I have used TBL as an instructional approach in Geography classes during my teacher traineeship at middle school level. If you need you can contact me. I'll be glad to help.

Please check some publications of mine

With kind regards

NP

 Part of the initial team in a  successful program   named " Strengthening of Mathematics and Science at Secondary School level  since  1998 which has been replicated in 33 countries. It involves TBL under a pseudo name  ' Activity, student experiment improvisation( ASEI)  Plan Do see and Improve( PDSI)approach. 

At the middle level, the teams are called Interdisciplinary Teams. There are also arrangements like co-teaching and team teaching. If you are talking about teachers getting students into teams, that's just called peer-based learning or even group work. The scholar who writes a lot about students learning in groups is Slavin. 

In ASEI PDSI approach, a collective lesson  plan is generated,  then presented by  one teacher as  other team members  observe and make note of  effectiveness of lesson.  The lesson is followed by a discussion to improve the lesson and  then observed again by the same team on anew set of learners. Some researchers call it lesson study

My colleague practices and has undertaken research on group work(teams) publishing on this. He is Dr. Phil Kelly (on RG) 

try these two papers he has published:

Achieving desirable group-work outcomes a group allocation process in Team Performance Management 03/2008; 14(1-2):22-38. DOI: 10.1108/13527590810860186

And

Group Work and Multicultural Management Education in Journal of Teaching in International Business 01/2009; 20(1):80-102. DOI: 10.1080/08975930802671273

Robert

Thank you for your reply. I will check his work out to see if it applies to the type of group I am researching.  Again Thank you so much for this information.

Increasing interests in the process and gaining valuable experience in team dynamics and collaborative work, Teachers act as coaches to the student-centered communities of practice, addressing individual questions, concerns and stepping in to help the students retain their focus if the problem seems too large.

http://www.nmc.org/pdf/Challenge-Based-Learning.pdf

Some interesting articles on this in recent issues of the Journal of Social Science education, see http://www.jsse.org

Thanks

Mary  Rice

 Thank you for your response. I am aware of group work and peer pairing in order to create a cooperative learning environment. Slavin does discuss the connection of groups with cooperative learning whereas Larry MIchaelsen extends the length and  the functions of the group to last the duration of a course semester. TBL and cooperative learning have similar attributes but they are different in approach and the length of time the group stay together.

Try this one

A structured form of team work and development, in which faculty help student develop team skills, assess both individual learning as well as overall team projects, and structure project assignments to strengthen interactions between team members 

http://sites.iiitd.ac.in/indo-us/papers/Paper_Jeff%20Froyd.pdf

o   Wanzek, J., Kent, S. C., Vaughn, S., Swanson, E., Roberts, G., & Haynes, M. (2015). Implementing team-based learning in middle school social studies classes. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 1–14. doi:10.1080/00220671.2014.893224

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220671.2014.893224?journalCode=vjer20