Innovative Teaching Ideas?
As the semester comes to a close, I find myself thinking about my classes this semester and considering ways to improve them the next time I teach them. Two of my classes (hazards and landscape ecology) will be put on the shelf until next August, but I will be teaching physical geography (GEO 121) again in just over a month (yikes!) Now would be a great time for me to make notes about what worked well, how the timing of some things worked and didn't work, and other thoughts for next fall. Even though I'll be teaching GEO 121 again soon, there is a good chance that I'll forget about some changes I wanted to make before then, so I should make some notes about that, too!
One of the things that I struggle with in GEO 121 is making the class interesting and more interactive. The lecture part of the class has 90 students and we meet in a lecture hall with seats that are bolted to the floor and I'm stuck at or near a large stationary podium. This setup is not conducive to student interaction with me or with each other. Despite these limitations, I usually spend a day or two each semester on in-class group activities. This semester, that ended up being only one day (due to some canceled class days earlier on). Every time I do one of these activities, I wish I had more of them to keep class interesting over the semester. However, I am also aware that some students may find the activities trivial, silly, or even busy-work and feel that they are not getting any useful information out of them. Since I am teaching the class again so soon, it is unlikely that I will have time to come up with a whole collection of new in-class activities to try out. One approach that I could take is to start small- come up with some short activities that only take up a few minutes of class time, but tie in with the lectures. I could also have students work in pairs or threes (it's hard to get much larger groups to communicate well in that setting).
This also opens another can of worms. For the past couple of years, I have banned the use of laptops during my class. I think they can be a huge distraction- especially in a lecture hall where lots of students behind you can see what you are doing, but I can't- and it's just too much of a temptation to switch over to email or Facebook or ESPN during lecture. I am reluctant to allow unrestricted use in class again, but at the same time, a lot of small group activities could be enhanced by computer use. Perhaps setting special times when computer use is allowed and not allowed could solve that problem.
As you can see, my thoughts are all over the place on this. If you have any thoughts or experiences to share about group work in large classes, please comment! I'd love to hear what you're doing.
One of the things that I struggle with in GEO 121 is making the class interesting and more interactive. The lecture part of the class has 90 students and we meet in a lecture hall with seats that are bolted to the floor and I'm stuck at or near a large stationary podium. This setup is not conducive to student interaction with me or with each other. Despite these limitations, I usually spend a day or two each semester on in-class group activities. This semester, that ended up being only one day (due to some canceled class days earlier on). Every time I do one of these activities, I wish I had more of them to keep class interesting over the semester. However, I am also aware that some students may find the activities trivial, silly, or even busy-work and feel that they are not getting any useful information out of them. Since I am teaching the class again so soon, it is unlikely that I will have time to come up with a whole collection of new in-class activities to try out. One approach that I could take is to start small- come up with some short activities that only take up a few minutes of class time, but tie in with the lectures. I could also have students work in pairs or threes (it's hard to get much larger groups to communicate well in that setting).
This also opens another can of worms. For the past couple of years, I have banned the use of laptops during my class. I think they can be a huge distraction- especially in a lecture hall where lots of students behind you can see what you are doing, but I can't- and it's just too much of a temptation to switch over to email or Facebook or ESPN during lecture. I am reluctant to allow unrestricted use in class again, but at the same time, a lot of small group activities could be enhanced by computer use. Perhaps setting special times when computer use is allowed and not allowed could solve that problem.
As you can see, my thoughts are all over the place on this. If you have any thoughts or experiences to share about group work in large classes, please comment! I'd love to hear what you're doing.
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