![\"Michael](\"https:\/\/images.coachingforleaders.com\/cb:ztCJ~31fd5\/w:1024\/h:415\/q:mauto\/f:best\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/teachinginhighered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Michael_Sandel_Lecturing-1567097977.jpeg\")
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This article on How to Engage Students and Support Learning in Large Classes<\/a> was originally posted on the EdSurge website<\/a> and is reposted here with permission. It is part of the guide <\/i>Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak.<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/a> <\/span>You can pose a question for a future column here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Dear Bonni,<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n 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?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n \u2014Anonymous<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In my experience, it\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n When we teach large classes, what approaches can we employ that will have a greater opportunity to engage students and help students learn more?<\/span><\/p>\n As I\u2019ve been thinking about this issue, I keep coming back to two key questions:<\/span><\/p>\n A\u00a0study<\/span><\/a>\u00a0was 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\u2014Stephen L. Benton, Dan Li and William H. Pallett\u2014analyzed 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.<\/span><\/p>\n That study concluded that there isn\u2019t a significant relationship between the size of the class and how well the students did in demonstrating learning outcomes. It\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Some large classes can create a shared experience for students that will be a class that they don\u2019t easily forget. Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, teaches one of that university\u2019s 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\u00a0Justice videos are viewable on YouTube<\/span><\/a>, without needing to enroll in the course.<\/span><\/p>\n Some approaches I observe Sandel using are:<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n One of his large class projects is\u00a0ANTH 101<\/span><\/a>. 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\u00a0share their learning with others<\/span><\/a>. 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,\u00a0Wesch invites us to<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u201ca new way of seeing the world that can be valuable regardless of your career path.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n He challenges us to see how the structure of his course helps us to put on these new lenses. He\u00a0suggests a simple truth about learning<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n After this article was originally posted on EdSurge, Mike Wesch came out with this wonderful resource:<\/p>\n Teaching Without Walls: 10 Tips for Online Teaching<\/a><\/p>\n
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