Teaching Large Classes
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Parts of this article have been amended with permission from the Centre for Teaching, Vanderbilt University, retrieved on May 8, 2018.
Teaching a large class poses many challenges, both in and out of the classroom. In the classroom, large enrolments can promote student disengagement and feelings of alienation, which can erode students’ sense of responsibility and lead to behaviours that both reflect and promote lack of engagement. Logistics can also be a challenge when teaching a large class. How can you best manage the daily administration of what can often feel like a small city? Below are suggested strategies to help instructors deal with some of the challenges associated with teaching large classes.
1. Promoting Student Engagement
While encouraging class participation can be challenging in any class, it can be especially difficult for instructors of large classes. To effectively evoke participation in such teaching contexts, it is helpful to understand the factors that discourage involvement. In the article, “ Putting the Participation Puzzle Together,” Weimer (2009) attempts to uncover precisely what motivates students to be active participants in the classroom. Weimer does this by analyzing a recent study that tests common hypotheses about the nature of student participation. The study found that, while a multitude of issues affect student participation levels, a few emerge as particularly important. First, students’ perception of faculty authority can make a substantial difference in determining whether or not students participate. Second, students’ perceptions of the instructor, developed through interactions outside of the class, have a large impact on student participation. Finally, student fears of peer judgment explain why many students choose not to participate.
Faculty Authority: Combatting perceptions of the instructor as fount of knowledge
The issue of faculty authority requires particular attention. In often freshmen-heavy large classes, many students feel that the instructor is the arbiter of knowledge. To these students, the ideas and arguments of the instructor are not meant to be challenged. Certainly, students in this environment are more likely to sit silently in class and take it all in. If, as instructors, we hope to avoid this, we must make sure that our courses are content-centered, not instructor-centered. How can we do this? We can model the kind of questioning inherent in our disciplines and ask students to practice those questioning skills through exercises, in-class and out. We can also be careful to underscore the degree to which knowledge in our fields is contested and constantly evolving.
To allow students to practice the skills they should develop, it can be helpful to break up the class into 10-20 minute segments, incorporating a specific question or exercise that requires student participation in each segment. The question or exercise can take several forms (for more examples of these kinds of exercises, see the CTL resources on Active Learning and Critical Thinking ).
When planning these questions or activities, keep in mind that large classes present advantages as well as special challenges. In these large classes, think of students as a diverse human resource to be drawn upon in pursuit of your learning goals. To help ensure that the students serve as this resource, it is vital that you set the right tone from the beginning. Make it clear during the first weeks of class that you expect students to question you and interact during class, and introduce questions or exercises that make that interaction both expected and safe.
These approaches are particularly effective when they take advantage of the opportunity for small-group work. Studies suggest that small-group activities promote student mastery of material, enhance critical thinking skills, provide rapid feedback for the instructor, and facilitate the development of affective dimensions in students, such as students’ sense of self-efficacy and learner empowerment (Cooper & Robinson, 2001). Assigning group members roles (like facilitator, recorder, divergent thinker, etc.) or distributing a group assessment rubric can keep groups relatively balanced and fair and help ensure participation by all group members.
Instructor demeanour
Student perceptions of the instructor can be particularly challenging to deal with given that in large classes, it is more difficult to have meaningful exchanges with each and every student. However, there is much that you can do to project a demeanour that promotes student participation.
Peer judgment
Fear of peer judgment is a participation disincentive for many students, particularly in large classes where students fear being embarrassed in front of dozens or even hundreds of their peers. To best deal with student fears of peer judgment, it’s critical that instructors promote an environment of trust and mutual respect from the very beginning of a course. In such an environment, students are more likely to feel safe to actively participate in class. Try to foster a sense of personal connection between students and instructors through group and partner activities that help students get better acquainted. The resulting feelings of cohesiveness are especially valuable because students who feel that connection are far less likely to go against their classroom community’s norms. Finally, be sure to balance student voices by not allowing any students to dominate discussions and by protecting students from interruption.
All of the approaches described above allow students the opportunity to engage with class questions and challenges anonymously or in small groups instead of, or prior to, large class discussion. These tools can therefore reduce student fears and promote participation. In addition, online discussion boards can provide structured opportunities for students who are otherwise too shy to participate in class discussion.
2. Managing Logistical Issues
Large courses come with an array of logistical issues that can turn into a nightmare if you are not prepared to handle them. How do you prevent your e-mail box from overflowing with student e-mails in the 24 hours before an exam? How do you manage that line that sometimes develops down the hall during your office hours? In this section, taking attendance, managing student email, and managing office hours are discussed.
Taking Class Attendance
In large classes, attendance can be a problem. Students may feel anonymous and decide they don’t need to attend because they won’t be missed. While many instructors do not take class attendance in their large classes, some do. But how can one best take attendance in a class of 200 or more students? Certainly, many instructors rely upon an attendance sheet that is passed around the room, but this is often a headache with the sheet being lost or students signing in for one another. Brief in-class assignments or quizzes can also be valuable in taking attendance. One can require that students answer a class day-related prompt on a notecard at the end of class, sign it, and hand it in before leaving. This notecard can be graded or not. Another way to ensure that class attendance remains high is by giving pop quizzes periodically.
Managing Student E-mail
When teaching a seminar class, you can expect a small percentage of students to e-mail regarding the coming exam in the 24-hours preceding it. When you have 200+ students, however, that same small percentage can overwhelm your e-mail box. What can you do?
Managing Office Hours
3. Grading in Large Courses
Large courses come with grading problems familiar to instructors across a range of disciplines. On the one hand, you don’t want to have so many graded assignments that you and your TAs are bogged down with incessant grading. On the other, you do want to have enough assignments so that you can adequately assess student learning with a fair grading system for your students, your TAs and yourself.
For a wide variety of suggestions and strategies to manage assignments and grading for large classes, see the CTL resource on Grading Strategies.
4. Working with Teaching Assistants
Large classes can range in size from 100 to 700 students, or even more in some cases. In classes this large, it is inevitable and necessary that you will have multiple Teaching Assistants to help you with everything that goes into teaching such a large number of students.
While TAs can be a blessing, they can also bring challenges, such as they may:
- have worked as a TA before and thus be more experienced than others who have not
- be reluctant or terrified to instruct students in a tutorial session
- be less confident, but others may be overconfident
- be more assertive, perhaps even challenging your authority, while others are more reticent and less likely to take initiative
- be dedicated hard workers while others are less motivated.
Given the wide range of personalities and working styles of your Teaching Assistants, how can you achieve a harmonious working relationship with them and get everyone pulling together? A good place to start is the Western Guide to Working with Teaching Assistants (2017).
The guide covers everything from your role as a TA supervisor, making initial contact, assigning duties, preparing TAs for marking and proctoring, TA office hours and supporting and assessing TA performance.
5. Integrating Technology into Large Classes
6. Dealing with Academic Offences
Academic offences such as cheating and plagiarism are common problems in university courses big and small, but in large courses, it can be particularly difficult to identify an academic offence when it happens. That’s because we’re grading such a high volume of exams, essays, and assignments that the kind of careful analysis often necessary to identify offenders is more difficult. You might not know your students and their work as well, and it’s that knowledge that typically helps instructors identify cheating when it is going on. As anyone who has proctored an exam for 200+ students can attest, it can be very difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on in our small city-sized courses. So what can you do?
Be upfront with your expectations
Having been to graduate school, the average university instructor is well-versed in what “plagiarism” entails. Nevertheless, not a year goes by without a professor at a major university being accused of plagiarism. Certainly, sometimes it’s deliberate. Oftentimes it’s not. That’s because what constitutes things like “plagiarism” and “cheating” is not always clear to many of higher education’s professional academics.
Given that fact, the students in often freshmen-heavy large courses are even less clear on what we mean when we speak of these concepts. While they are likely familiar with black and white scenarios (copying answers off of their neighbour’s exam is cheating), do they know what constitutes an academic integrity violation in those grey and murky scenarios that sometimes confront them?
- What are your expectations for “open book” exams?
- If students are allowed to work on homework assignments in pairs or groups, are they allowed to hand in comparable or identical assignments?
- How do you want students to cite sources in their papers? Is a works cited page required?
As the instructor, you and your TAs need to anticipate such questions. Upon handing out a paper or homework assignment, either you or your TAs ought to have a conversation with students about expectations. Ideally, you should put those expectations in writing on the syllabus or handout sheet, so that students have something to which they can frequently refer. Putting those expectations in writing also helps should you ever need to charge a student with a cheating offence. Some instructors even choose to dedicate early class time to giving their students a tutorial on cheating and plagiarism.
Dealing with cheating on exams
Trying to catch an individual or a small group of cheaters in an exam of 100+ students can be a difficult task, but there’s a lot that you can do to make cheating more difficult.
Dealing with cheating on papers and assignments
Identifying cheating on papers often requires knowledge of a student’s writing abilities. It’s often when students who really struggle with writing hand in flawless masterpieces that instructors or TAs are tipped off to a student’s dishonest tactics. In large classes, there may not be as good of a sense of your students and their writing, so what can be done to stop plagiarism?
Further Reading
Carbone, E.L. (1998). Teaching large classes: Tools and strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Heppner, F. (2007). Teaching the large college class: A guidebook for instructors with multitudes. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Renaud, S., Tannenbaum, E., & Stantial, P. (2007). Student-centered teaching in large classes with limited resources. English Teaching Forum, 3.
Stanley, C.A. & Porter, M.E. (2002). Engaging large classes: Strategies and techniques for college faculty. Boston: Anker Publishing.
Questions?
If you have further questions about teaching large classes, please contact one of our educational developers.