an assessment of individual preparation, participation, professional? Okay, so this is something I actually didn't cover in today's unit because it was focused, right? But there's a fourth piece of TBL which is evaluation. And that would warrant its own workshop. There are well-tested and well-researched options to have teams and team members evaluate their own and their teammates' contributions. And TBL often works in some way of recognizing the different and the different levels of contribution of teammates to their team. So there's actually a lot of work that's been done to prevent social loafing. So this doesn't turn into two people carrying the whole team, rather teammates are held accountable for what they do or do not bring and their grades vary depending on contribution. But that, if you wanna learn more about that we can chat about that after the session. Yeah, Judy, you've got your hand up. So I really like how you started the session talking about students' confidence. Like when they feel that they have the self-efficacy they would do better, they would just become a better writer. So when you put them into teams, do you put teams with different level of confidence? And if you do, do you see a difference? Like do they, are they able to support each other? Yeah, it makes a difference, it really does. So one of the things that I like about TBL is it raises the floor. So a lot of students who tend to struggle in especially a writing intensive course but it's not just specific to writing intensive courses it's students who struggle or who may have lower self-efficacy with all their skills. They tend to improve their achievement through TBL. And there's a lot of research done on that. So there's a lot of different hypotheses about why that's the case. In my experience, in my teams I put writers of different levels of confidence, different levels of achievement and performance in the same team and the higher achieving students the ones who may be more socialized into the kinds of writing I'm teaching they tend to do just as well as they would ordinarily do. The students who have lower confidence or also maybe lower levels of outcome or achievement they get exposed to all these different writing conversations and writing samples and writing strategies that they would never have seen if they were working in isolation and they end up really flowering. Like they really thrive. Sometimes there's their quiet students who are listening more than contributing for the first half of the course. And when they realize that they're invited to contribute to talk things out they really open up and they learn a lot more in the course than they would have otherwise because of that peer opportunities for social comparison it's called. So they're able to compare their own ideas to the ideas of members of their team and they're exposed to ideas and strategies that they would never have thought of if they'd been working independently and it really raises the floor for those students. So the lower performing students their grades tend to go up in TBL and that's after accounting for the adjustments you make based on how much they've contributed. So it's not like they're just kind of sitting there and their teams dragging them along it's that they're actually contributing and they're learning and I get really positive feedback from the students who otherwise feel left behind in classes where they're expected to kind of make their own way through the material. So I find that to be one of diverse teams students getting exposed to different ideas different approaches talking about the merits and drawbacks of those diverse strategies that really, really helps the students especially in writing there's not always there's never one solution to a writing problem, right? Multiple pathways to success so that diversity really matters and it empowers students to feel like they can actually try on strategies they never would have thought would have been valued or possible until they talk to their team members about it. Rebecca I was wondering if you could provide us with some resources. I have a lot that I'm not thinking about here and also thinking about the baby steps in this particular course if I could know a little bit about approaches to assessment that handle the social loafing it would be very helpful. And then I just wanted to connect with you when I had a clear idea of which aspect I wanna really hone this on I could really use your expertise to help me walk my way through that. I would love to do that. Why don't we exchange emails and we can chat back and forth and I can forward you some resources the social loafing and the evaluation piece is really important. And for me in particular that really helped win me over to realize how students were both supported and held accountable. So we can chat back and forth after the session. I just popped my email there, it's pretty nice. Okay, I will pop my email into the chat as well.