Whether you are relatively new to teaching large (lecture-hall style) classes, or you have spent years educating large classes, join Barbara Nixon, Michael Reksulak, and others from the Georgia Southern UnviersityFaculty Learning Community on Teaching Large Classes to learn and share your strategies for being both the sage on the stage AND the guide on the side.
As it says on the YouTube page for Michael Wesch’s video “A Vision of Students Today”:
[This is] a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
This spring, I am teaching a large (80-person) section of Introduction to Public Relations. For those faculty members who teach big sections of classes, what are some of the techniques you use for taking attendance? Encouraging participation so that students will know they are missed when they aren’t there? Other ideas?
In one of my public relations classes, I asked my students to create their own magazine covers about themselves so that we could get to know each other better. And I thought it was only fair that I shared my own magazine cover, created using Big Huge Labs.
The photo was taken in front of the Love sculpture in Scottsdale, AZ, in January 2007. We were in Scottsdale for the PF Chang Rock & Roll Half-Marathon, which we both walked in less than four hours (faster than some of the runners!).
I took the photo of my husband and me at arm’s length; I especially liked how my pink International Listening Association jacket shows up in the reflections in our sunglasses. Since that weekend, I’ve made it a habit of always snapping pictures of us together like that so that we can better remember our travels together.
This semester, I’ll be teaching a large section of Introduction to Public Relations at Georgia Southern University. I’d love to get some feedback, especially from students, on what professors have done to HINDER your learning in a large class. The more I know from the student point of view, the better I can prepare for this class.
So . . . what have professors (or teaching assistants) done that really drives you nuts in large classes?
At the end of each semester, I usually have my students do some sort of in-class activity where they tell me what they got out of the class.
This semester, this is what I plan to do.
Allow each student to come to the front of the room and choose one manipulative (toy) from the basket, along with one sheet of 8-1/2×11 paper. (I purchased inexpensive manipulatives from Oriental Trading Company.)
After students return to their seats, I ask them to name their toys. If they choose a short first name (three letters or fewer), they must also give their toy a last name.
Students then write the name of their toys vertically down the long edge of the paper.
Have students write one thing they learned for each letter in the name of their toy. For example, if you’re in a Public Speaking class and your toy is named Beetlejuice, the B could stand for “Be yourself.” Allow them no more than five minutes for this part of the activity.
Break students into small groups of five or fewer to shair their memories with each other. (They can also help each other out if not everyone was able to come up with something for each letter in the name.)
[OPTIONAL, depending on amount of time you have] Back in the large group, ask students to share their toys’ names and what they’ve come up with for each letter of their toys.
Ask students to provide their toys’ names (etc.) as as comments to a blog post you’ve created for them, so that you can save the information for your own future use. Have this count as part of their class participation for the semester.
Variations
Instead of giving students toys, have them use their own first names (or first and middle, if the names are short). Or have them use the name of their favorite actor or musician.
Let students borrow the toys, and collect them at the end of the class, rather than allowing them to keep the toys.
If you have a document projector, students could come to front of room and display their handwritten thoughts and the toy by using the projector.
It’s about the time in the semester when students may start becoming concerned about their grades. There hasn’t been a day gone by lately that a student hasn’t popped in during my office hours to ask about grades.
How should a student approach you if he or she thinks you’ve recorded a grade incorrectly? Let’s come up with a list of do’s and don’ts. I’ll get us started:
DO: Visit me in my office. Show me your graded assignment that’s been handed back to you. Say something like, “It looks like the grade that’s on this assignment isn’t the same as the one that’s recorded in WebCT Vista. Could you check on that for me, please?”
DON’T: Write me a Facebook message saying, “OMG, Prof. Nixon! U screwed up 1 of my grades!”
I look forward to reading your thoughts on this topic.
When you were in college, did you ever want to know what your professor was thinking or where he or she was coming from? I know I did.
I shared tips on how to arrive, survive and thrive in my classes with my students at Georgia Southern University earlier today. I figure it’s only fair. It helps to get my new students on a somewhat level playing field with those who have had me as a professor before.
Do you ever share tips like these with your students? I’d like to see what you do. Please comment and link to your blogs.
We’re off and running in our Fall Semester classes at GSU. This semester, I’m teaching five classes; the classes, with hyperlinks to the syllabi, are listed below:
So that we can make the most of this semester, please (PLEASE) take some time to read through the blog posts I’ve included here. I promise you, it will be well worth your time. (How often do professors let you get inside their heads, letting you know their tips for success and their pet peeves?)
When communicating with me via e-mail (or Facebook), please put your course number (such as PRCA 3339) in the subject line to help me immediately identify who you are and frame your questions or comments.
As a professor, I'm not ROTFL about cell phones in class
Like many educators, I have a short statement in my syllabi stating that I do not want my students to be spending time in class text messaging or surfing the web. But many of my students probably believe this is just because I want them focused on me instead of elsewhere. And that’s partially true.
Why don’t I want them doing other things in class? Read this syllabus excerpt by Professor Cara A. Finnegan. (Cara gave me permission to reproduce her article from her First Efforts blog.)
Technology and the Problem of Divided Attention
In recent years the saturation of cell phones, text messaging, and laptops, combined with the broad availability of wireless in classrooms, has produced something I call the problem of divided attention. A March 25, 2007, article in the New York Times summarized recent studies of productivity in business settings. Researchers found that after responding to email or text messages, it took people more than 15 minutes to re- focus on the “serious mental tasks” they had been performing before the interruption. Other research has shown that when people attempt to perform two tasks at once (e.g., following what’s happening in class while checking text messages), the brain literally cannot do it. The brain has got to give up on one of the tasks in order to effectively accomplish the other. Hidden behind all the hype about multi-tasking, then, is this sad truth: it makes you slower and dumber. For this reason alone you should seek to avoid the problem of divided attention when you are in class. But there’s another reason, too: technology often causes us to lose our senses when it comes to norms of polite behavior and, as a result, perfectly lovely people become unbelievably rude.
For both these reasons, then, turn off your cellphones or set them on silent mode when you come to class; it is rude for our activities to be interrupted by a ringing cellphone. Similarly, text messaging will not be tolerated in class; any student found to be sending or checking text messages during class will be invited (quite publicly) to make a choice either to cease the texting or leave the classroom. You are welcome to bring your laptop to class and use it to take notes, access readings we’re discussing, and the like. You are not welcome to surf the web, check email, or otherwise perform non-class-related activities during class. Here’s my best advice: If you aren’t using it to perform a task specifically related to what we are doing in class at that very moment, put it away.
And why is this type of list important for educators? It helps us to remember to keep the examples we use in class fresh and relevant. I recall the sounds of crickets chirping in the room a few years ago when I asked if anyone could relate to having an Arnold Horshack in the class with them. Don’t want that to happen to me again.
Though Beloit College hasn’t posted the one for this year yet, here’s the one for last year’s class of freshmen. As Beloit’s Public Affairs office says, “For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.” Additionally . . .
What Berlin wall?
Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
They never “rolled down” a car window.
Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
They have grown up with bottled water.
General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
Pete Rose has never played baseball.
Rap music has always been mainstream.
Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
“Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
Music has always been “unplugged.”
Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.
The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.
Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.
Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.
Eastern Airlines has never “earned their wings” in their lifetime.
No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.
Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.
Katie Couric has always had screen cred.
Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.
They were too young to understand Judas Priest’s subliminal messages.
When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.
Multigrain chips have always provided healthful junk food.
They grew up in Wayne’s World.
U2 has always been more than a spy plane.
They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as “The Joker.”
Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.
Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.
On Parents’ Day on campus, their folks could be mixing it up with Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz with daughter Zöe, or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford with son Cody.
Fox has always been a major network.
They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.
