For your consideration-- : suggestions and reflections on teaching and learning [1989 : October, no.5]

Г - - 4 r for our consideration . . . suggestions and reflections on Teaching and Learning CTL Number 5 October 1989 Ideas for Teaching Large Lecture Classes from an interview with Professor David Griffiths One of CTL's ongoing projects is a publication which we call the "teacher's desk reference." We have been interviewing faculty and TAs about what they know and like about teaching undergraduates at UN C. We thought that instructors might find the methods and ideas of their colleagues useful in their own teaching. This newsletter highlights some of the ideas of Professor David Griffiths of UNC's history department. “I was young and enthusiastic. Now I'm enthusiastic but I can't sustain it as well . Fol lowi ng certai n prac¬ tices, being conscious of methods, bei ng more aware of what you're doing helps" David Griffiths has been teaching for 20 years One of the courses he teaches is History 30, a survey course of Russian history. The classes are large— enrollment is usually around 150 students— and he has three teaching assistants to help him. He talked with us several times about many aspects of teaching large classes In our meetings three themes emerged: the teaching strategies he has developed over the years; the critical role of the teaching assistants; and the importance of recognizing and improving student learning, "not just whatthey learn but how they learn." Listening to Griffiths talk animatedly about teaching and how he teaches, it becomes clear that he is an enthusiastic and involved teacher who cares about both his students and his teaching assistants. "I like teaching. It's my profession. I can't imagine what I'd be doing if I weren't teaching." Course Planning and Organization "In large classes the teacher must be more organized and more concerned with method." When Griffiths first started teaching, he relied more on his own enthusiasm for the material than on organiza¬ tion or teaching methods to teach his students. He says that now he understands the necessity for structure and planning in a course, especially a course like History 30 ("one thousand years in one semester") which he teaches every year. Here are a few of the methods that help him to manage the great amount of material and large number of students in such a class. 'The first thing I do is say that the mate¬ rial is vast, I can't cover it all, but here are seven major themes that are goi ng to come up again and again..." He identifies the seven or eight themes that unify the material and he carefully plans the entire semester of lectures and discussion sections to emphasize those themes Griffiths formulates questions for the discussion sections that will get the students to analyze the read¬ ings and to relate the themes of the course to the readings. He plans his lectures on index cards, a note¬ taking technique he recommends to students, though as he says, "It is not just for the students. It helps me in organizing my material. I don't have to rewrite a lecture. If I've found something new or if I want to reorganize or if I want to combine two lectures; the material is there and it is just a question of reshuffling." "I use a description of the books* and a justification for assigning them, asa method of accenting what I think is im- Center for Teaching and Learning •University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill