Our Guest Post comes from Phillip Flamm, who teaches Operations Management in the ISQS department at Texas Tech University. This is his 10th posting on our OM blog.
I have been working with total team collaborative learning (TTCL) for 5 years and the impact it has on student retention and speed of learning. In short TTCL involves the manner in which a team of 3-4 students process lecture material. Step by step:
• Lecture 1…Team covers Lecture 1 notes and compile a cumulative understanding of that lecture which is distributed to all members
• Lecture 2…Team covers Lecture 2 then reviews Lecture 1
• Lecture 3…Team covers Lecture 3 then reviews Lectures 1 and 2
• Lecture 4…Team covers Lecture 4 then reviews Lectures 1, 2, and 3
• One last review of all Lectures before an exam yields good scores
Results have been very, very good. TTCL teams tend to average 15 to 20 points higher on exams than the class (450 students) average.
The SWARM process adds to TTCL:
• Lecture 1….same process as above
• Lecture 2….a member from each team rotates from their team (1) to the next team (2) carrying the cumulative version of Lecture 1. Team (2) combines both documents and then covers Lecture 2
• Lecture 3….different team member from 1 goes to 2 with cumulative Lecture 2. Team 2 reviews both cumulative documents then 2 and 3
• Lecture 4….different team member (1) goes to 2 with cumulative 4 document and so on
The idea is that the movement of cumulative documents/students will make available the notes of 8 students instead of 4. I suspect that the exam scores will be higher than previous TTCL classes, but how much is the question.
The next step in my research is to compare a class with no organized collaborative learning teams to the SWARM – TTCL in terms of exam grades.
Very informative article about team collaborations. I learned new is team collaborations term TTCL because of author perspective. I’m the believers who believes strength of team.
Thank you.