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Receiving a Master’s degree from the University of St. Mary’s has been an immensely satisfying experience for me. I’ve learned and changed and grown in innumerable and meaningful ways. But when it comes to professional development, the St. Mary’s program is second to none. I have applied my new learning and confidence directly to my classes and my students have benefited. St. Mary’s breaks their program into four IDEA categories: Instruction, Discipline, Environment, and Assessment. This article outlines the effect this program has had on my instruction.

Team-based learning, an educational method primarily conceived for business schools, was developed in the early 1980s by Larry K. Michaelsen, now a professor of management at the University of Central Missouri in the United States. An alternative to traditional lecturing, this method uses a mix of individual and group processes to solve problems.

In recent years, some medical schools have recognized the advantage of active learning that encourages critical thinking and have started to experiment with Professor Michaelsen’s techniques.

Now, the Duke-N.U.S. Graduate Medical School, in Singapore, has gone a step further, applying this method to its entire basic science education.