William Huang’s comment on this entry reminds me of a question that sometimes arises, which is how to do active learning in large classes with more than 50 students. I’ve never actually taught a class with more than 50, but what I’d like to do is teach a large intro statistics class (200-300 students) with about 6 or 10 teaching assistants who would be required to come to class. As the lecturer, I’d keep things going, start the activities, and use the blackboard as appropriate. The T.A.’s would circulate and make sure the students are clear on what they should be working on. T.A.’s would also be able to answer questions and help out.
I plan to try this out in a couple years (once I get the course all set up). Perhaps others have relevant experience along these lines? One reason I’ve worked so hard on class-participation activities is that I used to have a lot of diffiiculty getting students to speak up in class. The demonstrations and activities have made a big difference (or so I say in the spirit of self-experimentation, not actually having done a formal study or experiment on my teaching methods). My next step is to make it more clear what the students are expected to learn, and to actively monitor their learning. (See here for an inspirational model I’d like to follow.)
Andrew, your proposal is similar in spirit to the sort of thing that Eric Mazur has done in the physics department at Harvard. Take a look at his page on
<a href="http://mazur -www.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?ed=1&rowid=8″ target=”_blank”>Peer Instruction for some ideas.
This is not against your idea, and may be construed as off-topic – but I am very interested as to why lectures – I mean traditional lectures: a lecture series by one expert (relative to the students) teacher to the same class, big class, one-way communication (mostly) etc. – have proved so robust a teaching method in the face of endemic criticism.
I've just published a piece about it in the journal I edit: here is the Abstract:
Lectures are probably the best teaching method for many students in many circumstances; especially for communicating conceptual knowledge, and where there is a significant knowledge gap between lecturer and audience. However, the lack of a convincing rationale has been a factor in under-estimating the importance of lectures, and there are many who advocate their replacement with written communications or electronic media. I suggest that lectures are so effective because they exploit the spontaneous human aptitude for learning from spoken (rather than written) information. Literacy is a recent cultural artefact, and for most of their evolutionary history humans communicated by direct speech. By contrast with speech, all communication technologies – whether reading a book or a computer monitor – are artificial and unnatural. Furthermore, learning is easier during formal, quiet, real-time social events. The structure of a lecture artificially manipulates human psychology to increase vigilance, focus attention, and generate authority for the lecturer – all of which make communications more memorable for the student. Instead of trying to phase-out lectures, we should strive to make them better by understanding that lectures are essentially formal, spoken, social events.
Charlton BG. Medical Hypotheses 2006; e-published at present.
I used to teach 300 student economics classes with no TA support at all (as I was a graduate student in the department myself, TAs were distributed to faculty instead of to graduate students teaching their own classes no matter what size).
One technique I used was to incorportate active learning was introduce material with a 'pop' question. I'd pass out index cards and have them work on an answer. When they turned them in, I'd either assign extra credit on homework to everyone who turned in a correct answer, or sometimes just announce whether a class had been mostly right or wrong (you could do that during class yourself with a TA counting the tally).
I'd also use class volunteers for demonstration exercises.
I've taught classes of all sizes, and I'll say this – it's a lot easier to teach well in a smaller class. Teaching well becomes significantly harder as the class size increases from 35 to 100, and becomes an entirely different challenge altogether in classes over 150.
It is not impossible, however, to teach well in a large classroom. It's just a different skill set, and it really helps to be someone who can be a bit of a performer in a large room.
I've long been musing about a somewhat more ambitious program, which takes active learning principles in a more forcefully collaborative direction. I still haven't had the opportunity to try it out on a proper University class. I will, someday.