Presentation by: Latika Raisinghani, Johanna Sam, Ashenafi Alemu, Joana Pinto, Shawna Faber.
Session: A | Time: 9:00 AM-9:40 AM | Location: Room 206
Often, teachers may find it difficult to integrate assessment techniques effectively within their teaching. The EPSE 310 B course “Assessment and Learning in the Classroom” is designed for secondary teacher candidates. The primary goal of the course is to promote teacher candidates’ learning of diverse and high-quality assessment practices and their successful integration in curricular planning and teaching. Based on the course evaluations of past iterations of EPSE 310B, which were taught as a PowerPoint-based Lecture followed by case-study analysis in Seminars, this course was redesigned and taught through a team-based learning (TBL) approach (Michaelson & Sweet, 2008) in January, 2018. The course was taught to ten secondary cohorts with the number of teacher candidates ranging between 33-39 in each cohort. The teaching team comprised of Course Coordinator Dr. Shawna Faber and ten Graduate students who served as the Seminar instructors. TBL has been widely recognized as a teaching strategy that promotes deeper learning and empowers students as independent thinkers (Roberson & Michaelsen, 2016). It involves individual and team readiness activities (iRATs and tRATS), which are often designed in the form of multiple-choice questions to assess the individual’s and team’s readiness for learning the specific concept. These are followed by 4-S team-based application activities which have four key elements: 1) Significant problem 2) Same problem, case or question, 3) Specific choice, and 4) Simultaneous report (Michaelson & Sweet, 2008).
In this interactive panel discussion, EPSE 310B teaching team will engage audiences in the TBL approach while sharing their experiences of utilizing TBL. The emergent themes from the preliminary qualitative analysis of team members’ experiences include: 1) TBL perceived as both rewarding and challenging; 2) TBL promoted critical dialogical discussions, deeper learning and student accountability; 3) TBL enhanced teaching team’s pedagogical content knowledge and reflexivity. The experiences shared by the EPSE 310 B team will help inform future iterations of the course, as well as the practices of other teacher educators in UBC’s teacher education program and wider teacher populations who may be interested in utilizing the TBL approach in their diverse disciplinary areas and classroom contexts to promote students’ learning.
Abstract: 575