Thursday 16th October 2014 - Having too small a group of students

(This blog was written on the train to London on 16 October - hence the date.  However, wifi wasn't working on the train so it is only being uploaded on 21 October - from a hotel room in Shanghai.)

I know that many lecturers are delighted when the size of their specialist final year option class drops.  They look forward to greater interaction and more intense discussion with students.  This year I have the smallest final year class I think I’ve ever had – twelve in total.  (Perhaps there’s a message there, that’s it’s time for me to go!)  Over the years I have averaged about 25-30 in my classes – although one year it did go as high as 84.  But even so I have always maintained what has basically been a seminar format for the teaching.  In the year I had 84 students I split them into four separate groups and did 8 hours a week teaching (2 hours per group) although I was only credited with 2 hours in the departmental workload allocation. 

But my small group this year of 12 creates some problems for me because I have based the teaching methods and the student tasks for the course around much larger numbers.  Contributing to wikis and other collaborative activities has in the past been based on splitting the total group into 8 or more groups of 3.  Should I reduce the number of tasks (and therefore reduce the coverage of the final piece)?  Should I make students work on their own in the production of the initial materials to be edited by everyone?  That would seem somewhat burdensome on individuals since they would be needing to cover, on their own, tasks which in the past have been dealt with by three.  That would mean an aggregate of less reading as background to what is produced by the students.

My solution so far is to reduce the number of tasks to be undertaken in small groups, and to compensate for that by dealing with the extra topics from previous years through class discussion.  I am reluctant to reduce the syllabus just because there are fewer students this year.

But I realise that in saying that I am reflecting ways of teaching that I never used earlier in my career.  Then I was the prime educator, with some student support.  Now I set the framework but I encourage the students largely to educate themselves, and each other, through collaborative activities.  And hence the more students the more potential learning there can be.  That in itself is an interesting reflection on new pedagogies of enquiry-based learning.

The most tricky topic will come later in the semester.  Normally the session on the break-up of the former Yugoslavia (a very relevant and contemporary topic given the abandonment of the Albania-Serbia football match earlier in the week) depends on role play.  And I need students to play the following roles: Slovenes, Croats, Serbs in Serbia, Serbs in Bosnia, Serbs in Kosovo, Bosniacs, Albanian Kosovans, Montenegrins, Macedonians (I can say that on a UK blog, but couldn’t use that term on a Greek site), Albanians, Greeks, Bulgars.  That totals 12 – 1 role each!  But it wouldn’t be a very fair division of labour.