Larry Spence Associate Professor, College of The Liberal Arts Political Science Larry Spence, in his political science honors course, Critical Reasoning in the Study of Politics, forms a total quality team to examine the learning environment. This team works throughout the semester to examine what students are learning and ways they can improve the classroom. Additionally, teams of four or five students function like autonomous work groups in Spence's class. Their task is to help each other prepare weekly homework assignments. He gives them a general procedure and they modify it to fit their abilities and learning strategies.
Students discuss and work on problems together, which they then turn in individually to be graded.
Spence feels that this dialogue strengthens the ability of students to work as a team and challenge one another to think critically in the classroom. In Health Policy and Administration 497, a course on human resource management in health care organizations, Kathryn Dansky uses student teams as a focus of learning. Dansky uses three developmental classifications of workplace groups, committees task forces, and cross-functional teams, to form group assignments in collaborative learning. In addition, Dansky uses the team projects in the class to assist students in learning how to work and function in a team environment. In his Finance 306 course, Charles Cao has implemented CQI in the classroom through surveys and feedback sessions with students.