Team-based Learning

Citation

Mumford, A. (2002), "Team-based Learning", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2002.02223aae.002

Team-based Learning

Howard HillsGowerAldershot2001176 pp.ISBN: 0 566 08364 (hardback)£42.50 / US $74.95

Keywords: Teams, Organizational learning

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 to 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.

Alan Mumford