Time to get creative: Thinking about class-based problems/questions.

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In using TBL, one of the big challenges that we face this semester is selecting and developing significant problems to discuss in class. As we will learn, this is a difficult challenge, one that requires creativity, reverse engineering, and focused design on "what do we want the students to be able to do at the end of the session that they couldn't do before?" This is a challenge that we will discuss throughout this class collectively, as your teams will be required to design significant problems. Those significant problems will then be used in class to generate discourse.

As we work on these problems, we should not only be working to advance our understanding, but we should be critiquing the problem itself. For example, this week I have designed a problem for us to discuss in regards to our readings about TBL. After our discourse, I will ask you to use the following criteria/questions to critique that problem.

  • Is the problem important, authentic, and representative of the type of work that the students in the class will do? 
  • Did the question(s) generate discussion and make the team think? 
  • Did the problem get the team to make a choice or specific decision? 
  • Did the problem/question get the team to discern between several equally plausible options? 
  • Did the discussion get your team to probe the "why" of the concepts? 
  • Was there a way for the team to report out their decision (report out at the same time)?
  • When in the team-based discussion were individuals having lively discussions and/or defending their decisions? 
  • And, how could the problem be improved? 
The above questions may be helpful as we develop and critique various problems. Are there other questions that we may want to consider? If you can think of additional questions, please add them as comments to this post. 

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