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Teaching Large Classes by Adam Wilsman, Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University
Teaching a large class poses many challenges, both in and out of the classroom. In the classroom, large enrollments can promote student disengagement and feelings of alienation, which can erode students’ sense of responsibility and lead to behaviors that both reflect and promote lack of engagement. Logistics can also be a challenge when teaching a large class. How does one best manage the daily administration of what can often feel like a small city? This resource presents strategies to help instructors deal with some of the challenges associated with teaching large classes.

This article from UC Berkeley's' Center for Teaching & Learning, reviews how to create opportunities for your students to build deeper understanding of concepts through articulation and elaboration, as they engage in learning conversations (discourse & sensemaking) in a large lecture hall. These strategies shift some of the intellectual work to the students, as they offer explanations, summaries, elaborations, articulations of the material, and find ways to connect to what they already know with what they are learning in your course (Allen & Tanner, 2005). The title of the article is "Discourse & Sensemaking Strategies in Large Lecture."

Allen, D., & Tanner, K. (2005). Infusing active learning into the large-enrollment biology class: Seven strategies, from the simple to complex. Cell Biology Education (CBE), 4, 262-268. doi:10.1187/cbe.05-08-0113

This article is written by one of the most well-known professors in engineering education, Richard Felder. While not new, is still relevant to instructors teaching large courses. Felder says: "When we find ourselves teaching a mob, it's easy to throw up our hands, conclude that there's no chance of getting any responsiveness out of 150 or 300 students in an auditorium... Fortunately, there are ways to make large classes almost as effective as their smaller counterparts. Without turning yourself inside out, you can get students actively involved, help them develop a sense of community, and give frequent homework assignments without killing yourself (or your teaching assistants) with impossible grading loads. BEATING THE NUMBERS GAME: EFFECTIVE TEACHING IN LARGE CLASSES, by Richard M. Felder, Department of Chemical Engineering
North Carolina State University. Presented at the 1997 ASEE Annual Conference, Milwaukee, WI, June 1997.

A presentation that looks at the research findings on large classes and models for course redesign that help to overcome large class issues.

Large classes are among the most important because many students enrolled are new to the college experience. The big challenges of teaching large classes include finding ways to engage students, providing timely feedback, and managing logistics. When faced with these challenges, many instructors revert to lectures and multiple-choice tests. There are alternatives. This special report describes some alternative teaching and course management techniques to get students actively involved without an inordinate amount of work on the instructor’s part. From the Teaching Professor, Magna.

This resource is from Texas Tech University and is written by Jenny Lloyd-Strovas, Ph.D. at TTU's Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center
Texas Tech University in August, 2015.
Teaching large classes can be a daunting experience. How do you keep students engaged and active without losing control of the classroom? With so many students, how do you know if they are learning? Should you attempt to take attendance or risk losing students? How do you build rapport when learning 200 names isn’t a possibility? If you have taught (or are preparing to teach) a large class, you have probably asked yourself these questions. Here, I will discuss possible solutions for these challenges and more. This resource is organized to be a quick and efficient reference for challenges that you are experiencing in your classroom.

Tips for Teaching Large Classes Online, Faculty Focus, Rob Kelly (3-17-2009) writes about strategies used by Jonathan Mathews, Professor of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State. Prof. Mathews still regularly teaches large enrollment online courses.

This FAQ about effective teaching and learning in large courses (large classes) from the Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation. The questions focus on reducing anonymity, managing and engaging students, active learning, checking for learning, incorporating writing and group work without overwhelming yourself.

From UC Berkeley's Center for Teaching and Learning, Considerations for Large Lecture Classes provides six ways to make lectures in a large enrollment course more manageable and effective. The strategies include communicating explicit learning expectations, not trying to "cover" everything, focusing on analysis of issues or problems, engaging students through active learning practices, providing feedback to students, and using clickers to poll students.

We include this article in our repository to demonstrate that faculty have been concerned about and practicing active learning in large courses for decades. This is a classic from 1987 by Peter Frederick in a volume edited by well-known champion of excellent teaching and Prof. Emerita at Penn State, Maryellen Weimer. Teaching Large Classes Well. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 32: 45-56. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Frederick discusses interactive lectures, using questions to involve the class, asking specific questions (rather than "does everyone understand? which no one wants to answer), using small groups, using problem-solving to foster critical thinking, debates, simulations, and role playing. While his examples might be a bit dated, this still makes a lot of sense and provides useful ideas to adapt for the 21st century.

This document outlines the research evidence for the impact of large classes on student learning.

This document provides methods for doing classroom assessment (usually ungraded) to help faculty keep students in large classes engaged and to provide feedback about student knowledge of specific concepts to both faculty and students.

This document describes strategies for encouraging and enabling students in large classes to participate in class.

This is a worksheet that includes the reasons why students might be misbehaving in large classes and strategies for addressing the incivility.

This document contains a list of websites and other resources for faculty who teach in large classes.

This FAQ sheet offers many ideas and strategies for engaging students in active learning, given a large class environment.

This FAQ sheet offers many ideas and strategies for designing and administering meaningful assignments in large classes.

This FAQ sheet addresses many issues related to attendance in large classes.

This FAQ sheet provides a number of strategies related to class and course planning and lecturing in large classes.

This FAQ sheet offers many strategies for collecting student feedback in large classes.

This FAQ sheet discusses issues and strategies related to providing notes and supporting students' notetaking in large classes.

This FAQ sheet provides many suggestions for encouraging student participation in large classes.

This book is a collection of 14 articles from the Journal of College Science Teaching that describe techniques that promote higher-order thinking and inquiry skills. The techniques are alternatives to lecturing, and range from small tweaks to large-scale changes for courses.

Short descriptions of 22 activities to engage students in both large and small classes.

This FAQ sheet offers many suggestions for making good use of teaching assistants and classroom space.

Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) Guides
Discovering the Art of Mathematics includes a library of 11 inquiry-based books freely available for classroom use. These texts can be used as semester-long content for courses or individual chapters can be used as modules to experiment with inquiry-based learning and to help supplement typical topics with classroom tested, inquiry based approaches (e.g. rules for exponents, large numbers, proof). The topic index provides an overview of all our book chapters by topic.

A low tech alternative to clickers. Now students do not have to tote printed "ABCD Cards" for interactive lecturing and polling. Now there is an "app for that." The instructor poses a questions and the class holds up their response. The teacher scans the sea of answers to get a quick pulse on student responses. If there are too many As, Cs, and Ds, when B was the correct answer, then there may be some confusion and a need to clarify.

The Center for Instructional Innovation at Western Washington University has created a *free* ABCD Cards app for iOS and Android . Students simply launch the app, tap their answer choice, and hold up their answers. The app removes the burden of printing the cards, and responses
might even be easier to see for instructors in large rooms. Visit http://cii.wwu.edu/cii/ABCD/ for more information.

Active Learning, Strategies for Success is written for instructors who are not practiced at teaching actively. It was created after hearing from faculty "That active learning stuff doesn't work for me. I tried it and the students hated it!" Following a 4-step process can help ensure that your early attempts at active teaching are more successful. These steps have been used by hundreds of faculty to effectively introduce students to active learning. For suggestions of activities look for "Interactive Learning" in the repository search box.

In this article, Meixun Sinky Zheng, PhD, shares some low-risk strategies to help faculty transform lectures into student-centered learning experiences for enhanced learning outcomes. These active learning strategies can be easily implemented without significant redesign of the class and without an investment in technology. The article ends with a few tech-based strategies for engaging your students.

Helping Practitioners and Researchers Identify and Use Education Research Literature. By K. J. Wilson and C. J. Brame. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 17(1). 22 Mar 2018
This article discusses a study that reveals the impact that active learning has on students' ability to learn fundamental concepts and skills varies with instructor knowledge of teaching and learning. The goal of the study was to discover knowledge that is important to effective active learning in large undergraduate STEM courses. The authors note that experts more commonly consider how students are held accountable, notice topic-specific student difficulties, elicited and responded to student thinking, and provided for students to generate their own ideas and work.

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