I rounded the corner of the hallway and saw hordes of students
standing, sitting, and slouching near the door to the lecture hall. For reasons
beyond my ken the administration decided that classrooms in this building
needed to be locked between classes, so I pulled out the shiny new key and held
the door open while the students filed past. One asked me if I was her professor,
and when I said yes she stuck out her hand and said “Hi, my name is
[unfortunately I don’t remember it]!”
She was one of the 188 students in my Introduction to Psychology
course. I know that there are universities with larger, even MUCH larger, Intro
courses than this, but this was a first for my university. Up to this point our
Intro courses maxed out at 35 or so. Budget cuts prompted our Department to
think about how we could reduce the number of adjuncts we hire, and this large
section saves us 5 or 6 hires.
Of course I’ve taught Intro many times before, but it has been
almost 10 years since my last go-round. So my appetite for challenge was met by
teaching Intro again after this lacuna and the large class size, a new
experience for me. Actually one of my first teaching experiences (in grad
school) was teaching Intro with a class of about 50, and that course was taught
in an auditorium in a science building, as this one is as well.
Intro to Psyc is perhaps the most frequently taken classes in
higher education outside of required courses in math and writing, so the
resources available for teaching it boggle the mind. Many of these resources
seem to channel instructors into a traditional lecture format, perhaps because
Intro is taught so often by inexperienced instructors. Every publisher has not
only a complete set of ancillaries, but now most have engaging online
supplements to the text. So I could have reduced prep time and effort, and my
anxiety, by adopting the Intro text my Department had already chosen by
committee, downloading the PowerPoints slides and test bank, and (digitally)
dusting off my classroom activities from 10 years before. But where’s the fun
in that?
Instead, I decided that I was going to draw on my 20+ years’
experience in the classroom and the research about how people learn and design
my class with the students’ learning at the center. This decision led to many
hours of work and the familiar feeling of walking the line between fearless and
foolhardy. In the next series of blogs I
will describe the design decisions I made, why I made them, and how they turn
out.
Buckle up.
