Teaching a Large Class

Large classrooms often feel impersonal and depersonalizing, and students may respond to this feeling of anonymity in a variety of ways. Some of them may stop attending class early in the semester because they don’t think anyone cares (or will even notice) whether they come or not. Some will come to class only to sleep or play on electronic devices because they are convinced the teacher can’t see what they’re doing from the front of the room. Others may come to class with good intentions, but when they aren’t directly implicated by what is happening, they will begin to have off-topic conversations with classmates because they don’t think anyone can hear them in such a big space.

There are several different ways to break this cycle of anonymity and invisibility.

• Ask students to complete a short questionnaire about their interests at the beginning of the semester and offer some kind of brief response. This can help students feel that the instructor knows them, even if it’s in a very small way.
• Encourage students to come to their office hours and introduce themselves. Many students won’t accept this invitation, but it sends a message that you want to know your students as more than faces in a crowd.
• When you engage in the kind of classroom activities that are described below, remind students to state their names before speaking so that you can address them by name and eventually be able to call on them from memory. You can also have students bring name cards so that you can call on them by name even if you haven’t memorized them.

These are small steps, and they will work best when used with pedagogical strategies that require cognitive and social engagement.

Students often come into large classes with the expectation that they will be passive, and if we open class with a lecture, we reinforce that expectation. Moreover, when they walk into class and we immediately start delivering information, students may not have a clear sense of what they should be listening for or why that information should matter to them.

Students need to be engaged immediately so that when we do lecture, they can connect the information in our lecture back to their attempts to use the thinking of our disciplines. When we begin the class period by asking students to engage in a meaningful, challenging activity that requires them to use the new skills and ways of thinking they’re learning in our course, we give them an authentic reason to listen to what we have to say. Instead of just trying to figure out what they need to know for the test, they are trying to determine how our expertise can help them fill a gap in their understanding that was made visible by the activity we asked them to complete.

We can make this cycle of activity + debrief + mini-lecture even more productive when we repeat it for one to three times during a class period. Reliable activity structures like those described below can help us focus this work.

Even if you can’t get to know all your students, having them get to know each other can make a big difference in their experience of a large class.

Having them work together in pairs or small groups can also provide important opportunities for them to engage in complex disciplinary tasks that would be too challenging for them to encounter alone. It also makes the management of learning activities for you and therefore more feasible even for the largest classes.

Having students use these small-group interactions as a first step toward broader engagement can be a great way to lead into whole-class discussions. Below are a few reliable structures for designing activities that work well in large classes - sometimes even better than in smaller ones!

This is a very basic activity format, and one that can work well in any size class. Because its structure is flexible, it is particularly appropriate for large classes.

1. Pose a challenging, meaningful question that relates to a central concept or topic of that day’s class. Give students a minute to answer that question on their own (ideally in writing). This “think” step is an important way for students to formulate and commit to their own ideas before they hear from others.
2. Ask students to find a partner (or two) and share their answers to this question. This step gives students an opportunity to test out and rehearse their thinking with a smaller group of peers before possibly being asked to speak before the entire class. While the small groups are talking, you may circulate around the room to help keep them focused, gauge student engagement, and listen for themes that are starting to emerge.
3. Call students back together. Open the whole-class discussion by calling on one pair (which can be anywhere in the room) to share their response to the question. Notice that you don’t wait for volunteers—you can now feel comfortable with calling on individual students because you know that after the first two steps, they should have something to share. You may ask the students some probing questions that require them to interrogate and explain their thinking.
4. Ask for a group that came to a different conclusion to share and explain their response. In addition to asking these students to explain their thinking, point out the contrasts between the different answers and ways of thinking that have emerged.
5. This pattern may repeat until you have heard from several pairs of students and surfaced several different ways of thinking about the original question. After you provide a brief wrap-up of the discussion, you are now ready to use the ideas that have emerged as a lead-in to a brief mini-lecture that clarifies any points of confusion that were raised during the small group or whole class discussions.

Peer Instruction is a method developed by Eric Mazur (1997), a physicist at Harvard University. This strategy is similar to think-pair-share, but it is slightly more complex and structured.

1. Pose a challenging, focused question in a closed format (usually multiple choice) and ask students to commit to their own individual answers, either using a clicker to record them or simply writing them down. Students have about a minute to answer this question.
2. Ask students to find a partner and compare their answers. Each student’s task in this discussion is to convince their partner that they have the correct answer. Students have about 3-5 minutes for this discussion.
3. Ask students to commit to a new answer: students may have changed their answers, or they may have chosen to stay with their original answers. If you are using clickers, you can see how the distribution of answers is changing as they are registered.
4. After students have recorded their new answers, call on a student to ask what their answer was and why. Notice that you don’t wait for volunteers—you can now feel comfortable with calling on individual students because you know that after the first three steps, they should have something to share. You may ask the students some probing questions that require them to interrogate and explain their thinking.
5. Ask for a group that came up with a different answer to share and explain their response. In addition to asking these students to explain their thinking, point out the contrasts between the different answers and ways of thinking that have emerged.
6. This pattern may repeat until you have heard from several students and surfaced several different ways of thinking about the original question. After you provide a brief wrap-up of the discussion, you are now ready to reveal the correct answer. You can use the ideas that have emerged as a lead-in to a brief mini-lecture that clarifies any points of confusion that were raised by students’ attempts to answer the question.

The 4S task format comes from Team-Based Learning (Michaelsen & Sweet 2008), but instructors don’t have to be using TBL to take advantage of the benefits of these kinds of tasks. Tasks that conform to this structure have these characteristics:

• They present students with a Significant Problem, meaning the kinds of important problems that experts in your discipline confront regularly. 4S tasks should present problems that are too challenging for the most capable individual student in the group to solve or respond to on their own.
• All groups work on the Same Problem, meaning that students have reason to listen to each other groups explain their thinking because they have all tried to solve or respond to the same problem.  Group tasks are most effective when they inspire discussion between as well as within groups, and this will only happen if they have a common frame of reference. When students hear that other groups decided differently, given the same question and access to the same information, they will be interested in hearing what those groups have to say about their decision.
• They ask students to make a Specific Choice about the disciplinary problem under consideration. Framing the problem/decision as a choice among limited options will raise the stakes and improve students’ focus by requiring comparative analysis. The choice format also ensures that students have an easy means of sharing their answers and ensures that they will get immediate, focused feedback, which is an important motivating force.
• Students are asked to make a Simultaneous Report of their answers. This is a crucial step because it helps avoid the “I agree” problem, which tends to happen when groups are asked to share answers sequentially. When students have a mechanism (like holding up a card) to report their answer, you and the students get all the data at once and can begin processing it as a whole class—rather than just a series of conversations between the instructor and individual groups. A side benefit is that when students can immediately say whose answers differed from their own, they will be ready to engage in cross-group discussions.