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> On 2 Jul 97 at 17:27, Dr. Robert K. Irish wrote: > > > So, maybe I'm asking people to move on to looking at big group (lecture) > > strategies. How do you break your groups down in ways that are > > productive without leading to classroom chaos? Do you get students > > reporting back to students? (isn't this just students lecturing > > students?) What do you do when a group assigned a particular portion > > doesn't come through? > > I echo Susan's reference to Graham Gibbs. For my money he's one of the best writers on the subject of teaching large classes. He has a book called, I think, _Teaching Large Classes_ or something very similar. The other provblem, of course, is evaluation. Last term I tried to mark 100 writing assignments myself (gone are the days when we could count on TAs for that even if we wanted to which I didn't.) I gave short assignments, too--1000 words--but it was still almost a month past the end of the course when I got the marks up. This Spring I was forced to resort to a combination approach: exams (written, not multiple-choice) to generate marks and test content knowledge, and a number of small tutorial assignments, ungraded, many of them collaborative, to get students thinking/doing. The ungraded assignments seem to go much faster because I can just respond to them without having to justify a mark. I think there are better ways but I haven't found one that is completely satisfactory. The main thing is to find ways to compromise what we'd really like to do (clone ourselves and mark an assignment every week) without throwing away thinking/writing entirely. Doug