undergraduate

On December 1st and 2nd, DTU  teamed up with experts from the National University of Singapore (NUS) to organize the Training Course on TBL Teaching and New Teaching Methods in Medicine and Pharmacy. It was attended by Dr Robert Kamei and his colleagues from NUS, and by a great many staff, lecturers, and assistant lecturers of the Faculties of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing, of the Institute for Medicine, Biology, and Pharmacy, and of the Center for Molecular Biology at DTU.

 

Team-Based Learning (TBL) has recently become a common trend in medical education worldwide, to promote active learning. It is an advanced teaching method making use of the interactions, exchange, and debate in small groups of learners to help improve teamwork skills and critical thinking.

 

 

The training course was organized to support the university’s lecturers and assistant lecturers in Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing to recognize and apply the key strengths of the TBL method in their teaching. When studying in a program applying the TBL method, students acquire knowledge more rapidly and recall it longer in comparison with traditional passive teaching, thanks to the learners’ active participation in the lesson.

 

“A lot of research shows that, when listening passively, the students can forget up to 70% of the knowledge the teacher transmitted during one hour in class,” explains Dr Robert Kamei, Associate Provost of Education at NUS. “This is why, to improve the efficiency of the teaching, the lecturer should not only focus on the conciseness of the lesson, but also increase exchange and interaction with the students, avoiding the tendency to impose themselves. Teamwork is one format to organize the class efficiently when solving problems with the content taught and to practice teamwork skills, a decisive skill in the future success of the students.”

 

 

NUS lecturers organized the class following the teamwork format to create excitement and activity for the learners. From exercises to vivid examples, the education experts guided the DTU lecturers how to actively form learning groups, how to create a high-quality lesson, and how to get group discussion going and to stimulate the students to actively study. Many skills that are essential to students are to be trained through debate in small groups: reading material autonomously, problem-solving, scientific debate, teamwork, and so on. In addition, the TBL method also has the effect of teaching long-time retention of information, it helps the students learn to apply information in new situations, and it makes them active in their study activities.

 

Nguyen Hoang Quynh Mai, lecturer at the DTU Faculty of Medicine, said: “Organizing the class in groups to bring learners the joy of exploration and to make the class boil over with energy is how the lecturers and assistant lecturers from NUS have, in the days just past, helped us realize the difference between the TBL method and the traditional teaching method. I hope that, after this training course, the lecturers and assistant lecturers of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing will actively apply the key strengths of the method to organize their lessons in small groups, to help the DTU students feel more involved and really like the subject, and have an opportunity to grasp the knowledge both in breadth and in depth to study more actively.”