Team-Based Learning is a process for teaching and developing people in the workplace. It is a set of developmental principles and routines embedded into the day-to-day processes of a work team such that team members continuously learn and develop. The developmental activities are not new, e.g., coaching, stretch assignments, review of lessons learned. However, such developmental activities are typically conducted in an irregular and inconsistent way. The benefit of Team-Based Learning is that everyone on the team participates in the developmental activities on a consistent basis, because the activities provide other benefits that motivate the team to use them. That is, the team not only develops its people but also functions better.
History
Team-Based Learning was jointly developed by Duke Corporate Education and PricewaterhouseCoopers. In 2005, Judy Rosenblum, then President of Duke Corporate Education, and Tom Evans, Chief Learning Officer of PricewaterhouseCoopers, began to explore the learning environment in teaching hospitals and its possible transferability to corporate environments. They studied several teaching hospitals, principally Johns Hopkins Hospital. Teaching hospitals develop doctors (interns and residents) in the course of providing health care to patients. This is not classroom education. Rather it is teaching the practice of medicine while treating real patients with real diseases. The learning is embedded in the work.
Application to Business Teams
Rosenblum, Evans and their associates spent two years understanding how teaching hospitals work and exploring how those processes could be applied to business teams. They identified four routines and five principles to carry over to the business world.
Routines
Problem-Based Learning - Use problems encountered in the course of work as the context for learning
Point of the Wedge - Push responsibility combined with support to the most junior person possible
Socratic Method - Use inquiry to teach rather than just give the answer or solve the issue Owning the Client or Project – Individuals have a heightened sense of accountability and motivation because they have their own client or project with support from more experienced team members
Principles
Rounds - Meeting where a less-experienced team member presents an issue or challenge and recommends a course of action
Team Workshops - A team member leads a developmental event for other members focusing on a specific technical or service topic
Shadowing – Less-experienced team member accompanies a more-experienced member to a meeting he or she would not normally attend
Observation & Feedback - A specific activity is observed, and using the Socratic Method, coaching is given
Lessons Learned Forums - Thorough review and discussion using mistakes and successes as a situation to learn from.
Making It Work
The mission of teaching hospitals is to develop doctors. While businesses earnestly espouse a desire to develop their people, such activities are too often seen as separate from work and something that interferes with getting work done. Businesses are not as motivated as teaching hospitals to develop people on the job. For that reason the transfer of teaching hospital based approaches to a business context might have failed if not for the fact that the new processes create side benefits that motivate the business team members to do them.
Senior team members need to spend extra time mentoring junior team members, however that time is more than made up by the increased productivity of the team derived from successfully driving tasks to lower levels. Such delegation frees up senior people’s time. Junior people enjoy taking ownership of projects (with support) and are more motivated in their jobs. The net result is that the team gets more work done, junior people are developed more quickly, and team morale is higher.