Methods: This is an account of the pilot teaching experience using Team-Based Learning for 30 undergraduate nursing students in the discipline of Care of Women, Children and Adolescents of the University of Brasilia-UnB, Brazil in September, 2018.
Results: Three TBL pilot sessions were conducted with 30 undergraduate students of the nursing course and the topics discussed were: Safe Delivery, Sexually Transmitted Infections, Menopause and Breast and Uterine Cancer. At the moment of the feedback, the students described that the use of TBL favored greater significance for the learning of the studied content than in the traditional method. They reported their desire to remain with the TBL sessions because they felt more motivated by the study and by the method to allow interaction among team members, as well as being a space to express their opinions. Some students also reported greater involvement and concentration, because the dynamics allowed to maintain the focus on the topic discussed. The results of this experience report corroborate a study conducted in the United States of America with 160 students that compared the use of TBL with the use of lectures evaluating the engagement in class, which showed that in TBL the students demonstrated a higher level of accountability and involvement (Sharma, Janke, Larson, & Peter, 2017). In China, 98 students randomly formed a traditional group of lecture-based teaching and TBL-based teaching group. TBL students showed significantly improved communication skills, higher motivation, and higher scores on the exams than the traditional teaching group . The results of a quasi-experimental study conducted with 84 medical students demonstrated statistically significant values for student involvement, satisfaction and learning for TBL sessions, and a decline in this score for students who had teaching sessions traditional format of lectures (Faezi, Moradi, Ghafar, Akhlaghi, & Keshmiri, 2018). In the United States, researchers evaluated the perceptions of 85 physiotherapy students about TBL and found a satisfactory experience in TBL use in terms of accountability, preference for learning mode, satisfaction, and better academic performance (Livingston, Lundy, & Harrington, 2014). Information about TBL’s initial positive effects on student engagement and accountability could help programs in building momentum with the team-based approach to learning while working toward results that may take longer to achieve, such as changes in professionalism or skills of the team (Sharma et al., 2017).
Conclusion:
The teaching experience about the application of the pilot experiment in TBL evidenced that the teaching methodology allows the student a more meaningful learning. The adoption of TBL as an innovative learning process strengthens higher education. The TBL promotes the acquisition of concepts and the development of skills, competences and attitudes in an integrated way and allows to develop the capacity of group problem solving.