Using a Team Structure for Student-Assisted Facilitation of Laboratories in an Introductory Allied Health Microbiology Course

As many instructors have noted, it is challenging to lead a successful microbiology laboratory, especially for students without sufficient prerequisite training such as in pre-allied health/nursing classes. In the community college setting, this is compounded by the lack of adequate resources, especially teaching assistants or others, to help individual students during a laboratory experience. In addition, there is much transition in the student population of the college so asking students who have completed a class to help in this setting is often impractical. To modify our system to allow students to more easily ask questions and get feedback, we designed a student facilitator system. This system allowed each student to be a leader of the team for a particular laboratory experience. Each student was individually trained to be supportive of the team as a whole. This program is useful in that it can be applied to any class-based laboratory setting to provide better student team interactions than if there were no facilitator