Improving Clinical Reasoning in Health Professions Students Through Team-Based Learning

Today’s health professionals need to demonstrate effective team behaviors in order to function as part of a health care team, apply an ever-expanding stream of information to their personal knowledge base in order to continue growing professionally and reason clinically in order to make optimal ongoing patient care decisions. Health professions curricula should include an emphasis on skill development in these three important areas. Unfortunately, most educators in the health professions struggle to balance an expanding set of important disciplinary knowledge, skills, and behaviors against the fixed number of classroom hours available, so it is critical to be able to use these hours efficiently. This chapter describes team-based learning (TBL) and the use of research and my own experiences to demonstrate that it is an extremely efficient and effective way to achieve these learning goals. This chapter also provides ideas for how it might be applied to various health professions topics and disciplines.