Lectures + Discussion Sections

[downer]

So, if your students do not learn your content to a reasonable degree, how do you determine that you have, in fact, been 'good enough'.

That's not really an issue that comes up. My pass rates are similar to those of other professors. In the US, there is no universal standard to meet. Each university, each dept, each professor has their own standards. So it is mostly a matter of a few decades of experience teaching at different places and talking to other profs about trends in student performance.

[Caracal]

I didn't say I wanted to treat them like children.   But

1) they are adolescents, and that ain't the same as adults, and

2) I do have a responsibility to take all reasonable steps to maximize their learning of the material I am teaching.

1) as Puget stated below, traditional age college students are generally considered "emerging adults," we need to be mindful of the developmental tasks and the developmental changes that occur of this life period rather than continuing to see our students as adolescents as they would be in high school.  While it's true that 18 is not a magic number in terms of development (it's not a dichotomous change on the 18th birthday), it is a different life stage when individuals graduate from high school and make choices to enter into college (or the military or the workforce, or a combination of these) and a period of continued executive functioning growth.

2. I think there is the crux of the situation and where educators will differ. What are the reasonable policies for this course set-up, this content, and these particular students? I assume that my colleagues at my Uni and on the fora are making the appropriate pedagogical decisions for their course given these considerations, and that policies will differ between courses.  I don't use a laptop ban in mine for a variety of reasons that posters have stated here (e.g., disability considerations, access to electronic resources on the LMS during class, individual differences in typing vs handwriting skills), including the fact that one of the authors on a study which is often cited in support of laptop bans has made it clear that his results should not be used to support a whole-sale laptop ban, and that he does not ban laptops in his classroom.

Yeah, I agree with both of these points. Keeping in mind the dangers of overgeneralizing from my own experience, I know that I actually became a much more responsible student in college than I had been in high School partly because with nobody around to bother me about how and when I did the work, I felt a much greater sense of responsibility to do it. (It also helped that I was mostly taking classes I was interested in and good at, and that I had a lot more time to get everything done out of class.) Of course, some people have the opposite reaction, but I know a lot of people for whom failing courses was a wake up call that they needed to take responsibility and figure out what they were doing.

[artalot]

A colleague of mine has had luck with in-class group work. She assigns small groups at the beginning of the semester (usually 5 students) and then has them discuss concepts, readings, etc. in class. One of the most interesting things she does it has them take a short quiz or answer a quick question before class, then they can update their answers after discussion with the group. It gets the students to do the reading, etc. before class, but also engages them in discussion during class time. It works best if you have more than one TA who can walk around and encourage the wall flowers to participate in the discussion.

[Hegemony]

These are all great suggestions — Artalot's suggestion for instance seems very profitable — but the problem I see is that the Discussion Sections are the place where this more individualized close work is supposed to be done. So what would be left for the Discussion Section meetings to do?

[OneMoreYear]

These are all great suggestions — Artalot's suggestion for instance seems very profitable — but the problem I see is that the Discussion Sections are the place where this more individualized close work is supposed to be done. So what would be left for the Discussion Section meetings to do?

Hegemony,  I realize I'm not sure of your general field, and I think to some degree the construction of the discussion sections may be class/field dependent. As a grad student teaching recitation/discussion sections, some of the variety of ways they were structured were:

1. TA class sessions were dedicated to working toward a final project related to course material, so the meetings with the TA had scaffolding steps for the project and opportunities to work in groups (these projects included papers, presentations, posters, one class they were role-play skits demonstrating class concepts).

2. TA class sessions were focused on an applied topic related to that week's lecture (e.g., in abnormal psych, whole class lectures could be about the development and symptoms of the disorders and the recitation could be focused on the basics of intervention).

3. TA class sessions were focused on clarifying material from lecture. The professor had a system where the students at the end of class did an exit ticket type activity--I think the 2 questions were something like: Name one important thing you learned in class today and Write/ask one question about today's content - something that has left you puzzled. Then the "puzzling" concepts for that week were reviewed in the recitation. 

How do your colleagues structure the discussion sections when they teach the course? Do you think what they do will not work for your style or this particular course content?

[Hegemony]

Well, my colleagues teach more general courses — "All The Things About Culture" — and then the idea is that the discussion section is about only one of those things at a time. But I have a sense that the discussion sections are not very well managed anyway, because the grad students teaching them seem a bit lost. They don't get a lot of direction about what to do in the classes.

My new course is "One Specific Part of Culture," so the lecture classes will be less of a lively grab-bag of stuff. And I'd like to provide more guidance to the poor grad students who will be running the discussions.

In addition the norm in my department is to have three 50-minute lectures per week; it's just an accident of scheduling that mine are two 80-minute lecture sessions. I'm definitely going to need multiple things to perk everyone up and make sure everyone's awake for the whole thing, including me.