Small Class Active Learning

I have several challenging opportunities for my active learning this summer. I’ll have a small class of ten students, we’ll be in the unfamiliar setting of Regent’s University, London, and five of the class dates will be devoted to field trips. I’ll scale my group prompts down to pair prompts, experiment with other groupings, use carousel for poetry close reading, and divide the class into two field trip task forces to report to each other on their excursions. I should be able to investigate all of our class excursion sites before the students visit, which I hope will be enable me to prepare some sort of prompts or a guide that will connect what they will see with what we have been reading and discussing. They will be welcome on their long weekends to travel where they will, and the chance to be about in London and southern England should be an outstanding opportunity for the students to gather their own photos and videos and create exciting eportfolios.

I’m also expecting that with fewer students than usual, the activity I designed for thirty students, though it might still work as effectively, will probably be accomplished sooner. Plenty of questions and minute papers at the end of the Tuesday classes are likely possibilities to address this. Of course, since part of the effect of active learning in larger classes is to make them seem smaller, less impersonal, then I suppose starting with a small class should be an automatic benefit for all concerned. And with a class this size, I will finally be able to learn everyone’s name.

“Improving Learning in Small Classes” –Indiana University of Pennsylvania