Lectures + Discussion Sections

[Hegemony]

In all my many long years of teaching, I've never been assigned a course that has large lecture classes plus smaller discussion sections. Now it's my turn. Normally my classes are very interactive, so this is uncharted territory for me. The number of students will be 100+.

The course involves an aspect of popular culture. So, something that ought to interest students — if they can make it through my lectures.

One problem is that the lectures are supposed to be an hour and twenty minutes long. Ugh, who could keep their attention focused on a talking head that long? Even a talking head with a PowerPoint?

What tips do you experienced folks have for what I should be doing in the lecture classes to keep us all from falling asleep?

What else should a newbie to lecture classes be aware of?

[ergative]

Small group activities in lecture followed by surveys that cleverly lead into what you planned to discuss next.

'Now turn to the person sitting next to you, and think of all the examples of the male gaze/landmarks on the hero's journey/commentary on capitalism that you can identify in Rise of the Clones.'

...

'Now, how many people identified <x>? Yes, quite a lot of you. Did anyone bring up <y>? Yup, a few. Now, what about <z>--did that come up in your discussions? No? Well, let's see why <x>, <y>and <y> all serve as examples of the male gaze/landmarks on the hero's journey/commentary on capitalism. While we're discussing that, see if you can think of other examples from the Star Wars franchise that unite these ideas in a similar way.'

Then, if there's time, you can ask for volunteers to share what they came up with that wasn't <x>, <y> or <z>.

In other words, students don't need to share everything they discussed with the whole class the way they might in a smaller discussion session. Surveys can help them feel like their discussion was productive, without needing to spend a lot of time sitting through the thoughts of 100 students. And discussions/surveys might also break up large lectures into smaller bite-sized pieces. Each survey serves as a kind of chapter break: 'you have now heard enough about this topic to form an opinion that will feed into the next topic.'

In general, I'd recommend coming up with chapters or sections in your lectures. Instead of using the whole 1:20 to build a grand theme, use it to build four smaller ideas, each one of which stands alone, and so is robust against fading attention, but all of which can be tied together in the discussion section if it's really important to finish witha  grand conclusion.

[Puget]

I regularly teach a 100 person class, and would never lecture the whole time.

In fact, two years ago I decided the flip the class, so lectures are now short segments online interspersed with MC learning check questions, and class time is discussion and in class assignments. However, that takes a lot of planning and work, so I wouldn't suggest doing that for fall.

Before the flip though, I still incorporated discussion in the class-- a mix of questions that I would take a few answers to from the full class and then elaborate on, raise-your-hand polling questions (I didn't use clickers, but that's an option-- there are phone apps now so they don't have to buy and remember to bring a separate device), and group-discuss-report back. I also used lots of video clips to illustrate things, as well as participatory demos, which may ore may not be relevant to your course material.  I would try never to have more than 5 min of straight lecturing without something different happening.

[mythbuster]

Similar to what ergative describes. Do not feel that you have to totally change your style during the "lectures"! Be as interactive as you can. However there are issues that you should ponder in advance with a large section.

The biggest difference with a really big lecture is the ability of students to hide/ not respond/ not attend. Do you you care about attendance? Participation? If so you can use various phone based apps to track who is there and how they respond to in class prompts. These can be worth points if you want.  The plus side to big classes is that some students will find safety in the anonymous online responses, where they would never respond verbally in a small class.

The other issue that can happen in a big class with activities like a think/pair/share etc. is difficulty getting the students/room back on track looking and listening to you. The younger the students the more this can be an issue. Especially if this is a primarily fresh-person course, I would establish a standard signal to the room that the discussion should end. Flashing the lights often works for me.

[Parasaurolophus]

This is how courses with TAs were organized at my doctoral program: the prof teaches the whole class twice a week (usually for one hour, but occasionally 1hr20) and the TA leads a discussion section of 35 for an hour once a week (well, usually you had two separate discussion sections, but whatever).

Like the others said, just do your usual thing in the lectures. 1hr20 isn't as bad as it may seem; it's about the limit for attention without a break, but you're breaking things up with discussion and stuff anyway. Power through content in the lectures, and in the discussion section, focus everyone's attention on something in particular. That's the time for group work and focused discussion, as well as remedial instruction.

[sinenomine]

Interactive polling is also a good way to keep them engaged.

[mamselle]

Long before clickers, my Econ 101 (micro) undergrad instructor used to use the class as a 'case study sample' when teaching profit/loss and cost intersects. This was in a large lecture hall (I'd say at least100 folks, probably more).

He'd lecture briefly on the terms needed to discuss the day's topic (graph, supply/demand curves, and axes the first day, say) and then set up a cluster of related polls, asking us, for example, "If I offered a slice of pizza for $100.00 at the Buckeye Inn, how many of you would buy one if you'd just finished watching an OSU game and you were starving to death after celebrating the win over Michigan?" (thus, obviously, pulling in pop culture references to keep them engaged). He'd also proceed to drop the price under all the same circumstances.

All these results were graphed quickly on the board and a discussion held about them after, say, 6 plot points were determined for that set of conditions and the curve drawn. Then on to the next.

We'd end up with, say, 4 graphs of various conditional situations, and then he'd ask for analysis. He'd also refer us to the TAs for anything we didn't understand, and they were well-versed in fielding and answering more specific questions.

So a semi-flipped class before that was even a thing. I still remember Phillips curves.

It was a real let-down the next term when the Econ 102 (macro) guy read us his book all term for lectures, and the TAs had no idea what he was talking about, either.

In teaching art history, even with large intro classes, or music theory, I do a lot of interactive, "what do you see/hear" stuff to keep the sensate responses uppermost in their minds. In teaching dance, of course, the whole thing is interactive: the instructor sets an exercise, everyone does it, you do the next, and the next, and the next.

In theater class it's usually more mixed, some lecture, some video, some short readings, etc., with a mind to emphasis on period style, writers and performers of a give era or location, etc. And in French, I'm constantly doing feedback drills, with pronunciation emphasis, the shifting forms of declensions and conjugations, and fluidity the goals as well as the praxis.

Even in Bible Study--closest thing I get to lecturing, really--I consistently fold in music and art examples, theater readings, dance and opera videos (there's a beautiful one of Villella dancing the finale to Balanchine's 'Prodigal Son' as well as the "Fix Me, Jesus" duet in Ailey's "Revelations" just for starters...) and I can't show things without inviting conversation about them, so....we talk.

Probably the idea of comparison/contrast is most useful in contradistinction to the more linear developments one expects from a straight lecture. By mixing it up and not only folding in student involvement, but varied approaches and the challenge to verbalize the differences in an area, the liveliness stays aloft and the snores (if any) are drowned out.

And of course--but this is probably a given--taking student input on its own terms, finding what one can agree with first, and critiquing (but not criticizing) later. Much smaller scale, but I just had the coolest 1-on-1 discussion of cross-dressing traditions in theater and opera with my middle-school voice student who's sorting out his own ID at the moment.

So, going with more up-to-date topics pertinent to the students themselves can also help....but you probably already know and do that.

M.

[ergative]

The activities you can fold in really depend on the topic.

In a psychology class, you can do mini experiments, especially if you have clickers. Choose some extremely robust, replicable result, and have students do a couple of trials of the experiment, and then graph the results.

In a statistics class, you can have the students provide the measurements for analysis--e.g., take their height to illustrate bimodal distributions; or if you have a variety of ages, do something like give them a list of pop culture touchstones and ask them to provide their date of birth and the number of touchstones they recognize, to illustrate correlation.

I've found that a carefully formatted Google doc works well: provide the link to the place where they enter their data, and then switch to another tab where you've got a results graph ready and waiting to update as the data is input.

[Hegemony]

Yeah, I really don't understand our university practice in this arrangement. Regular classes are 3 hours a week, period, for a standard number of credits. These large classes are 3 hours a week, plus an hour's discussion section (so total 4 hours), for the same number of credits. This baffles me.

In addition, the discussion sections are supposed to be taught by a graduate student, but the particular graduate student I will be getting will be in her first semester of graduate school, having never taught before. So to give this have a hope of working, I think I will need to design the discussion section meetings with considerable detail.

Unfortunately the material of the class is all text-based, rather than lending itself to images or films.

My heart is sinking.

[Parasaurolophus]

FWIW, it's standard practice in my field--in Canada; the US is a bit different--to throw first-semester grads right into the deep end like that. A discussion section is something of a soft landing. You probably don't need to sweat it too much, although having some kind of pre-existing structure she can adapt or borrow from will probably make her life easier. But really, so would very clear expectations for what the sections be like. Although they're touted as an opportunity to "discuss" the material in a more intimate setting, really they mostly end up being about helping students "get" (/review) what's going on in the reading, and communicating expectations about the assessments. Or even just reading some passages together and figuring out WTF is going on.

[Katrina Gulliver]

This may or may not be relevant to your situation, but what are the expectations of these lectures: ie, are they to be recorded for students to watch later?
In which case the interactive stuff might not be ideal (and may raise other issues, in terms of consent for students to be recorded on something that's available to watch later).

And yeah, 1hr 20 is a slog.

[Hegemony]

No, mercifully they won't be recorded.

[Cheerful]

In addition, the discussion sections are supposed to be taught by a graduate student, but the particular graduate student I will be getting will be in her first semester of graduate school, having never taught before. So to give this have a hope of working, I think I will need to design the discussion section meetings with considerable detail.

I agree mostly with Parasaurolophus here.

If your new grad assistant has a strong record as an undergrad, she may be enthusiastic about the discussion sections and have good ideas about how she wants to run them.  She was an undergrad who experienced college teaching and probably has ideas about what works well.  Why not provide some guidelines, let her work for her pay, and see how it goes?  If you sense the discussions are going poorly, you can intervene.  I once had a teaching assistant (fresh out of undergrad) who did very well and shared a few new ideas for teaching her age group.

[kaysixteen]

It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases.   It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs.  Random suggestions include:

1) making sure, at least in freshman classes, that, at the beginning of the semester, students get quick and direct lessons on notetaking, the old fashioned kind with actual pen and paper, and reinforce this requirement by checking notebooks periodically
2) making sure that material lectured upon, at least material that professor emphasizes as important through writing on board and such like, regularly appears on quizzes and tests
3) holding a zero tolerance policy for electronics use in class

[ergative]

It saddens me to hear that American undergrads couldn't handle a 80 minute lecture, esp given the likelihood that such a class only meets twice a week in most cases.   It goes without saying that I was horrified to read the poster who suggested that hu's students could not really deal with more than 5 minutes of lecture without interruptions for more interesting activities, activities which seem to be the proper province of junior hs.  Random suggestions include:

1) making sure, at least in freshman classes, that, at the beginning of the semester, students get quick and direct lessons on notetaking, the old fashioned kind with actual pen and paper, and reinforce this requirement by checking notebooks periodically
2) making sure that material lectured upon, at least material that professor emphasizes as important through writing on board and such like, regularly appears on quizzes and tests
3) holding a zero tolerance policy for electronics use in class

Given the decreasing dexterity with handwriting, and the fact that many students are actually extremely effective in note-taking with digital devices (e.g., downloading lecture slides in advance and annotating them directly during lecture), to say nothing of disabilities accommodations, I think this is a losing battle that, even if won, would not actually benefit our students.