Team Learning consists of 6 interlocking elements:

• Students are organized into permanent, strategically-organized small groups.
• Terms are broken up into discrete learning units (at least five to seven over the term), for which students must read all materials before the unit begins.
• Readiness Assurance Processes (RAPs) at the beginning of each unit consist of individual quizzes, group quizzes, immediate feedback and a systematic appeal process.
• At this point, the instructor knows what questions the groups missed, so then lectures on only those concepts, saving time by not lecturing on what everyone already understands.
• Application-oriented group assignments are specially-designed and conducted during class time.
• Each students' final grade comes from combining: their individual scores, their group scores, and peer-evaluations from their group members.

Many of these elements have been tried with varying levels of success across the country for years. Michaelsen has developed course format guidelines that streamline their delivery and new techniques for accomplishing his instructional goals successfully.

Michaelsen has data from thousands of groups he has taught in this format, and has discovered a few important things:

• Repetition is critical to the RAP process. If groups do not experience the individual-quiz, group-quiz, immediate feedback process enough, they never break through the social dynamics that characterize new groups. Specifically, the most verbal student usually gets his or her answers on the group quiz on RAPs early in the term. It is only after several feedback episodes that quieter students get motivated to speak up if they have watched the group put the wrong answer down while they themselves had the answer correct.
• Group participation only helps the individual student. In Michaelsen's experience, by the end of the term each group's score is an average 18% higher than the highest-scoring individual in that group.
• The membership of each group must be strategic. Michaelsen has developed a fast and efficient way of organizing classes of even several hundred students into small groups.
• With a few simple tools, course logistics for large classes become much more manageable using this format.