American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy

Volume 1, 2015

Practices in Pedagogy

Teaching Philosophy with Team-Based Learning

Team-Based Learning is a comprehensive approach to using groups purposefully and effectively. Because of its focus on decision making, it is well suited to helping students learn to do philosophy and not simply talk about it. Much like the “flipped classroom” approach, it is structured so that students are held responsible for “covering content” through the reading outside of class so that class meeting times can be spent practicing philosophical decisions, allowing for frequent feedback from the professor. This chapter discusses how TBL works in Philosophy, the elements of a TBL course including activity design (which can be adapted to non-TBL courses), and how TBL avoids the known problems of group work. The appendix contains examples of TBL activities in philosophy courses.