Team Based Learning

Citation

Mumford, A. (2002), "Team Based Learning", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 28-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2002.34.1.28.1

David Jaques

Kogan Page

London

2000

310pp

ISBN: 0749430915

£19.99 (paperback)

Group working, Learning styles, Teams, Education, Training

One of the useful consequences of ten years of books on the Learning Organization has been some increased attention to both work based learning, and the processes through which people learn in groups. Hills sets out his views on some differences between groups and teams, the processes through which teams go in becoming effective, team culture, and how members of a team learn with and from each other. He has a major chapter on what he calls “effective learning”, where he covers issues such as holist as compared serialist learning, left and right brain model, NLP and the drill plus practice model used he says in the armed forces. He refers to the learning cycle and learning styles leading to the identification of personal learning strategies. His final chapter identifies the different roles of the “Leader”, the individual and the training department.

While I welcome the emphasis on the actual processes involved in learning, I found some aspects of the book disappointing. He says that there is an important difference between a team and a group – a comment with which I agree. He defines a team as a collection of people who must have a collective achievement in mind, as compared with a group but he then abandons the distinction in what he writes. This is not surprising, because he refers to action learning as a valuable process and claims that it is “similar” to team based learning. On his definition of collective achievement of course an action learning group is a team. It is so at the level simply of the collective achievement requirement required of mutual learning. It may be even more fundamentally a team if it is involved in a shared project. In my view he introduces further confusion in his attempt to rewrite both the familiar descriptions of the group process (forming, storming, norming and performing), and also his rewriting of roles in the team. His shorthand versions of variants of Belbin and creating four roles, may be interesting but are supported by no evidence except his own personal experience. He claims to reinterpret the Honey and Mumford learning cycle and learning styles, but in fact repeats their learning cycle. His identification of the way in which learning styles could lead to different personal learning strategies is accurate, and his emphasis on the desirability of not being stuck with a preferred learning style is valuable.

Jaques has reached the third edition of his book. Whereas Hills claims to be giving emphasis to workplace teams (though in fact he writes a great deal about hill walking, scouts and yacht races), Jaques is concerned really with specially created groups in educational and training circumstances. Given his intention, his book admirably provides fluent description of the circumstances in which effective learning groups can be created. I do think this is a rather one‐eyed view – it is precisely the intellectual synergy that might be created by looking at groups at work and groups in a training context which could provide particularly effective learning experiences. However as an author myself I know how irritating it is to be criticised for not writing a book you did not intend to write, so I think it appropriate to commend the content of what Jaques has actually written.