Team-Based Learning: an active teaching method for Physics Education

Abstract

Traditional teacher-centered methods, characterized by lecturing and resolution of a huge number of exercises as content fixation activities, are still omnipresent in physics classes from high school to college level, even though the efficiency of this method is low. Such methods contribute, among many others factors, such as social, economic and cultural, to high rates of failure, dropout and demotivation of the students, which denotes the importance to rethink about this practice. Several active teaching methods have shown positive results regarding the learning of contents and skills building by the students. However, these methodologies are mostly unknown by Physics teachers in Brazil. The purpose of this paper is to present one of these methods, the Team-Based Learning (TBL), which is highly widespread in health and business courses in North American Universities. It aims to improve learning and develop collaborative skills through preparatory activities, problem solving (individually and in small groups), among other strategies. In this paper, we describe in detail the method and present the main results of the scarce literature in Physics Education.