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Tips for longer class-meetings?

In our recent post discussing inside advice from a recent SLAC hire, I shared that at my university, we have 4-credit courses that meet significantly longer than 3-credit courses at most other universities (our MWF classes are 1:10 minutes each day, and 2-day-a-week classes meet for 1:50 each day). I also shared how the traditional "chalk and talk" approach to teaching that had served me well at other universities failed to translate, necessitating other teaching strategies to engage students better for longer meetings. 

One commenter asked, "could we maybe have a thread about how people deal with longer class times? I'd love to get some new ideas." I think this is a great idea! About 7 years ago I shared some of the things that I've done in class, though I've experimented with other things since. Because this is finals week, I don't have time right now to share some of the other things I've done, though I hope to share some in the comments section in coming days.

In the meantime, do any other readers have any helpful teaching tips for longer-than-normal class meetings?

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7 responses to “Tips for longer class-meetings?”

  1. a graduate student

    I have been a student in quite a few 3-hour seminars, and I really don’t like them. But here are the things that have helped make it tolerable from my perspective: Guest lectures and guest presenters. Student presentations. Students leading discussion. Lots of discussion questions that are engaging. Group activities. A change of subject. Mixing up how material is presented within the same class session–doing some slides and writing on the chalkboard and handouts. Lots of visuals.

    Reply
  2. SLAC Associate

    A couple of suggestions, the first much easier to implement than the second:
    #1) Plan a variety of activities each day and change things up every 20 minutes or so. Lecture for a little while, then do some sort of small group critical-thinking/close-reading activity (e.g., identify the argument, come up with a list of objections and possible reponses, etc.), then have the student groups discuss what they found, then lecture some more, watch a relevant short video clip, have them free-write for 10 minutes, do a little more lecture, etc.
    #2) Find ways to make students run the session for some significant portion of the time (especially in upper-level majors courses). An easy way to do this is to assign presentations, but I recently ran a course where I put students in small groups early on and each group was assigned responsibility for completely running a couple of class periods in the second half of the semester: giving introductory lectures on the material, leading discussions, coming up with activities, etc. I assign the readings and identify some key learning objectives for each day, and I grade the students on how well they do leading the session. I sit in the very back and try to restrain myself to making only a handful of comments during the whole class period, and that only if I think something critically important is being overlooked.
    Warning: Attempting this will cause most instructors to dispair because the intellectual caliber of the discussion is noteably reduced, because the median student just doesn’t have anything like the knowledge and skills we do in leading a class. But even though the lectures and discussions will seem rather neutered to us, my experience is that students — especially the less-skilled 2/3rds of students — often take much more away in the end, due to the amount of work that they have to spend prepping a class period.

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  3. Evan

    An obvious suggestion: breaks. The longer the class, the longer the break.

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  4. Marcus Arvan

    @Evan: I found that breaks work just fine for 3 hour graduate seminars, but that breaks do not work well for long undergrad courses—and I’ve heard the same thing from a number of other people who have tried them at my university. Grad students may be able to come back and focus after a break, but in my experience after a break undergrads really tune out. Maybe there are good ways of dealing with this, but I figured I’d weigh in fwiw.

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  5. anon

    I worked for four years at a place where about half of the undergrad classes, even introductory ones rather than advanced seminars, were three hours long. I had good experience putting breaks into these sort of class, myself.
    I did something similar, and maybe not too creative in both halves of the class that had a similar arc in terms of energy: short lecture, breakout writing + discussions, whole-class discussion, follow-up short lecture reviewing and summing things up. This gives them the opportunity to get back into things after the break, maybe, and the consistency might have helped, too. Just meant I had to have two interesting-enough writing + discussion prompts ready per class.
    I’d do other things on more special occasions : peer review workshops and so on. Sometimes I’d also block off an hour to take up pre-written questions with the whole class that they had to prepare before class.

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  6. P

    Sustained in-class writing time. Someone above mentioned free writes – I recommend reading some of Peter Elbow’s stuff on free writing in thinking about how to pitch the activity. You can follow this with a class discussion–students can have a lot to say after 10-15 minutes of free writing in response to a prompt.

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  7. Evan

    @Marcus, yeah, I’ve had that happen. Since I teach 4-hour classes, both undergrad and grad, I consider breaks a necessity, whether they help to focus or not!

    Reply

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