CLO magazine story outlining the history of Team-Based Learning. Hospitals Show How to Accelerate Learning

Team-Based Learning consists of a set of four principles and five routines

Process for implementing Team-Based Learning

Team-Based Learning

How can you motivate and accelerate learning and development without incurring the costs of flying people around for classroom training? How can you leverage an historic investment in coaching – where you aren’t currently seeing any hard returns to increase the competence and productivity of your people? How can you get more people mentored in a large organization? How can you change the way people work without changing work processes?

Duke CE has been doing research on these issues for the past two years. Learning from best practices in team learning on the job, we have created and successfully tested an education and change process that we call Team-Based Learning (TBL). TBL drives concrete improvements in work quality, staff engagement, team trust and overall productivity without expensive changes in process redesign. The work is built primarily around our observations of the medical training program at Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

Even in an environment where failure could mean death, Hopkins has chosen not to focus solely on execution at all costs, but rather has built a set of routines and a philosophy that leverages education and individual accountability as a way to more effectively and efficiently deliver care to patients.The Hopkins residency training program is so effective that it is consistently ranked as the best in the United States, and Hopkins-trained doctors are consistently differentiated from their peers.

The primary lesson from Hopkins is that work offers the best place to develop capability.The trick is building a mindset and a set of disciplines and expectations that consistently deliver on that opportunity. We have altered the routines and philosophy that Hopkins uses and have combined them with other best practices that we have seen in other businesses.

The TBL approach works within existing business processes to embed learning and development inside the work of an organization.The approach includes:

  • Routines that improve productivity by driving tasks to lower levels of the department or team.
  • A Socratic approach to developing capability in the course of real work that can easily be learned by line managers.
  • An emphasis on preparation and accessing company knowledge management systems.
  • The opportunity to learn research, writing and presentation skills at work.
  • A focus on accountability for the work and ownership of the problem, project or client.
Achieving these benefits requires an upfront investment and ongoing support. The process takes place over the course of two to three months. Following a day of training, TBL takes on average about seven hours for each person to learn the routines. Groups are then supported by Duke CE coaches as they embed the routines in their work processes and deliverables.