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Teaching

How to Keep Class Sessions from Running Short (Or Going Too Long)

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 17, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Person looking at Apple Watch display

This article on How to Keep Class Sessions from Running Short (Or Going Too Long) was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

How can I design my class sessions to fit the available time? I never see this discussed in resources for effective teaching, but it has been a big challenge for me for many years. I'm always concerned about having too much or too little material.

With any interactive or active form of learning, so much of how a class goes depends on the students. So it's not like presenting a speech where you are in complete control of the time. Any error causes problems that ripple through the semester, especially when I'm teaching multiple sections that need to stay in sync. And any change in the course coverage or how I construct the classes makes prior years' experience largely irrelevant.

—Kevin Werbach, professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania


The fears about not having enough material to fill a class, or in getting behind with what you planned, are common. Peter Newbury, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at University of British Columbia Okanagan, recalls such a time for him.

“A memorable teaching experience for me was the day I ‘lost control.’ The students were so engaged in discussions, I had no authority. It was awkward. And awesome. In hindsight, I created a safe environment, posed good questions, and gave them agency. I prepared to do nothing.”

Below are five approaches to use regarding the time-based aspects of class planning. I recommend making use of a timer, having an established end in mind for each class session, erring on the side of student engagement versus “covering the material,” having plans for extending the learning if activities are shorter than planned and leaving room for metacognition, meaning, leave time to talk about the learning process.

Begin with the End in Mind

Before we get to the details about what will be explored in a given class session, it is time to stay broad. The leadership author and speaker Stephen R. Covey always stressed the importance of beginning with the end in mind. In his case, his advice helps us to formulate personal mission and vision statements. In the case of teaching, the axiom helps us to be intentional about the most important things learners will walk away with as a class finishes.

In the book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain describes how sustaining students’ attention helps to facilitate learning. He describes how a longitudinal study explored the ways in which expert teachers keep their focus narrow. Bain writes, “Teachers succeed in grabbing students’ attention by beginning a lecture with a provocative question or problem that raises issues in ways that students had never thought about before, or by using stimulating case studies or goal-based scenarios.”

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

When we begin with the end in mind in our teaching, our class planning becomes more flexible. We have a core question to explore, or a goal to pursue. The emphasis becomes on putting on different lenses in viewing the same set of ideas. What does this concept look like in different contexts? Where might there be confusion on the students’ part?

Use a Timer

There are many good reasons to use a timer while teaching, and one is simply maintaining awareness. When I am teaching a class for the first couple of times, I print out a copy of my slide deck with nine slides per page. I write on the printout how much time I plan to take for each section of content and for each interactive exercise. Then, I set a timer on my Apple Watch, which gives me nudges throughout the class to keep me on track of when I need to be moving on.

Of course, an Apple Watch is not required for this purpose. There are plenty of smartphone apps that work just fine. Microsoft PowerPoint has a timer built into the presenter’s view. There are also physical time clocks that some faculty like to have separate and apart from their computer setup.

Another reason to keep a timer handy during class is to facilitate exercises with students. I sometimes use a timer that has numbers large enough for students to see. I give them periodic reminders regarding how much time is left in the exercise and visit with those groups that have finished early. I ask them if they had any surprises as they went through the exercises, and how confident they are in their answers.

Err on the Side of Engagement

Whenever I hear faculty say, “I am just having so much trouble covering all of the material in this class,” I know that it is quite likely that they are spending an overabundance of time strictly lecturing and not enough time assessing the students’ understanding and retention of the learning.

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

Then, I often do something to get them talking and potentially moving around the class. Sticky notes are a favorite way of mine to accomplish both of these aims at once. I describe more ways of using sticky notes in teaching over on my blog, if you’re interested. I then might lecture for around 15 to 20 minutes. But throughout that time, I am asking the students for examples and posing other questions to them about how what we are talking about fits with prior learning from past weeks. The last third of the class is spent getting students talking with each other, reinforcing what they’ve learned, and seeing where there might be misunderstandings.

One resource I have found particularly useful in dissecting the questions around what topics need to be covered comes from Maria Anderson, CEO and Cofounder of Coursetune. She has proposed what she calls a learning lens for the digital age: ESIL. As we work through examining our goals for a given course, we can ask ourselves how deep the students’ learning needs to be around a given concept. Do they just need to know that it exists (E)? Or should they be able to perform a given task or provide an answer with some support (S)? Perhaps the learners need to be able to demonstrate something independently (I), or even have a deeper understanding of the concept that will persist for a lifetime (L). The ESIL lens can be useful when thinking through how much time to spend on each part of a class session.

Determine a Way to Extend the Learning

Even if we are making use of active-learning approaches, the interactive exercises we plan can take less time than we planned. Judith Dutill, a communication educator and instructional designer, recalls a time when a lesson she had planned about words and meaning went far faster than she had anticipated. She had brought in words from different decades and had the students match the word to the decade of the dictionary entry.

“We flew through it,” Dutill admits. She then had them get into groups and asked them to create a list of dictionary entries that could be added. In her case, she did this exercise more on an impromptu basis. However, now she has it to use the next time she teaches the class, if the same thing happens.

When I am teaching foundational courses with terms that are likely new to students, I tend to make use of Quizlet, a flashcards app. Quizlet has a test feature that generates a collection of matching, true/false, and fill in the blank questions. I will often have print outs of a couple of the tests from Quizlet, for when a quick opportunity for review emerges. I also highly recommend the Quizlet Live feature, which I have written about previously on my blog. I have only played Quizlet Live games with groups of up to 40. However, the makers of Quizlet say that they have seen it played with groups as big as 150 people.

Leave Time for Metacognition

Instead of just covering material, we need to get our students to be thinking about their learning. Metacognition is thinking about our thinking. As we have our students engage in metacognition, they are more readily able to take what they have learned and apply it in different contexts. As a result, they are able to determine their strengths and weaknesses and use strategies to figure out how to adapt their learning strategies accordingly.

Having students share the muddiest, or most confusing, point at the end of a class is an opportunity for metacognition. So is having students keep reflective journals to gauge their own learning.

The author of Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt, reminds us of the importance of structuring opportunities for reflection and metacognition. He suggests that we ask our students what seems most important to them from what was addressed in class. Among the specific prompts Hanstedt proposes: “What did you struggle with and why? How does this connect to X, Y, or Z? How would you explain this to someone not in this field?”

I recently taught my first class of the semester. It was a three-hour class, which gave me plenty of time to work through a number of interactive exercises to grow the students’ curiosity. The good news is that the students were far more vocal than I am accustomed to having undergraduates be that early in the semester. I did an exercise with sticky notes and then picked a couple of students to go stand next to each sign and recap the themes that emerged. It all went well.

However, I ran out of time to do the case study I had planned. Since I am not teaching multiple sections of the class, it easy to decide to let the class out about 15 minutes early, leaving time for a handful of the students to stay back to share some connection they had made during our time together.

One of them mentioned growing up in the same town I did – and noting how much that place reminds him of his grandmother, who has since passed away. Another mentioned his love of podcasts and asked if I had any other recommendations for him, beyond the ones I mentioned in class. I asked another young woman to stay after a bit, so I could thank her for the contributions she made during class and saying how much I was looking forward to getting to know her this semester.

If I had been teaching a class session that was closer to an hour in length, it would have been more important to use a timer and to keep things more structured during the interactive exercises.

We want to be able to leave enough room in our teaching for what might emerge, but without leaving behind the essential opportunities for our students to practice what they are learning.

Photo: Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

Why I Broke My Self-Imposed Open-Textbook Writing Ban

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 7, 2020 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

stack of books

I told Dave that I was done with open textbooks. Well, at least the part of my experience with them that means I work with a group of 15-20 educational leadership doctoral students to write one in an eight week period.

When Robin DeRosa had been on Teaching in Higher Ed (episode 183), she shared about her student’s open textbook. Not to diminish the tremendous effort that it takes her to continue the work on it, but they build upon past students’ contributions over time. They haven’t written a new book each time.

I have been completely unsuccessful at convincing any of the cohorts I have worked with to go about revising and adding to the prior cohort’s books. Each group had a vision for something completely different. When I left our house to teach that Saturday morning, I mentioned to Dave that things were going to be different this term. Well, they are now definitely different.

Just not in the ways that I expected.

Cohort 11 is writing a book during our eight-week class. Tessa had a fantastic idea to take the features that you would typically find in an instapot and to create a book of essays that illustrated leadership lessons using those functions. For example, the instapot has a pressure cooker setting. Most of us have had to lead under pressure and could easily write 40 essays on the topic without running out of ideas.

The book will have leadership essays in it that all have some kind of an instapot reference. The conclusion of each chapter will contain a recap entitled: Leadership Recipe, along with an instapot recipe.

My Instapot Recipes on Pinterest

Two of the project leads from prior cohorts came on Teaching in Higher Ed (episode 225) to share about their experiences writing a book with their colleagues. Our conversation reveals some of the challenges we experienced. Yet, they each said they would do it all over again, given the choice. They also mentioned some of the digital tools that we used in creating the books.

Google docs

Google Team Drives

Pressbooks

Zoom

Canva

Why did I decide to go against my self-imposed prohibition against writing a book in eight weeks?

There are two reasons, really. First, Tessa’s vision for the book was compelling. She was ready to dive in and the rest of the cohort was, as well. Second, I removed another major assignment in the class that I predicted would enable us to have adequate time to see their ideas become reality.Book cover: Nourishing leadership

I am continually reminded of how less can be so much more in teaching. The learning deepens when we stop trying to cram so much into our classes.

We had our second synchronous video conference session the other evening. The group has been collaborating using Google docs and some members of the cohort were confused how to find things and also how to provide and receive feedback on their writing.

Immediately, Robert started reorganizing the documents so they were easier to find. We could all see him doing it via Zoom as he revamped everything. Tessa brought up Google drive and showed people how to create a new document, upload a document, and to make suggested edits.

I had removed a major assignment, which freed up the time to really dive even more into the book project. The students shared how their confidence was building using the tools they are using for their personal knowledge management (PLT) systems.

There has been plenty of time for self-directed and cohort-directed learning to occur. I made some book cover ideas in Canva and some of the people on the session got to experiment a bit with using Canva. Robert found some recipe card graphics and showed everyone how they could be placed in PowerPoint. He showed how to add text boxes over the top of where the recipe instructions and ingredients would go. The rest of the cohort was passionate about which recipe card design to select and how to display them within the book.

I enjoyed seeing what a high-performing team Cohort 11 is… At one point, Annette asked Silvia if she wanted to chime in. Silvia had been awfully quiet and Annette wanted to be sure everything was ok. It turned out that her screen name in Zoom had been inadvertently set to “user”. She had been chatting things up in the chatbox, but none of us realized that she was the face behind the person named “user”.

It was apparent, too, that they haven't allowed themselves to fall into bad habits of always going with the first idea that someone mentions. Teresa is adept at sharing her perspectives, even if they are different from what others have had to share. They all use humor well and collaborate tremendously well together.

You may not decide to write a book during one of your classes and I totally understand that sentiment. However, let me challenge you to take a different lesson away from this post. Take a look at your classes and find ways to do less. You may just find there's a whole lot more learning waiting on the other side. And some delectable recipes, too.

 

Filed Under: Teaching

What to Do Instead of Asking for Questions

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 15, 2019 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Packed suitcase

I tend to still feel nervous when I travel. When I was in my twenties, I took a trip to London. Somehow, in the fog of the morning packing, I had left all of my nylons (back when they were often considered essential business wear for women) and every single pair of underwear for the trip, sitting on my bed in my apartment.

As most of you who have travelled will realize right away, the story has a happy ending. As Dave tries to gently remind me, even all these years later, “They have stores where you’re going. You know you can always buy things.”

It was a bit more difficult procuring my items back then, however. I first had to discover that I would need to learn that what I was actually searching for was referred to in that region as knickers and tights. The new language helped a lot. Plus, I got to discover the amazing place that Herrod’s is… and buy some items that I never would have found back home.

When students first come on our campuses, they have a whole set of vocabulary to learn, as well. Especially for those who are the first in their families to attend college, there will be strange social norms to adapt to and words to discover related both to their academic disciplines and higher education in general.

Three of my colleagues and I are in the process of earning a Hispanic Serving Institute teaching certificate from ESCALA. The founder of ESCALA, Melissa Salazar, was on episode 264 to provide us with an overview of the various ways to serve our Hispanic students. On November 27, Janue Johnson, who I met at the ESCALA training will join me to share about our respective experiences and ongoing learning.

One of the activities we did following the training was to video ourselves teaching and use a teaching self observation instrument to denote what was happening in the class at the time. We indicate who was talking during each two minutes of the recording. During those short durations, we attempt to categorize what is happening. Are non-rhetorical questions being asked? Are students discussing a topic?

While there are always things I want to improve each time I observe my teaching, I did walk away from the analysis feeling good at the fact that it was fairly even between who was talking: me or the students, with a slight bit more of the words being said by the students.

It pleased me that they seemed so comfortable to ask me what I meant by something, or to probe for me to share more. We were debriefing a speaker event that we had attended the week prior. Everyone had something to share, something that was made evident as I listened to the conversation pop back and forth between us and as noted on the classroom observation instrument that each student had made at least one substantive comment during the discussion.

I was meeting with a couple of students the other day who are planning a series of events. I inquired as to whether or not they have thought about serving refreshments. One of them stopped to tell me that she wasn’t familiar with the word refreshments. It was just like my early years of professional work when someone said they were going to have some libations… I enjoyed how easy it was for her to stop me to clarify the meaning and thought about how much more learning happens when we are comfortable enough to ask.

Some people try to create that same type of comfort level for people get clarification on a term or concept whenever they need it by periodically stopping to ask if anyone has any questions. In my experience, this technique doesn’t work very well. It’s only in the immediate moments of misunderstanding that we have the greatest opportunities for people to inquire. If I wait to ask who has questions, I have probably missed the moment that someone actually did want to ask something.

Instead, I work to reduce the power distance in my classes. Sometimes that can mean re-arranging the chairs into a more conversational structure, with no real front of the class. It can mean leaving room for silence and other voices besides mine. Much of the time, it means not taking myself too seriously, but placing that focus on the students and the learning.

I don’t get it right every time. Just like when I pack for trips, I still forget things. I’m sitting in my hotel room in Pittsburgh at the POD conference realizing that while I have my winter jacket here, I neglected to bring any long sleeved shirts or any kind of a sweatshirt.

When we mess things up, it’s time to get creative. Our students appreciate our transparency and what these experiences teach them about handling failure. And when we’re in a cold hotel room with just a bulky winter coat to protect us from the cold, marble top of the room’s desk, we can always wear the hotel room’s robe over our clothes and thank goodness for those long sleeves.


While it probably hardly seems like the right time for me to be dolling out advice, here are a few travel-related resources:

  • Episode 261 on Productive Travel
  • Pack it Up blog post (I still really recommend the Pack Point app)
  • Tools for Travel (This is one of those posts that has gold in the comments section – thanks especially to Robert Talbert. Also, I started paying for the pro version of TripIt and have found it to be totally worth it.)

Photo credit: Brandless on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Get Students to Join You for Office Hours

By Bonni Stachowiak | November 13, 2019 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

This article on How to Get Students to Join You for Office Hours was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

I work at a small institution, where the professor/mentor relationship is paramount. I know how essential it is to have students come see us during office hours, but my students just aren’t coming to visit. How do I get more of them to utilize that time with me?

—Sitting alone during office hours, anonymous


The irony isn’t lost on me that I am about to answer a question about getting students to come to office hours, when I can only remember making an attempt to do that twice in my own college years. Once, the professor wasn’t there, so that story ends with me leaving and never giving it another go.

The other example involved me actually coming face-to-face with someone I was very afraid to talk to. I was failing microeconomics and wasn’t sure what to do. One of my roommates was tutoring me, and she suggested that I stop into the professor’s office hours to get a bit more direction.

I still remember the stern look on his face. His eyes were crinkled up. His disappointment seemed so evident. “What did you say your last name was, again?” he asked. After my response, he got up from his desk and told me to follow him. He went to a large file cabinet in a back hall and removed some kind of notebook from one of the drawers.

As he sat back down, he sighed deeply. He asked what my Dad’s name was and if he had gone to the same school I was attending. (He had.) The professor then shared that my Dad had been his student and in fact had even been selected as the business student of the year in the late 60s.

While I was glad to know that about my Dad, I don’t recall getting any new insights about economics during my visit. Fortunately, my roommate’s help continued and I managed to pass the class. I never visited another professor during their office hours. It never occurred to me that it was part of their job. Or that some of them might actually enjoy the experience. Yet, here I am to offer a few suggestions of some approaches to try that might have brought me back for more when I was in college.

Start with Small Steps to Set the Stage

This first set of ideas fall into the category of what I will call Setting the Stage. None of these approaches require getting permission from anyone to try them out. These small steps can help more students benefit from the experience of office hours.

Be Welcoming

One of my colleagues, Roger Heuser, a professor of leadership studies at Vanguard University, regularly invites people to join him in his office for tea. He has a box of all these different types of teas from around the world and a set of fancy teacups. The whole experience has left me feeling like our conversation was the most important thing to him in those moments and that the time was sacred. No incoming text messages interrupted what either of us had to say. I felt welcome and affirmed.

The idea of doing something unique that shows a student we care and are here to support them helps a lot.

I have been meaning to attempt to replicate this same tea experience in my own office hours. However, I have only gotten as far as trying to find some good teacups on Amazon and considering purchasing a wooden box for a tea collection. Instead, my attempts at being welcoming involve leaving my door open during office hours, giving a warm smile and greeting the person, and moving out from behind my desk to a different seating area for conversations with students.

Show Transparency

The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project encourages professors to help students understand how they learn and pull back the veil on the teaching and learning process The model advocates using a three-part approach to transparency. Each assignment should have a clear purpose, a description of the task, and associated criteria for how the work will be graded.

We should bring that same emphasis on transparency into office hours. Be clear with students about the purpose of office hours in the syllabus and each time an invitation is extended to join you. Establish a clear and easy sign-up process. Finally, communicate what students can expect when they decide to take advantage of office hours with you.

Structure Time for Scaffolding

Consider encouraging students to use office hours as a time to “scaffold” assignments. Just as scaffolding is used in physical construction to hold the structure up as it is being built, the office hour can be a place for students to bring in their work for input before it is complete.

For instance, if you have assigned a paper, invite students to come into your office with an idea and a brief outline, so you can talk through it together.

Some professors require this as a component of an assignment, though I would caution against using coercion too heavily, as you are trying to give the perception that office hours are inherently valuable. Otherwise, you are just building in another box students feel they are required to check.

Invite Groups

It can also help to welcome groups of students into office hours. This often results in students feeling less fearful when they are in the room with others they perceive to be in similar situations. If a student is struggling in your class, it can be helpful to realize there are others also having challenges learning the material.

Or Try These Bigger Ideas

These next set of possibilities may not be common practice yet, so you may want to talk with colleagues about how to experiment with these options while still fulfilling the requirements at your institution.

Go Virtual

Stefan Still, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Washington, has shared previously on EdSurge about his success at taking his office hours online. He has been skeptical about bringing technology to teaching, out of concern that it can bring too much focus to impersonal aspects of teaching. However, he has found that having students join him virtually for office hours has extended his reach beyond what was possible with in-person meetings.

Another advocate for the power of virtual office hours is Zhaoshuo Jiang, assistant professor of civil engineering at San Francisco State University. On an episode earlier this year of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, he indicated that, “The main goal of teaching is not only to help the student inside the classroom, but also outside the classroom.” He invites his students to set appointments using the YouCanBook.me scheduling service, allowing them to not just select a date and time preference, but also to specify whether to meet in person or virtually.

Eat, Walk, Move

It can be quite helpful to remove ourselves from the office part of office hours altogether. Viji Sathy, a teaching associate professor and program evaluator of chancellor’s science scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, encourages us to be more inclusive in how we approach office hours by using different formats, times and locations. She gets herself in the contexts in which her students spend their time, instead of expecting them to come to her. She shared these approaches on her website, and also discussed them on an episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Get Yourself a Robot

At San Francisco State, Jiang has gone even further to shake up his office hours. He literally has a robot set up and ready for students to use during their virtual visits. He uses the Double 3, a two-wheeled robot that can be controlled by students via an app on their phone. It’s essentially a gimmicky way to do a video chat, with the webcam attached to the robot so that students can change their view by moving the robot around the office as they converse.

Yes, for the vast majority of us, a robot is probably not in the picture. However, the idea of doing something unique that shows a student we care and are here to support them helps a lot.

Whether you welcome someone in for a cup of tea, or meet them in the library for a chat, office hours can make a world of difference for our students.


Photo credit: Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Filed Under: Teaching

How to Engage Students and Support Learning in Large Classes

By Bonni Stachowiak | September 6, 2019 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Michael Sandel teaches Justice class

This article on How to Engage Students and Support Learning in Large Classes was originally posted on the EdSurge website and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. You can pose a question for a future column here.


Dear Bonni,

You have shared often about active learning strategies and the impact they have on student learning. However, I am dubious that the approaches you describe work with large classes. What about when you have 50-60 students in a class? Or even hundreds?

—Anonymous


In my experience, it’s true that small classes provide greater opportunities for student engagement and for professor/mentor relationships to occur. However, there are certainly those who employ methods that put this perspective to the test.

When we teach large classes, what approaches can we employ that will have a greater opportunity to engage students and help students learn more?

As I’ve been thinking about this issue, I keep coming back to two key questions:

  • What can we discover about the relationship between class size and student learning?
  • When we teach large classes, what approaches can we employ that will have a greater opportunity to engage students and help students learn more?

A study was published by IDEA, a non-profit organization that focuses on academic success in a higher education context, which explored whether class size is a factor in perceived learning. The authors—Stephen L. Benton, Dan Li and William H. Pallett—analyzed data from 490,333 classes that were tracked by the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction systems. Over 400 different colleges and universities were included in the research.

That study concluded that there isn’t a significant relationship between the size of the class and how well the students did in demonstrating learning outcomes. It’s worth noting, though, that the courses that were large tended to emphasize knowledge-based material. In online courses, the size of the class matters less than the reasons that students cite for enrolling.

Some large classes can create a shared experience for students that will be a class that they don’t easily forget. Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, teaches one of that university’s most popular courses: Justice. It became so popular that Harvard now offers it as a free version of it on the edX platform. He is a master at the Socratic method of asking questions that get even the most passive of learners thinking. When my students watch his videos, they say they feel like they are sitting in the same Harvard classroom that is being filmed and are participating in the dialog with the other students. If you would like to see Sandel in action, the Justice videos are viewable on YouTube, without needing to enroll in the course.

Some approaches I observe Sandel using are:

  • Asking open-ended questions and having all students silently reflect on their answers before anyone shares to the broader class.
  • Inviting students to predict what will happen next in a story, or what they think will be the result if a specific choice is made.
  • Using minimalist slide decks, and therefore not overwhelming students with lots of text to digest while he is speaking.
  • Starting each class session by asking students to recall what was discussed in the previous session.
  • Calling students by name, even in such a large class. He asks each student who speaks to identify themselves, and he regularly refers back to that speaker much later in the same class session.
  • Painting pictures in the students’ heads through excellent storytelling.
  • Exploring many different applications of the same concept. For example, what does libertarianism look like in historical events, in bioethics, in compensation, and in human rights?

Another master teacher of large classes is Michael Wesch. He is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University whose expertise as a digital storyteller has won him widespread attention for his videos, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, viewed by more than 20 million people and featured at conferences and film festivals around the world.

One of his large class projects is ANTH 101. The course is designed around ten different challenges that students wrestle with during the semester. And all students, even ones not formally enrolled but who find the free course materials online, are encouraged to share their learning with others. His teaching assistants have engaged with students in the class from places such as Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Samoa and Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the memorization of a set of definitions in the discipline of anthropology, Wesch invites us to “a new way of seeing the world that can be valuable regardless of your career path.”

He challenges us to see how the structure of his course helps us to put on these new lenses. He suggests a simple truth about learning:

“You can’t just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.”


After this article was originally posted on EdSurge, Mike Wesch came out with this wonderful resource:

Teaching Without Walls: 10 Tips for Online Teaching

In a future episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, we will get to hear from Wesch, once again. Something to look forward to…


Some approaches I observe Wesch using in ANTH 101 are:

  • Centering the class around 10 big ideas and linking the assignments around those same ideas.
  • Referring to assignments not as traditional homework, but as “challenges,” and making sure that each one represents something that will be relevant to the students’ lives, both now and in the future.
  • Encouraging students to share their learning in a radically public way. Both students who are formally enrolled in the course and those joining in because they want to are asked to share their responses to the challenges on instagram, on blog posts, and on Twitter using the #anth101 hashtag. These answers are curated on the main ANTH 101 website.
  • Extending the learning from ANTH 101 out to other institutions. He offers a free set of resources for instructors who wish to use the ANTH 101 materials.
  • Telling innovative digital stories through his extensive collection of videos. What he does is not technically difficult (in terms of video editing), but he has done lots of iteration and thinking differently about how to keep viewers engaged.

Way back on episode 25 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I talked to another expert at engaging large groups of students: Chrissy Spencer, who teaches at Georgia Tech. One of her big lessons is to invite her students to become active participants—in one example she invites them to play the part of a chili pepper population in a simulation designed to teach evolutionary processes.

The big challenge of large classes is keeping students engaged. But such engagement is not just an issue in big classes. Quality Matters suggests we need to consider more ways to get our students active in their learning, and to focus on the issue no matter the class size.

For Spencer, one key strategy is having students do focused group work and reinforcing their learning through means other than strictly relying on passive listening to lectures. [link: https://youtu.be/5wg1fR6Fv2Q ]

Some approaches I observe Spencer using in her large classes are:

  • Actually having students in the class embody parts of the concepts she is trying to teach.
  • Employing prediction as a means of deepening learning through a series of interrupted case studies. These structured experiences allow Spencer to identify when students misunderstand concepts early on, before they have gone too far into the case without receiving feedback.
  • Offering team-based, low-stakes assignments to get students explaining what they are learning to others in the class.
  • Including service learning as part of course assignments, so that students can experience how what they are learning can help the local community in some way.
  • Bringing something she loves (like chili peppers) into the classroom and helping that passion spread over to the students.
  • Using tools like the CATME Team Maker to carefully construct teams that consider everything from demographics, preferences and even whether or not a student has transportation to participate in the service learning opportunities into the mix of how groups get created.

I am among those who treasure what can happen in small classes. However, when I am exposed to people who are masters at engaging students in large classes and helping them succeed academically, I am reminded that class size is not as important as I might sometimes find myself thinking that it is.

Filed Under: Teaching

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