Agreed, learning teamwork and team problem solving is useful, but only after individual mastery of the skills in question first. There's no way to shortcut mas

Agreed, learning teamwork and team problem solving is useful, but only after individual mastery of the skills in question first. There's no way to shortcut mastery, it takes individual effort, practice, and time. Do that first, then teamwork later with a group of similarly skilled people. Also, different people have different individual learning styles (aural, visual, doing) and learning paces, so when you mix a bunch of folks with those differences, before all of them have mastered the material, some are going to get left behind and others held back. Ideally learning environments and methodologies account for and adjust for that. To be fair, Vermont Med School's methodology in the article does appear to account for this, requiring some degree of individual mastery before group work: >A lot of the science of pharmacokinetics is simply mathematical equations. If you have a lecture, it's simply presenting those equations and maybe giving examples of how they work. >In an active learning setting, you expect the students to learn about the equations before they get there. And when you get into the classroom setting, the students work in groups solving pharmacokinetic problems. Cases are presented where the patient gets a drug in a certain dose at a certain time, and you're looking at the action of that over time and the concentration of the drug in the blood. >So, those are the types of things where you're expecting the student to know the knowledge in order to use the knowledge. And then they don't forget it.