Tag Archives: large classes

Posters in Philosophy

Just returned from the biannual conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.  What an excellent conference with an excellent group of people!  I will be posting a few entries related to presentations and workshops I attended at the conference.

One was by Kristin Schaupp at Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who said that in large philosophy courses, one assignment she has used with success is a poster.  Instead of having each student do one, she breaks the class into groups who stay together the entire term.  One of their assignments as a group is to create a poster, similar to those presented at conferences in the social and natural sciences.  They have several “poster days” at the end of the term, so that each group has a chance to show their poster and discuss it with other students in the audience.  Continue reading

Peer Review of papers in large classes

In an introduction to Philosophy course in Spring 2010, which had around 120 students and six discussion sections, I did several experiments. One was with having students do a peer evaluation of each others’ papers. This was pretty tricky in such a large class. It was not as successful as I had hoped, mostly because of the logistical difficulties. Continue reading