Website: Instructional Settings
Building Community in Large Classes
University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence
Our
Recommendation
This is a collection of strategies that instructors can use to create relationships in large courses. We really appreciate how it focuses not only on student-instructor relationships, but also provides strategies for increasing student-student interactions and student-content interactions. They are very clear and actionable!
- The Alphabet Game: Students think of a discipline-specific concept/theory that starts with the letter A, the letter B, etc. until they reach they end of the alphabet (e.g., “What Do Sociologists Study?”). A variation would be to see how far down the alphabet the groups can get in 5 minutes. The instructor follows up with the large class. (Eggleston & Smith)
- Collaborative Response: The instructor poses a question to the class and invites responses by a show of hands or via an online immediate response tool (e.g., Clickers, Poll Everywhere). After providing their individual response students discuss the question in small groups. Each small group develops a group response which is then shared or submitted along with all individual responses.
- Thought Provoking Questions: The instructor poses a thought-provoking, “yes or no” debatable question to which students respond individually and then discuss in groups of 2-4 (e.g., Food banks should be discontinued because they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.) The instructor follows up with a large group discussion. This can also be done in the large class with immediate response tools (e.g., Clickers, Poll Everywhere).
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