After a long hiatus for the summer, I am finally getting back to posting on this blog–I was working on research as well as moving to a new apartment, and so my thoughts on teaching were not as prolific as usual during the past six weeks or so.
I am posting one idea I put in place in one of my courses for how to make class time more than lecture with some discussion within the big class group thrown in. I had considered student presentations, but given that my Social and Political Philosophy class has 60 students this term, and given that the term is only 13 weeks long, it’s hard to fit in 60 presentations. Another option that I’ve used in the past is group presentations, where groups of two-three students work together to present something to the rest of the class. In the past I’ve been able to do that because I’ve had break-out discussion sections in addition to the lecture, and the presentations could happen in separate discussion groups. That worked well because then several presentations could happen at the same time. But it requires the discussion-group setup, which my course this term doesn’t have.