WEEK 6

In Teaching Large Classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students, Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw refer to “The Problems with Large Lecture-Style Classes” as “a reality that is not likely to disappear in the near future”. When they mention issues such as “Inadequacy of classroom facilities and environment”, 

“Large classes” is still a very delicate issue for me. Large classes are the enemy of student-centered environments. Students cannot be completely engaged in learning, even though they are well-behaved, they tend to get distracted.

How can we promote learning? How can we engage students? Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw give us the keys to success: variety, pace, interest, routines, speaking style, interaction and collaboration.

According to these authors, the teacher can create empathy by designing appealing materials and promoting interaction by assigning different tasks. Establishing certain routines, different phases of the lesson and different lesson styles can improve the atmosphere of a lecture classroom. As far as the speaking style is concerned, it is one of the most useful techniques to create a student-centered environment. I use the speaking style  to “tell” my students what my classes will be like and what I want my students to do and how I expect them to behave. Sometimes the speaking style   shifts to an eye-contact style in case one of the students is not focusing.

In Using Technology In Teaching Large Classes, from the University of Oregon's Teaching Effectiveness Program, I particularly enjoyed reading about online assessment with Blackboard and Blackboard features. This type of assessment can “provide students with immediate feedback”, “are automatically graded” and “scores are logged into the online Grade Center”. The teachers can use this type of assessment to “test student knowledge”, “measure student progress” and “gather information from students”.

In the section on Enriching discussions with technology, the use of the “discussion board” is seen a technique to promote a student-centered online environment. I agree that teachers must be the “facilitators”. Teachers cannot be absent from this process. The interaction among participants must be balanced, the interest in the discussion must be kept and the teacher, apart from being the “facilitator”, must make a great effort in order to promote students participation and to give positive feedback to them.

The effective and efficient use of the “discussion board” implies “setting aside specific times to read and respond”, “making regular announcements”, developing an FAQ’s section”, “helping students access the board” and “setting limits and being explicit”.

Chandra Singh's interaction learning style shows us that "students should be actively engaged in the learning process". We are there to introduce the topic and assign the topics for discussion, but then we should let the students "stretch their knowledge".

As far as my project is concerned, as I am still teaching and the end of the school year approaches, I have a lot of work to do.

• The students are doing the projects I assigned.

• We used the computer lab for 45 minutes this week.

• I am reading the questionnaires about ways of learning

• I introduced another technology tool: wordle

• The students are working with wordle