Team-Based Learning in a Research Methods For Planners Course

MULTIMEDIA CASE STUDY

This case walks readers through the steps University of Kansas Professor Ward Lyles followed to incorporate team-based learning (TBL) into his course to make learning statistics meaningful and engaging for his students. It presents tips and strategies for incorporating TBL to improve course design and teaching practices.

Introduction

In his fall semester course at the University of Kansas (KU), Ward Lyles redesigned an introductory research methods course for urban planners that was traditionally taught through class lectures and individual assignments. In collaboration with Professor Bonnie Johnson and colleagues at KU and elsewhere, Lyles created a course that approaches the content—research methods and introductory statistics—through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and changed the pedagogy to team-based learning (TBL).

Following the guidelines for TBL, he restructured class time by dividing students into small groups focused on meaningful and challenging exercises to be completed within the class period. He recognized that statistics can be difficult for students in an urban planning program and that group work often creates challenges. Thus, he devoted class time to building course climate: setting class norms and expectations; building understanding and trust among peers and between students and the teacher; and guiding group work and discussions. His redesign was effective for all students, particularly marginalized or disadvantaged students. The new title of the course is, aptly, UBPL 741 Quantitative Methods I (a.k.a. Using Research to Foster Compassionate Planning). Lyles’ course syllabus is available online.

 

KU professor Ward Lyles teaches statistics through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

 

Team-based learning is the core instructional method in Lyles’ course. TBL offers an integrated, theoretically grounded, and empirically informed pedagogical approach consistent with leading-edge recommendations from the Association of American Universities, National Science Foundation reports, and university centers for teaching excellence. The TBL approach offers opportunities for individual and group learning, collaboration and team-building skill development, communication across multiple mediums, and shared evaluation of learning outcomes. TBL is well suited for educating and training students for careers in planning.

Because of his work on the course redesign, in 2018 Lyles received the Curriculum Innovation Award, which recognizes effective teaching strategies and helps faculty to integrate and refine them to improve student learning. Learn more about other award recipients on the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy website and see the institute’s course catalog for more information on pedagogical courses.

Topics

Team-Based Learning; Teaching Strategies: Pedagogy

Learning Goals

  1. Explore the challenges and opportunities of Team-Based Learning for students and faculty.
  2. Review how to design and facilitate small group exercises that foster collaborative learning.
  3. Analyze Lyles’ approach to rethinking the design and pedagogy of his course and how it can inform and refine your own teaching practice.

Primary Audience

Faculty interested in integrating team-based learning approaches into classroom instruction.

Prerequisite Knowledge

None

Summary

This case goes through the steps Lyles followed to incorporate team-based learning (TBL) into his course to make learning statistics meaningful and engaging for his students. It presents tips and strategies for incorporating TBL to improve course design and teaching practices.

Empowering Faculty

What are the hopes, expectations, and challenges that new faculty experience when developing and teaching a course? How will they know if they need help? Who might they turn to for support? In this video, Lyles shares his experience in taking over a course that had been taught for 30 years by two department faculty members.

Thought Starters

  • What challenges did Lyles face as a new faculty member?
  • What challenges did Lyles identify that students must meet to succeed in a quantitative methods course?
  • In what ways did Lyles have institutional support for the course redesign?
  • What would you do if you were in his situation?

Additional Resources

Empowering Learners

How do you create an interesting learning environment that keeps students engaged, challenges them to work hard, and supports them so they won’t give up? In this video, Lyles shares how he empowers and engages students’ interests and passions and monitors their progress to decide when to teach, guide, and push students to learn.

Thought Starters

  • How is the “guide on the side” approach different from the traditional approach to teaching?
  • Under what circumstances does the “guide on the side” approach work well? Under what circumstances does the “sage on the stage” approach work well?
  • What might be lost if a teacher acts only as a “guide on the side” and never as the “sage on the stage”?

Additional Resources

Integrating Course Climate, Pedagogy, and Content to Improve Student Learning

When developing a course, educators often start by identifying the essential content—theories, frameworks, principles, topics, and issues—that students must master by the end of the course. But what other ingredients are essential to building an engaging learning experience and improving learning outcomes? In this video, Lyles shares how he integrates course climate, pedagogy, and content knowledge to improve student outcomes.

Thought Starters

  • What learning challenges did Lyles identify?
  • What is course climate?
  • What are the relationships among course climate, pedagogy, and content?
  • Why is course climate important?
  • How did Lyles create a course climate that enhanced learning?
  • How does Lyles’ approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion relate to the planning profession?

Additional Resources

Designing a Team-Based Learning Exercise

Tremendous thought and creativity go into designing exercises for each class. Ideas that work don’t occur in a vacuum but emerge from studying examples of what others have figured out and then making that expertise one’s own. When learning from examples, clarifying the thinking behind design decisions is invaluable. In this video, Lyles shares his thinking behind the design of a team-based learning exercise.

Thought Starters

  • How has Lyles designed the activity to make it relevant and engaging for students?
  • Which aspect of the exercise elevated the challenge for students?
  • How did Lyles support students when they came to the more challenging parts of the activity?

Additional Resources

Team-Based Learning Instruction

Universities grade students on individual performance, but for planners in the real world, team and organizational performance is what matters. Lyles highlighted this observation as one of the main motivations in the design of his course. What were the challenges of team-based learning? How did he design group exercises to mitigate those challenges? These issues and many more were discussed in the other videos. This video gives viewers a window into what actually happened in the classroom. It condenses the full class period into about 13 minutes.

How did Lyles teach content and facilitate group work? Specifically, how did he know that students had acquired important content knowledge and skills? How did he scaffold, support, and push students to apply the underlying core concepts and technical skills to solve the group exercise within the timeframe of a class period? How did he make the small group and whole class learning experience effective and engaging for all students?

Faculty

Ward Lyles, PhD, AICP. Associate Professor, University of Kansas.

Dr. Lyles’ research and teaching interests center on the intersection of people, the built environment, and the natural environment. His current research projects explore 1) the use of planning to reduce long-term risks from natural hazards and climate change, 2) the use of social network analysis to examine the role of planners in local planning efforts, and 3) applying content analysis methods to evaluate planning documents.

Dr. Lyles has published articles in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Cityscape, the Journal of Planning Literature, and Natural Hazards Review, plus other journals. He holds a PhD from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also worked as a post-doctoral research associate. Prior to obtaining his PhD, he lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where he worked at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, a planning-oriented nonprofit organization; cofounded Madison Magnet, a social capital–oriented nonprofit organization; and was very engaged in the civic and political life of the city. Dr. Lyles is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP).