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ESL Activities for Big Classes | Fun ESL Games for Large Groups

Do you have a big class filled with lots of students who want to learn English? It can be a bit terrifying, right? That’s where these ESL activities for big classes come in. These ESL Group activities are designed for large English classes and will get everyone participating in style.

ESL activities and games for big classes

But, not to worry! Keep on reading for the best ESL games and activities that you’ll want to consider for a big English class with 20+ students. Let’s get to some of my favourite ESL group activities!

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Have a Big TEFL Class?

I love large classes of 20+ students! They used to terrify me when I first started teaching in Korean universities. However, as the years went by and I figured out how to manage them, I liked them more and more. These days, I actually prefer a class of 20 to a class of 1 or 2.

Large ESL classes of 20 students or more can be a bit difficult to teach English to if you don’t have a lot of practice with them. Another problem is that it can be hard to come up with games and activities that will work with a big crowd. However, help is here! Read on for my top ESL activities for big classes. Most of them will work for children as well as adults so adapt away and enjoy.

Of course, monitoring learning is slightly more difficult in a bigger class, but these activities make it possible to do it at least to some degree.

ESL Activities for Big Groups

ESL Activities for Big Classes

Let’s get into the best activities for larger ESL classes.

#1: Is that Sentence Correct?

Is that Sentence Correct? is a sneaky way to get your students focusing on English grammar. The best part about it is that you can use this activity with 1 student or 100! It’s also very easy to adjust the activity from beginner to advanced. The sky is really the limit for this one, although one thing I like to use it for is a reported speech activity .

I find this ESL activity works best at a warm-up activity, or as a review at the end of class. When used as a warm-up, use it to review material from the previous class(es). When used as a review, focus on what you’ve studied that class. It’s a nice way to round off a unit as well. The best thing about this one is there is a few minutes of silent calm that descends upon your class!

#2: Videos in the ESL Classroom

Videos can be a great tool to use with large ESL classes. They are interesting, motivating, and engaging for most students. There is also a wide variety of activities you can do along with them. The sky is really the limit! Whatever you do, don’t just watch the video and be done with it. There really are a million and one pre and post watching ESL activities that you can do which are really useful for your students.

Check out this post for some ideas about how to use videos in the ESL Classroom.   There are lots of ideas for pre and post video-watching.

ESL Activity for Big Classes #3: Presentations for ESL Students

Presentations for ESL students is another excellent activity to get your big ESL classes doing. Task-based learnin g, especially if students are able to choose their own topic is a great way to make learning more memorable. In large classes, simply put students into groups of 4-6 instead of by themselves or in pairs.

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I find that presentations work best when students are given a very specific set of guidelines, mostly related to avoiding death by PowerPoint. Here are some things I tell my students:

• Only 1 slide/person plus an introduction slide.
• No more than 10 words on that slide. Focus on an interesting picture, etc.
• You must memorize your section of the speech. You can have a piece of paper in your pocket for emergency use only. I won’t penalize you if you quickly look at it once.
• Each student in the group must talk for an equal amount of time.
• Think of 2-3 discussion questions you could ask the class.

#4: Easy English Vocabulary Quiz for Kids

#5: concentration.

Concentration is a fun game to help your students review vocabulary. There are different ways to play and you can match words-definitions or words-pictures. It doesn’t matter how big, or small the class is because you students can play in pairs or in groups of up to five.

This is an excellent activity for beginners or intermediate students and children especially love to play it. You really can adapt it to just about any age or level, and it lends itself well to vocabulary, as well as certain grammatical points. For example, problem and advice, or conditional clauses.

Try out this ESL group activity and I think your students will love it as much as mine do! Or, I’ll refund your money!!!

#6: Just a Minute

Just a Minute is a great warm-up activity for higher-level teenagers or adults. The idea is that students have to speak about a certain topic for an entire minute without stopping. You can also make it interactive by having a partner or group members ask follow-up questions based on what that first student said.

It’s challenging, but you can make it a bit easier by reducing the time for beginners to 30 seconds.

#7: Reading Activities for Big Classes

Reading is a great activity for bigger classes because it can be done individually without a lot of guidance from the teacher. Check out this ESL Reading Lesson Plan Template for how to conduct one of these lessons the CELTA way. You’ll find the usefulness of your reading lessons increases substantially by using a lesson plan template such as this one.

#8: ESL Surveys for Big Classes

ESL Surveys are one of my favorite activities for big ESL classes and they actually don’t work that well with fewer than 10 students. Surveys are great because they’re entirely student-centered and they also cover all 4-skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking). Students usually really enjoy talking to lots of their classmates too!

Be sure to set up some guidelines before you start. Here’s what I usually say:

• 1-1 speaking only. I don’t want to see any groups of 3 or more.
• The goal is not to finish first. The goal is to have lots of mini-conversations in English with a partner.
• Speak English! Sure, it’s easy to speak in your first language, but you’re actually wasting your time. The goal is to practice English so go for it.
• Don’t write full sentences, but just take notes for your partner’s answers.

Remember that the challenge is in the information gap nature of it, not having to complete it quickly.

• 146 Pages - 06/19/2020 (Publication Date)

#9: Board Games

Board games are a natural choice for large classes of ESL students because you can break up any number of students up into groups of 3-5. It’s student-centered teaching all the way! The other reason that I love using board games in the ESL classroom is that you can make one for just about any topic. Students love them too!

Don’t forget to bring a little prize for one student in each group to make it more interesting. They are ESL group games made easy.

ESL Activity for Big Classes #10: Running Dictation

Running Dictation is a fun activity that children, as well as adults, love. It gets your students up and out of their seats and can really energize a lethargic class. Running dictation also makes a great warm-up activity for that Monday morning at 9 class!

It’s one of my favorite 4-skills ESL activities.

#11: ESL Speaking Activity for Large Classes

#12: odd one out.

Odd One Out is an excellent ESL warm-up game to review vocabulary for small or big ESL classes. You put students into pairs and they compete against each other to add an element of fun to it.

#13: 3 Things

If you want to focus on writing with your students, then you may want to consider trying out 3 things. It’s a very simple, but fun ESL writing activity that requires in the way of materials or preparation. An English teacher’s dream, right?

You can find out more details about it right here:

3 Things ESL Writing Activity .

• 249 Pages - 09/11/2023 (Publication Date)

#14: Postcard ESL Writing Activity

If you can get your hands on a stack of blank postcards for cheap, then consider this simple but fun English writing activity. It’s a nice way to have students work on writing some simple sentences related to travel and vacations. Learn more about it here:

ESL Postcard Writing Activity .

#15: Don’t Forget about ESL Warmers

#16: me too esl group activity.

This is a simple but fun ESL speaking and listening activity that can be done with larger classes. It also requires nothing in the way of preparation or materials and what English teacher doesn’t need this kind of thing, right?

The way it works is that students say a fact about themselves to find out which of their classmates also has it in common. Check out all the details here:

Me Too! ESL Classroom Activity .

#17: Dictation Writing and Listening Activity

Another idea for big ESL classes is to do some dictation. This activity is heavy on listening and writing but also focuses on things like spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and grammar. In short, it’s a versatile ESL activity that can be done with one student or a hundred!

Want to find out more about it? All the information you need is right here:

ESL Dictation Practice .

Fun ESL games for bigger classes

#18: TV English Conversation Lesson Plan

One of the best things to do with large classes of students is to divide them into pairs, give them an easy-to-follow lesson plan that’s engaging and interesting and let them get to work. Then the role of the teacher is to monitor for errors and offer assistance if needed.

One of the best topics is TV. Almost everyone watches at least a couple of shows and most students really enjoy talking about it. Here’s the complete lesson plan:

TV ESL Lesson Plan .

Did you like this lesson? It’s from this book:

• 279 Pages - 07/12/2020 (Publication Date)

#19: Brainstorming Game Ideas

For larger classes, a nice activity is something related to brainstorming. In this case, instead of doing it on the whiteboard with the entire class, divide students up into smaller groups of 3-5 students to complete these activities together. They are ideal for a warmer or review activity.

If you want to help generate some new ideas and get some creative juices flowing in your classes, have a look at some of the top picks here:

Brainstorm Game Ideas.

#20: Conversation Questions ESL for Big Classes

• 130 Pages - 07/02/2020 (Publication Date)

If students in your class are interested in doing some “free-talking,” then consider this solution. Put students into pairs or groups of three, give them a print-out of conversation questions around a certain topic and let them get to talking. Of course, don’t even consider having a class discussion with a large class because it’ll be far too teacher-centred and there won’t be enough student-talking-time.

Here’s my top recommendation:

Conversation Questions for ESL .

#21: 120-90-60 Speaking Fluency Activity

#22: current events lesson plan.

One of my favourite things to do with bigger English classes is to divide students up into pairs or small groups of 3-4, give them an easy to follow lesson plan that’s heavy on the conversation and then let them get to it. This one on current events is one such example. It contains the following:

• Warmer question
• Vocabulary, idioms, and phrases
• Conversation questions
• Writing prompts that are ideal for homework or extra credit

Take a look here:

Current Events English Conversation Lesson.

#23: Man/Woman on the Street Interview Activity

If you have a big TEFL class, try out this speaking and listening interview activity which can easily be done in as many small groups of 4-5 students as necessary. It’s fun, interactive, and extremely student-centered. It’s ideal for eliciting opinions from students on current events or controversial topics.

Sounds like exactly what you need to try out with your large class? Check out this article for all the information you need to get started:

ESL Interview Activity (Current Events) .

#24: English Phrases and Expressions

• 142 Pages - 11/22/2020 (Publication Date)

All students can benefit from knowing more common English expressions. This helps conversations go much more smoothly if students have a variety of useful phrases at their fingertips.

I find that the best way is to teach them in related sets. Here’s one example of that:

Common English Phares for Offering Help .

#25: Word Categories ESL Games and Activities

When teaching vocabulary, I like to focus on categories of words like jobs, food, around the city, etc. This is also how most ESL textbooks are organized. It’s helpful because students can learn related words at the same time, instead of random ones that aren’t really connected which makes them more memorable. Check out my recommendations here:

Words Categories Games.

#26: Hot Potato

#27: freeze group esl writing activity.

A fun way to practice writing with larger classes is to have students do freeze. Instead of writing stories together as a class, put students into groups of 4-6 and have them make that same number of stories. Then, in the end, each group can choose their favourite story and read it out loud to the class.  More information about it:

Freeze ESL Group Writing .

#28: Closest in Meaning

This is a simple reading activity that works very well for larger TEFL classes. Students have to read the original sentence and then choose another sentence that fits most closely with the original one. It’s possible to make it as easy or as difficult as you want. Try it out:

Closest in Meaning .

#29: ESL Vocab Auction

#30: debating.

If you teach a very large class, consider setting up some debates about interesting, silly, or controversial issues. It’s the ideal activity to do in groups of four, with two students arguing the pro side and two the con side.

For some of the best ideas for topics, be sure to check this out:

Debate Topics .

#31: English Phrases, Expressions, and Idioms

A great class, whether with one student or lots of them starts off with a solid lesson plan. This one is for higher-level students and covers English phrases and idioms. Try it out, in class or to give as a self-study or homework assignment. Have a look:

English Expressions Lesson Plan .

#32: Things to With Large Classes on the First Day

#33: directions esl activities.

One of my favourite units to do with large TEFL classes is directions. There are a number of fun activities, including information gap ones that are a natural fit. Have a look at some of my favourites here:

Giving Directions ESL Activities and Games .

#34: Find Something in Common 

This is a simple ESL icebreaker activity that works well for any class size, from 6 to 50. Students have to mingle with their classmates, to try and find out what they have in common with each person, using questions.

The best part is that it requires absolutely no preparation and no materials except for a pen and paper. Learn more about it here:

ESL Find Something in Common.

#35: St. Patrick’s Day

I love to celebrate the holidays with my students. It can be a nice change of pace from the usual textbook activities. For this holiday, there is certainly lots to talk about as there is both an interesting history and some fun traditions happening these days. Here are some of my favourites:

ESL Saint Patrick Day Activities .

#36: Dialogue Substitution 

#37: small talk activities.

Small talk is one of those important speaking and conversation skills that all English learners need to master. Small talk serves an important social function and even though it might seem easy, there are lots of subtle rules surrounding it.

That’s why I like to spend time working on it with my students. Here are some of my top ideas:

Ideas for Small Talk ESL.

#38: ESL Short Stories for Reading Comprehension

One of the best things to do with large classes is a reading-focused lesson. It’s far better than the teacher trying to lead a discussion with the entire class because all of the students are active, instead of just a few.

The main issue is finding appropriate materials. If your students are at an intermediate level, you’ll want to check out these short stories about life in Canada. Have a look here:

ESL Reading Comprehension Short Stories .

#39: Five Senses

#40: tefl vocabulary sheets.

If you want an easy solution for teaching big classes, then look no further than these vocab sheets. They’re an all-in-one solution that you can just print off and take to class. Yes, it really is that easy. Find out more about them here:

TEFL Vocab Sheets .

#41: Jigsaw Activities

#42: after reading strategies and ideas.

It can be a little bit tricky to come up with things to do in large English classes. Reading is a natural fit though! It’s easy for students to do this on their own and you don’t have to worry about things like student talking time.

The key is to make sure that you’re getting the most mileage from each story or other kind of reading passage that you choose. That’s where these ideas come in! Check them out:

After Reading Strategies .

#43: Show and Tell

Show and tell is a nice warm-up activity for all ages. If you have a large English class, then consider doing 2-3 students at the beginning of each class, instead of everyone in a single day. Find out more about it:

#44: Round Robin Story

Try out this simple listening/speaking, or writing activity with your big classes of English learners. For lots of students, it’s best to put them into small groups and do it as a writing activity. Learn more:

Round Robin Story Writing Activity.

#45: Twenty Questions

#46: there is and there are games and activities.

A key concept that all students need to master is when to use “there is” and “there are.” Have a look at some of my favourite activities for teaching this:

There Is There Are Games and Activities .

#47: Guessing Games to Play

Who doesn’t love a fun guessing game, right? They add an element of mystery and can ideal for a really big class. Have a look here at some of my top ideas:

Guessing Games to Play .

What are some Tips for Teaching Large ESL Classes?

Teaching large ESL classes can present unique challenges, but with proper planning and strategies, you can effectively manage and engage your students. Here are some tips to consider:

Classroom Management

• Establish clear expectations and rules from the beginning and ensure they are consistently enforced.
• Use seating arrangements that facilitate interaction and minimize distractions.
• Use a variety of techniques to gain and maintain students’ attention, such as signaling systems, gestures, or choral responses.
• Break down instructions into smaller steps to ensure understanding and manage transitions smoothly.

Group Work and Pairing

• Divide students into smaller groups or pairs for activities and discussions. This promotes active participation and allows for more individualized attention.
• Assign specific roles within groups to ensure everyone contributes and stays engaged.
• Provide clear instructions and time limits for group tasks to maintain focus and productivity.

Visual Aids and Technology

• Utilize visual aids, such as posters, charts, or multimedia presentations, to enhance comprehension and engage students visually.
• Incorporate technology, when available, to deliver interactive lessons, provide online resources, or use educational apps that cater to larger class sizes.

Active Learning Strategies

• Implement a variety of active learning strategies, such as think-pair-share, jigsaw activities, role-plays, or hands-on tasks, to encourage participation and foster a dynamic learning environment.
• Incorporate games and competitions to make learning enjoyable and to motivate students.

Clear and Concise Instructions

• Use simple and clear language when giving instructions, and ensure students understand before beginning an activity.
• Use visual cues, gestures, or demonstration to support verbal instructions and facilitate comprehension.

Monitor and Provide Feedback

• Regularly circulate around the classroom to monitor student progress and offer assistance or clarification when needed.
• Provide constructive feedback to individuals or groups, emphasizing both strengths and areas for improvement.
• Encourage peer feedback and collaboration to foster a supportive learning community.

Differentiated Instruction

• Recognize and accommodate the diverse needs and abilities of students in the class.
• Offer differentiated tasks or assignments that cater to different proficiency levels or learning styles.
• Provide extra support or extension activities for students who may require additional challenges or assistance.

Engage with Multimodal Activities

Incorporate a variety of language skills and modalities (reading, writing, listening, speaking) into your lessons to cater to different learning preferences and reinforce comprehension.

Time Management

• Plan lessons carefully and allocate sufficient time for different activities, allowing for smooth transitions between tasks.
• Prioritize essential learning objectives and adjust lesson plans accordingly to ensure meaningful learning experiences within the available time frame.

Build a Positive Classroom Culture

• Foster a supportive and inclusive classroom environment where all students feel valued and respected.
• Encourage peer collaboration, cultural sharing, and mutual support among students.
• Celebrate achievements and recognize the progress of individuals and the class as a whole.

Need Even More ESL Activities?

• 148 Pages - 03/09/2016 (Publication Date)

If you found these ESL activities for big classes useful, then you’ll want to check out this book over on Amazon: 101 ESL Activities: For Teenagers and Adults . They’ll help make your classes interesting and fun, guaranteed.

Plus you’ll save a ton of time when lesson planning by not having to wade through all the junk on the Internet to find that one ESL game or activity that you can actually use in your classes. These ones are tried and tested and they’re awesome.

You can find the book in both digital and print formats. Keep a copy on the bookshelf in your office to use as a handy reference guide. Or, consider downloading the digital version to your phone or tablet with the free Kindle reading app.

Yes, it really is that easy to level up your teaching game. Head over to Amazon to pick yourself up a copy today, but only if you want to get yourself a serious dose of ESL teaching awesome in your life:

Teaching Large English Classes FAQs

There are a number of common questions that people have about teaching bigger TEFL classes. Here are the answers to some of the most popular ones.

How do you Teach Large Classes?

Teaching large classes is difficult but it can be made more manageable by using some of the following strategies:

• Break students up into groups.
• Change groups frequently.
• Use technology in the English classroom .
• Consider a “flipped-classroom” model.
• Use a variety of games and activities.

What are the Challenges of Teaching Large Classes?

There are a number of challenges when teaching large classes. These include the following:

• Lack of flexibility
• Various levels (particularly in language classes)
• Classroom management issues including crowd control
• Only a small amount of time for individual attention for each student
• Difficulty in monitoring student progress

How do you Manage an Overcrowded Classroom?

There are a number of strategies to employ to manage an overcrowded classroom. Some of them include the following:

• Using groups.
• Making sure students are always busy
• Keeping things interesting with a variety of activities
• Making liberal use of early-finisher tasks

Why are Bigger Classes Better?

Sometimes, bigger classes can be better for students. This is because they can encourage students to use their problem-solving skills and critical thinking instead of just relying on the teacher. Also, students must work together and rely on each other as resources for learning.

Have your say about these ESL Activities for Bigger Classes

What are your thoughts about these games and activities for big English classes? Did you try out one of them from this list or do you have another that you’d like to recommend? Leave a  comment below and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

Also be sure to give this article a share on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter. It’ll help other busy English teachers, like yourself, find this useful resource.

Last update on 2022-07-17 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

About Jackie

Jackie Bolen has been teaching English for more than 20 years to students in South Korea and Canada. She's taught all ages, levels and kinds of TEFL classes. She holds an MA degree, along with the Celta and Delta English teaching certifications.

Jackie is the author of more than 100 books for English teachers and English learners, including Business English Vocabulary Builder , 67 ESL Conversation Topics ,and 39 No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities for Teenagers and Adults . She loves to share her ESL games, activities, teaching tips, and more with other teachers throughout the world.

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Center for Teaching

Teaching large classes.

Here, we present strategies to help instructors deal with some of the challenges associated with teaching large classes:

Promoting Student Engagement

What causes students to not participate.

While encouraging class participation can be challenging in any class, it can be especially difficult for instructors of large classes. To effectively evoke participation in such teaching contexts, it is helpful to understand the factors that discourage involvement. In the article, “ Putting the Participation Puzzle Together ,” Dr. Maryellen Weimer attempts to uncover precisely what motivates students to be active participants in the classroom.  Weimer does this by analyzing a recent study that tests common hypotheses about the nature of student participation. The study found that while a multitude of issues affect student participation levels, a few emerge as particularly important. First, students’ perception of faculty authority can make a substantial difference in determining whether or not students participate. Second, students’ perceptions of the instructor , developed through interactions outside of the class, have a large impact on student participation. Finally, student fears of peer judgment explain why many students choose not to participate.

Faculty Authority: Combatting perceptions of the instructor as fount of knowledge

The issue of faculty authority requires particular attention. In our often freshmen-heavy large classes, many students feel that the instructor is the arbiter of knowledge. To these students, the ideas and arguments of the instructor are not meant to be challenged. Certainly, students like this are more likely to sit silently in class and take it all in.  If, as instructors, we hope to avoid this, we must make sure that our courses are content-centered, not instructor-centered. How does one do this? We can model the kind of questioning inherent in our disciplines and ask students to practice those questioning skills through exercises, in-class and out. We can also be careful to underscore the degree to which knowledge in our fields is contested and constantly evolving.

To allow students to practice the skills they should develop, it can be helpful to break up the class into 10-20 minute segments, incorporating a specific question or exercise that requires student participation in each segment. The question or exercise can take several forms.

Think-pair-share – In this simple exercise, the instructor poses a question or problem to the class. After giving students time to consider their response (think), the students are asked to partner with another student to discuss their responses (pair). Pairs of students can then be asked to report their conclusions and reasoning to the larger group, which can be used as a starting point to promote discussion in the class as a whole (Angelo and Cross, 1993). This exercise helps promote engagement because students feel greater responsibility for participation when paired with one other student; lack of participation becomes obvious and problematic. In addition, the inclusion of “think” time and the initial opportunity to talk about a response with a single peer reduces the anxiety some students feel about responding to instructor prompts.

Minute paper – This classroom assessment technique (Classroom Assessment Technique Teaching Guide) can also be used to promote student engagement (Angelo and Cross, 1993). At the end of a class segment, students are asked to spend one to three minutes writing the main point of the class to that point as well as questions that remain. These papers can serve multiple purposes: they can be used by the instructor as a formative assessment technique; they serve as a tool to promote metacognition, asking students to consider what they do and don’t understand; they can be used as the basis for small or large group discussion. As with the think-pair-share technique, the minute paper gives students time to compose and articulate their thoughts, increasing their comfort with asking questions or entering discussion.

Muddiest point paper – This modified version of the minute paper asks students to articulate the point that is most unclear to them at a given point (Angelo and Cross, 1993). It serves the same functions as has the same potential uses described for the minute paper.

Clicker questions – Questions that can be presented as multiple choice questions are particularly amenable to use with “clickers,” or classroom response systems. All students in the class are asked to choose a response to the question, and the results can be displayed in real time. If the instructor wishes, student responses can be tracked, either to serve as an attendance measure or as a formative assessment tool. This approach has the benefit of broad student participation in the mental work of answering the question. In addition, clicker questions can be used to foster discussion very effectively (Crouch and Mazur, 2001); if a significant fraction of the class answers incorrectly, then student groups can be asked to discuss before re-voting.

When planning these questions or activities, keep in mind that large classes present advantages as well as special challenges. In these large classes, think of students as a diverse human resource to be drawn upon in pursuit of our learning goals. To help ensure that the students serve as this resource, it is vital that we set the right tone from the beginning . Make it clear during the first weeks of class that we expect students to question us and interact during class, and introduce questions or exercises that make that interaction both expected and safe.

These approaches are particularly effective when they take advantage of the opportunity for small-group work. Studies suggest that small-group activities promote student mastery of material , enhance critical thinking skills, provide rapid feedback for the instructor, and facilitate the development of affective dimensions in students, such as students’ sense of self-efficacy and learner empowerment (Cooper and Robinson, 2001).[1] Assigning group members roles (like facilitator, recorder, divergent thinker, etc.) or distributing a group assessment rubric can keep groups relatively balanced and fair and help ensure participation by all group members.

Instructor demeanor

Student perceptions of the instructor can be particularly challenging to deal with given that in large classes, it is more difficult to have meaningful exchanges with each and every student. However, there is much that we can do to project a demeanor that promotes student participation.

Make it a priority to learn and use student names. Some instructors use “equity cards”, which are generated from students’ pictures (from the class roll). Instructors call on people at random from the card pile. This ensures that the instructor uses students’ names, helps ensure a broad base of participation, makes students less likely to disengage during class, and can be a helpful tool in learning students’ names. Other instructors accomplish the same goals by gathering student ID cards at the beginning of class and choosing students at random to answer questions.

Establish a rapport. At the beginning of each semester, Andy Van Schaack of the HOD department at Vanderbilt asks students to fill out note cards describing some of their interests.  By looking over these note cards and memorizing student names, Dr. Van Schaack gets to know his students and tries to greet them by name and speak with them as they enter the classroom.  Such efforts often result in a better rapport between professor and student, and as a consequence, a more engaged classroom.

Be patient and affirmative with students in class and out. These behaviors can bolster student confidence, and more confident students are much more likely to participate in class. Many students will shut down in a class when they perceive an instructor as harsh. In such cases, the fear of instructor disapproval becomes more pronounced.

Develop strategies to encourage students to use office hours. Dr. Andy Van Schaack requires students to meet with him in groups of four during the first few weeks of the semester. He finds that the brief social interaction (generally, about 5 minutes per student) helps him remember students’ names and makes the students more comfortable with him and a small group of their colleagues.

Peer judgment

Fear of peer judgment is a disincentive for many students, particularly in large classes where students fear being embarrassed in front of dozens or even hundreds of their peers. To best deal with student fears of peer judgment, it’s critical that instructors promote an environment of trust and mutual respect from the very beginning of a course. In such an environment, students are more likely to feel safe to actively participate in class. Try to foster a sense of personal connection between students and instructors through group and partner activities that help students get better acquainted. The resulting feelings of cohesiveness are especially valuable because students who feel that connection are far less likely to go against their classroom community’s norms. Finally, be sure to balance student voices by not allowing any students to dominate discussions and by protecting students from interruption.

All of the approaches described above allow students the opportunity to engage with class questions and challenges anonymously or in small groups instead of or prior to large class discussion. These tools can therefore reduce student fears and thereby promote participation. In addition, online discussion boards can provide structured opportunities for students who are otherwise too shy to participate in class discussion.

Handling Student Grades

Grading in large courses: common problems.

Large courses come with grading problems familiar to instructors across a range of disciplines. On the one hand, we don’t want to have so many graded assignments that we bog ourselves down with incessant grading. On the other, we do want to have enough assessments that we have a fair grading system for our students and ourselves. Is there a way to strike a balance between these two things without relying entirely upon multiple choice exercises? Absolutely.

Rethinking Formative Assessments

There are several ways to incorporate more formative assessments into our class that do not add significantly to our workload, but give students and instructors the critical feedback that they need. Discussion-oriented activities in the classroom enable students to practice course-related skills and demonstrate comprehension of the material, while not requiring formal grading. For these kinds of activities, students can receive valuable verbal (and sometimes written) feedback from professors, TAs, and other students. The incorporation of polling technologies like “clickers” or Top Hat  can also serve to engage students while giving students a sense of how they’re doing in the course, and giving instructors an opportunity to assess student-learning.  These types of feedback-providing activities are especially valuable in classes in which the first graded assignments are not returned to students for several weeks.

The Value of Group Projects and Papers

What of summative assessments? We will need to grade some homework, papers, and exams, so how do we best grade 200 students? One option is to split students into groups.  In a class of 200, organizing our class into 50 groups of four students to work on weekly homework assignments or papers reduces our grading load by 75% while still giving students a chance to practice their skills and receive feedback. This substantial difference in workload may make collecting homework assignments or additional paper assignments feasible in these large classes. Such group work also has value in promoting the kinds of communication skills that represent critical learning goals in so many of our classrooms. However, group projects also raise different challenges in cultivating fair and equitable groups that we will need to address. To help promote active contribution by all group members, there are a number of tactics that we can try, such as

• Assigning each member of the group a role in the group.
• Building a peer review element into the group work so students feel accountable to one another.
• Offering small bonuses on exams for those groups whose members all maintained a certain average, in order to promote positive interdependence.

Light Grading on Short Assignments

Another way to build a steadier stream of graded feedback into our courses without making grading a full-time job is to maintain a simple grading system for short assignments. For example, we can grade papers on a three-to-five point scale, with specific pieces of information required for each point. A check/check-minus/check-plus system also makes our job as a grader quicker and easier while providing feedback to instructor and student alike. It’s important to realize that we need not grade everything on a 100-point scale with copious comments.

The Value of Grading Rubrics

Finally, by utilizing a detailed grading rubric for papers and other assignments, we can streamline the grading process and reduce the need for extensive written comments. Rubrics can also obviate problems of inconsistency when we’re dealing with more than one TA grader. Effective rubrics can thus facilitate a faster grading system that is also fairer for students.

Paper Comments

One of the most time-consuming aspects of grading in any classroom is providing comments on student papers.  How do we provide worthwhile comments to students while protecting our time? There are a few ways to approach this problem. Many professors use shorthand comments on papers and hand back papers with a guide to that shorthand. Indeed, often we make the same comments over and over again on many papers. Rather than repeating those comments in full sentences, a shorthand comment of perhaps a word or acronym, keyed to a guide can save considerable time for professors. That’s not to say either that all comments should be “cookie-cutter” in this way, but using this technique for half of one’s written comments can shave hours off the grading process. For more information on such shorthand paper feedback, please see a recent Professor Pedagogy post, entitled, “ A Mountain of Grading ,” which discusses a CFT workshop from August 21 st , 2012, “Effective and Efficient Grading,” led by Assistant Director Nancy Chick, and Graduate Teaching Fellow Beth Koontz.

Robo-graded homework

It can also be valuable to take advantage of automated online homework services. Some examples:

The publishing company Pearson offers Mastering Biology, an online, robo-graded homework and testing system that includes multiple choice questions that are coded to Bloom’s taxonomy and normed to nationwide answers as well as ordering and sorting activities, several of which are associated with elaborate and informative animations. In addition, the system includes Socratic questions and hints to help students think through processes they are misunderstanding as well as opportunities for multiple trials at hard concepts. The company offers similar programs for a variety of disciplines, including

• Mastering A&P
• Mastering Astronomy
• Mastering Chemistry
• Mastering Engineering
• Mastering Genetics
• Mastering Geography
• Mastering Microbiology
• Mastering Physics

A series of case studies on the utility of the system can be found here .

Many science textbook publishers offer similar systems; instructors should consider these systems when choosing a textbook.

• General chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Biochemistry
• Analytical chemistry
• Chemical engineering
• Introductory physics

ALEKS is a textbook-independent assessment and learning system that relies upon artificial intelligence techniques to assess students’ understanding of key course concepts and track them to learning activities that help move their understanding forward. Built on the principle of hierarchical concept organization in chemistry and math, the system asks students diagnostic questions to locate their areas of mastery and then tailors subsequent steps to build on existing knowledge.

This list, while far from exhaustive, is intended to suggest starting points for online tools that may improve learning in large classes.

Ultimately, we do not need to choose between superficial or minimal grading and a grading system that leaves us and our TAs overwhelmed. With the right strategies and techniques, we can both give our students frequent feedback, graded and ungraded, while still maintaining some semblance of a social life. For more information on grading, please see our teaching guide entitled, “ Grading Student Work .”

Working with Teaching Assistants

One common undergraduate complaint in large classes is with regard to inconsistency in grading.  Most instructors will recognize the refrain, “My TA is an unfair grader! Can I change sections?” Indeed, it can be frustrating for undergraduates who believe that they are the victim of the “tough grader,” and are receiving worse grades than their friends despite handing in comparable work. So how do we ensure consistency and mitigate undergraduate charges of unfairness?

Have regular grading meetings! The best way to promote grading consistency among our TAs is to meet as a group soon after collecting an exam or paper. If one is grading essays, identify and photocopy an exemplary essay, a few mediocre essays, and a poor essay and distribute these essays to each member of the group. Prior to the meeting, have each TA grade and comment upon these essays. At the meeting, go through each essay one-by-one. Ask each person what grade they gave to each essay and why.  Ask them about the best and worst aspects of each piece of writing. Such a meeting provides a wonderful opportunity for our graders, especially our inexperienced graders, to think about how they’re approaching their grading. It can serve to calibrate expectations for the exam or paper. The meeting can also serve as a forum for us to explain our expectations for the exams or papers. It is unfair to assume that our TAs will simply know what we’re looking for on any given exam question or paper topic.

Use grading rubrics. A carefully designed grading rubric can both minimize the amount of time spent grading, an important consideration in large classes, and serve as a common standard for our TAs. We can even enlist TA support in constructing a grading rubric. Such an exercise can be valuable to TAs because it facilitates the grading process, but it also gives them an opportunity to play a major role in student assessment, a valuable experience for those TAs who hope to teach courses of their own at some future time. It also gives us a new and unique perspective on class exams, papers, and assignments that may ultimately enrich the course.

Divide up grading sections. We can better ensure consistency by assigning different grading sections to different TAs. This is more challenging with essays, but is a common approach for exam-grading.  What this technique entails specifically depends on the makeup of our exam, but for example, perhaps one TA grades the short-answer section, a second TA grades the first essay, and a third TA grades the second essay.  While there still may be some inconsistency in the “harshness” of grading between sections, with this method, students can hardly argue that their particular grader is tougher: everyone’s exam is graded by the same graders!

Handling Grade Complaints

In most classes, large or small, grade complaints are inevitable. However, the issue can become more pronounced when a couple of upset students becomes a dozen or more. How can we best deal with grading complaints?

Have a formalized system in place. Instructors of large classes approach grade complaints in a variety of ways. Some insist that undergraduates come directly to them with their concerns. Others suggest that undergraduates speak to their TAs first before consulting the professor. Still others give full authority to their TAs to handle all grade complaints. The important thing is that we have a formalized system, preferably outlined in our syllabus. Students should know what is expected of them, and what their options are if they feel that they have been graded unfairly. Tell students upfront what the protocol will be.

Require complaints to be written out and submitted. One common technique to avoid frivolous grade complaints is requiring a written explanation of the complaint at an early stage in our protocol. Oftentimes, upon starting this piece of writing, undergraduates with a visceral reaction to a bad grade will see that the grade was deserved. By requiring this piece of writing, we’re also forcing students to confront the written comments on their exam or paper. Sometimes, students simply see the bad mark and seek out the instructor, rather than reading and mulling over grader comments.

Institute a 24-hour rule. Another way to ensure that students are carefully considering the grade and comments and aren’t simply going with a visceral reaction is to have a 24-hour rule. What that means is that students are required to take 24-hours before contacting the TA or professor with a grade complaint.  This 24-hour period often serves as a “cooling off” period in which students can read and think about grader comments.

Managing TAs Who Lead Discussions, Lab Sessions, and Review Sessions

Know Your TAs. Just as with grading, TAs come to discussion-leading with different levels of expertise.  Some will be at home in the classroom. Others will be terrified to speak in front of their students.  It’s a good idea to get a gauge on this in the weeks preceding the semester so that we can give our TAs the appropriate level of support. Some may be independent-minded and will desire considerable control over what happens in their classrooms, and others may require strong guidance. Thus, before we get to know our undergraduates, we ought to get to know our TAs.

Hold regular meetings. Should we have TAs that require a strong support system or even if we don’t and we want to maintain some control over discussions, lab sessions, and review sessions, regular weekly or bi-weekly meetings can be valuable. These meetings can serve many purposes. We can use this time to go over important concepts and course content with our TAs who likely don’t have our expertise.  We can also use this time as a “check-in” period to get a sense of how the course is going for our TAs and undergraduates alike. Professor/TA meetings can also be a forum in which we provide TAs with handouts or discussion guides to help facilitate their class time. Ultimately, how much control we want to exert over our discussion sections, lab sessions, or review sessions is up to us, but setting aside a time to meet with our TAs is valuable because it provides professor and TA alike with a support structure in which everyone can talk through issues relating to the class.

Dealing with Cheating

Cheating is a common problem in college courses big and small, but in large courses, it can be particularly difficult to identify cheating when it happens.  That’s because we’re grading such a high volume of exams, essays, and assignments that the kind of careful analysis often necessary to identify cheaters is more difficult.  We might not know our students and their work as well, and it’s that knowledge that typically helps college instructors identify cheating when it is going on.  As anyone who has proctored an exam for 100+ students can attest, it can be very difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on in our small city-sized courses.  So what can we do?

Given that fact, the students in our often freshmen-heavy large courses are even less clear on what we mean when we speak of these concepts. Sure, our students may have read the Vanderbilt Honor Code at some point in the distant past, but while they are likely familiar with black and white scenarios (copying answers off of their neighbor’s exam is cheating), do they know what constitutes an honor code violation in those grey and murky scenarios that sometimes confront them?

• What are our expectations for “open book” exams?
• If students are allowed to work on homework assignments in pairs or groups, are they allowed to hand in comparable or identical assignments?
• How do we want students to cite sources in their papers?  Is a works cited page required?

As the instructor, we need to anticipate such questions.  Upon handing out a paper or homework assignment, we ought to have a conversation with students about our expectations. Ideally, we should put those expectations in writing on the syllabus or handout sheet, so that students have something to which they can frequently refer.  Putting those expectations in writing also helps should we ever need to charge a student with an Honor Code violation to the Honor Council.  Some instructors even choose to dedicate early class time to giving their students a tutorial on cheating and plagiarism .

Dealing with cheating on exams

Trying to catch an individual or a small group of cheaters in an exam of 100+ students can be a difficult task, but there’s a lot that we can do to make cheating more difficult.

Proctoring effectively. Proctoring can seem basic: watch the students as they take the exam and make sure they’re not chatting or looking at one another’s tests.  However, there are some aspects to proctoring that are easily overlooked.  For example, it can be difficult to observe students when they are wearing a hat that covers their eyes, so many professors require that students either remove their hats, or put their hats on backwards.  Another often overlooked feature of proctoring is the need for at least two proctors.  Part of the proctor’s role is often to field student questions regarding the exam, but while the instructor is answering that question, who is observing the students?

Randomize the blue books. In many of our large classes, students use blue books for exams.  Students are typically asked to bring these blue books with them to class on exam day, especially in large classes where the instructor would have to pay a considerable amount of money to provide all students with exam booklets.  Some students see this as an easy way to cheat: write answers in the blue book and refer to those answers throughout the exam period.  Of course, there is an easy way around this problem. Ask students to hand in their blue books as they walk in the classroom. Shuffle the blue books, and then re-distribute them to students randomly.

Randomize the exams. Perhaps the most traditional way to cheat on an exam is for a student to copy off of his or her neighbor. The easiest way to avoid this is to hand out different versions of the exam. Some professors hand these exams out on different color sheets of paper to further confuse a student who might like to copy his or her neighbor’s exam.

Randomize the seating. In our teeming large classes, it isn’t always possible to leave spaces in-between each exam-taker.  We can, however, shake up the seating arrangement. For example, one common technique is to require students seated in the back few rows to switch with those students seated in the front few rows. This can prove logistically challenging with a large class and a limited amount of time, but if we have a couple of minutes to shake the students up, it can do a lot to prevent exam takers from cheating.

Switch up our exams each semester. Designing tests can be a time-consuming affair. For that reason, some instructors use the same test questions year after year. While this is tempting, it is not advisable if we hope to prevent cheating. Some fraternity and sorority houses, in particular, keep files of past exams for a variety of courses. Change exam questions up each semester to prevent some students from having an unfair advantage.

Dealing with cheating on papers

Identifying cheating on papers often requires knowledge of a student’s writing abilities.  It’s often when students who really struggle with writing hand in flawless masterpieces that instructors are tipped off to a student’s dishonest tactics. In large classes, we may not have as good of a sense of our students and their writing, so what can we do to stop plagiarism?

Provide students with clear instructions. Many of our students are inexperienced when it comes to citing sources.  How do we want them to cite their sources? How thoroughly? Will parenthetical citations suffice?  What citation style is preferable? Do we require a bibliography or works cited page? Answer these questions in a handout or in the syllabus.

Use Turnitin.  Brightspace allows users to choose whether or not to run student assignments through “Turnitin,” a program that checks for plagiarism, generates feedback for students on revision strategies, and serves as an online platform for instructors to provide electronic feedback to students. To use Turnitin, instructors must select the option to “enable Turnitin” for each individual assignment that they would like to run through Turnitin. Learn how .

So we caught a student cheating.  Now what?

There are a number of ways that we can approach an Honor Code violation.

Take the issue to the honor council. Simply visit the Vanderbilt Honor Council’s page ( Vanderbilt Honor Council ) and click “Report a Violation.” There are many advantages to this option. The Vanderbilt Honor Council has vast experience dealing with violations and handing the issue over to them takes what can be a substantial weight off our shoulders.

Meet with the student. Once one turns the issue over to the Honor Council, one should not discuss the incident with the student. Before one goes to the Honor Council, however, meeting with the student and asking them about what happened can be valuable. Students often appreciate the opportunity to discuss the alleged violation and such a meeting provides the instructor with an opportunity to access the veracity of the student’s claims. Sometimes the issue is simply a miscommunication or misunderstanding.  If that’s the case, it’s better to avoid triggering the Honor Council process, which is often long and involved for the student.

Ask the student to re-do the exam, paper, or assignment. It is within our rights as the instructor to ask students to re-do an assignment if the violation is minor. It is, however, strongly discouraged to simply give the student a zero on the exam, paper, or assignment. The student may file a complaint against us if they’re denied any kind of due process in an accusation of cheating.

For more information on dealing with cheating, please consult our teaching guide entitled, “ Cheating & Plagiarism .”

Managing Logistical Issues

Our large courses come with an array of logistical issues that can turn into a nightmare if we are not prepared to handle them. How do we prevent our e-mail boxes from overflowing with student e-mails the 24 hours before an exam? How do we manage that line that sometimes develops around the building during our office hours?

Taking Class Attendance

While many instructors do not take class attendance in their large classes, some do.  But how can one best take attendance in a class of 200 students?  Certainly, many instructors rely upon a attendance sheet that is passed around the room, but this is often a headache with the sheet being lost or students signing in for one another.  Many instructors take attendance through the use of clickers. Brief in-class assignments or quizzes can also be valuable in taking attendance.  One can require that students answer a class day-related prompt on a notecard at the end of class, sign it, and hand it in before leaving.  This notecard can be graded or not.  Another way to ensure that class attendance remains high is by giving pop quizzes periodically.

Managing Student E-mail

When we teach a seminar class, we can expect a small percentage of students to e-mail us regarding the coming exam the 24-hours preceding it. When we have 100+ students, however, that same small percentage can overwhelm our e-mail box. What can we do?

Be upfront about how often we will check and answer student e-mails. Our undergraduate students have grown up in an age of e-mail in which many of them expect immediate responses to their e-mailed questions, big or small. This, however, is an unreasonable expectation for those of us not attached to our smart phones, and even for some of us who are, and students need to be made aware of this early on in the semester. Many instructors discuss their rules for e-mail in their syllabus. For example, “I will read and respond to student e-mails once per day, each morning” or “Please give me 24 hours to respond to each e-mail.” Such rules can help avoid rapid-fire e-mails from students, many of which may ask why it’s taking so long for us to respond to their question. Students will also be more inclined to think ahead with their questions and concerns: the professor will not get back to students immediately just because they waited until the last minute on a given assignment.

Consider placing limits on student e-mails. Some instructors give students a line or word limit for their e-mails.  Some suggest that students keep emails to four lines or less, while others have more stringent requirements. Andrew Van Schaack, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt, limits the body of student emails to 140 characters, the length of a Tweet. Such rules help ensure that student e-mail is clear and concise.

Establish rules about the kinds of questions we will respond to via e-mail. Some questions lend themselves to quick e-mailed responses, others don’t. It may be valuable to tell students what kinds of questions we will answer via e-mail and which are better left for office hours or in-class Q&As.

Avoid the pre-exam e-mail deluge. The 24 hours prior to an exam is often a time when panicked e-mails flood into instructor inboxes. Likewise, the 24 hours prior to a paper due date is also a busy time, as students often scramble for extensions. Again, clarity with expectations is important. One ought to notify students when one will stop responding to e-mails regarding the exam, whether it’s 24 hours, 12 hours, or 2 hours in advance, and how long one requires to provide feedback on a rough draft of a paper. Clear and consistent rules can be helpful and may encourage students to think ahead.

Managing Office Hours

Create an office hour sign-up sheet. Being an instructor of a large course sometimes means managing dozens of eager office hour visitors each week. However, having students mill around outside our office during our office hours isn’t only a nuisance for our office neighbors, it’s not a valuable use of our students’ time. Consider implementing a formal scheduling system for our office hours, perhaps one publicly available to our students such as Scheduly , so they know when they ought to plan their visit.

Encourage students to utilize their TAs. TAs are capable of handling many student issues, and there are some issues for which our TAs are actually better suited than instructors (for example, for discussion section questions or lab questions). Make sure that our TAs are available for office hours and encourage students to visit TAs with their issues, particularly when we are unavailable or otherwise too busy.

Lay some ground rules. Sometimes, in the days preceding an exam, in particular, students will visit our office hours expecting to hold an hour-long one-on-one study session. This could certainly be valuable for the student, but can we manage such a session given the time constraints that come with being an instructor of a large class? If the answer is no, we may want to organize a dedicated review session or simply tell students in advance that we cannot be their “study buddy.” Other times students may come by to chat. While there is value in cultivating cordial relationships with our students, if this is not something that we can abide in our schedule, instruct students to only drop by office hours if they have specific questions.

Re-conceptualize our office hours. Office hours tend to be one-on-one meetings with students. However, there are some situations in which meeting with students in a group can be just as effective and a time-saver as well. Do three students want to meet with us regarding the makeup of the exam? Assure that they’re comfortable meeting as a group, and then schedule them together.

Consider holding online office hours. If our schedules make fulfilling our weekly office hours difficult, or if we are interested in holding extra office hours in a given week, we can always hold remote office hours.  If we are interested in conducting office hours online, Brightspace provides a mechanism to do so. The virtual classroom feature lets you live-broadcast and collaborate with students online.

Integrating Technology

However, one of the most useful features of Brightspace is also among the least utilized: the discussion board feature. Integrating an online discussion board into the classroom experience is a great way to provide structured opportunities for our quieter students to participate in the course. While this is a valuable tool in small courses, it’s particularly valuable in large courses because so many students might have wonderful things to contribute, yet receive comparatively fewer opportunities to do so as one of many students.  Consider posing online discussion questions before lessons to get students thinking about the material before class, or asking students to respond to discussion questions after class to demonstrate their synthesis of the material.

Twitter – Many university professors have utilized Twitter in their classrooms to great effect.  Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Dr. Monica Rankin’s “Twitter Experiment” in her introductory history class at UT Dallas.  In this course, Rankin lectures on Monday and Wednesday, and organizes a small group discussion on Friday in which Twitter is used as a backchannel where students share questions and ideas between groups.  You can find an excellent five-minute video on Dr. Rankin’s “Twitter Experiment” here: The Twitter Experiment – Twitter in the Classroom .  For a brief, critical discussion of Dr. Rankin’s use of twitter, you can find a good article on CFT Director Derek Bruff’s “Agile Learning” blog here: Backchannel via Twitter .

Clickers – As discussed in the “Promoting Student Engagement” section, classroom response systems or “clickers” are a great way to get students involved in classroom discussions. One popular technique is to pose a question, ask students to consult their classroom neighbor, ask them to submit their answer as a pair, and then ask some students to share out their responses.

Clickers work for a multitude of reasons. Clicker responses are anonymous, so they embolden students to participate . Even if students, upon seeing the results, notice that their answer is not the most popular, by seeing that others got the same question wrong, it is often easier for students to try to defend and explain their wrong answer: a starting point for some valuable teaching moments. Clickers are also a great way to get everyone involved in the class and not just the students who are willing to speak out loud .  Finally, clickers are fun!  For some ideas on how to best integrate clickers into our classrooms, one resource is this quick and easy guide, written by Vanderbilt University CFT Director, Derek Bruff, “Multiple-Choice Questions We Wouldn’t Put on a Test: Promoting Deep Learning Using Clickers.” For additional information, please see our teaching guide entitled “ Classroom Response Systems .”

Top Hat – Clickers can be a wonderful classroom resource, but they’re not without their problems. The biggest problem for many is that they’re not free, and they’re not even cheap. Top Hat is a “bring your own device” (BYOD) classroom response system that makes use of students’ personal mobile devices (phones, tablets, laptops) as response devices. BYOD systems offer a number of logistical and pedagogical advantages over traditional, “clicker”-based systems.

Top Hat is the first classroom response system to be adopted campus-wide at Vanderbilt. It is available to faculty, students, and staff across campus at no cost. Instructors teaching with “clickers” are invited to consider Top Hat for in-class student polling.

VoiceThread.com – Another tool that can be used to promote learning in a large class is found at VoiceThread.com. With VoiceThread, we can post an image, document, or video online and have our students comment on it. Students can add a video comment, audio comment, or a text comment to whatever we or our students post. What results is often a rich, multimedia conversation between instructors and students. In her book, Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies , Dr. Michelle Pacansky-Brock outlines how she regularly integrates VoiceThread into her Art History classes. For an example of how one might use VoiceThread, visit one of Dr. Pacansky-Brock’s real VoiceThreads .

Online learning and assessment tools — Several online homework/learning tools are described under the Handling Student Grades tab above. In large courses, such interactive technologies can prove a critical resource for students who desire frequent feedback, but can’t afford to visit instructor office hours each week.

Some Recommended Readings

• Carbone, Elisa Lynn.  Teaching Large Classes: Tools and Strategies .  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, c1998.
• Cooper, James L. and Pamela Robinson.  “The Argument for Making Large Classes Seem Small.”  New Directions for Teaching and Learning 81 (2000): 5-16.
• Heppner, Frank.  Teaching the Large College Class: A Guidebook for Instructors with
• Renaud, Susan, Elizabeth Tannenbaum, and Phillip Stantial. “Student-Centered Teaching in Large Classes with Limited Resources.” English Teaching Forum Number 3 (2007).
• Stanley, Christine A. and M. Erin Porter.  Engaging Large Classes: Strategies and Techniques for College Faculty .  Boston: Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

Angelo TA and Cross KP (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2 nd edition . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cooper JL and Robinson P (2000). The Argument for Making Large Classes Seem Small. New Directions for Teaching and Learning 81: 12.

Crouch CH and Mazur E (2001). Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics 69: 970-977.

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Large classes: teaching tips.

Even though there are significantly more students to manage in large courses, the following tips can help you provide opportunities for students to engage with the material in meaningful ways, build community, and improve communication.

Build Community in Large Classes

To build community in large classes, it's helpful to show that you're interested and that you care about your students’ success.

Strategies to help personalize your class

On the first day, share a few things about yourself to help your students get to know you. For example:

• Why you chose this field
• What you study with your research
• Something that really interests you about the topic of the class 
• Their favorite activities
• What they’re excited about learning in your class
• Anything about your class that they might be concerned or worried about
• Move around the room as you lecture if you have a portable microphone. Move closer to students when they ask a question.
• Learn names or ask students to make paper name tents. Ask students to share their name each time they respond to a question and make a point of calling them by name. Even if you don’t learn all of them, students will appreciate your effort.
• Show students you care about their learning experience by soliciting their feedback. For example, you can try offering a simple 3-question survey asking them what’s been most helpful, what they’re finding challenging and what changes would improve their learning. Afterwards, share common themes and let them know what changes you can make or explain your reasoning if some changes are not feasible.
• Regularly remind them about office hours, your willingness to help, and other support available to them. Remember that not all students know what office hours are and it helps to explain the term. Share resources provided by the Learning Strategies Center that can help your students learn.

Help Students Connect with Each Other

Being a student in a large class can be an alienating experience, particularly for students who are new to campus. Fostering a sense of community by helping students connect with each other and potentially make friends can have a positive impact on your class.

Strategies to encourage student connection

• Use a discussion question on the first day to get students talking with others nearby or their assigned group. 
• Make the class feel friendly and welcoming by asking them to introduce themselves to the students next to them each class.  
• Suggest that they exchange contact information with the students they sit near in case they miss a class.
• Pose a question to students and ask them to discuss it for a few minutes with another student sitting near them (think-pair-share). When using pair or small group activities, remind them to include students nearby who might be sitting alone and to introduce themselves. 
• Consider assigning students to permanent small groups to sit together during class and work together on group activities or projects. Belonging to a small group can help a large class feel smaller and more friendly. For the first few class sessions, you will need to show a seating chart or map on the screen so that student groups can find each other and sit together.
• Encourage students to use their groups, either assigned or based on proximity, for studying outside of class.

Support Student Learning with Structure and Practice

Two important ways you can support your students’ learning in a large class are to have a clear course structure with established routines and use active learning strategies, including checking regularly for understanding. Having routines helps students remember what they need to do, when, and how, while active learning helps them engage with the material and learn it better.

Strategies to support student learning with structure and practice

• Create a predictable and consistent class structure so that students know what to expect and can fall into a rhythm (e.g., quiz on Mondays, polling questions each class, homework due before discussion section). Routines can be especially helpful in large classes to more easily transition in and out of activities and to avoid confusion in communication.
• Communicate your expectations about attendance, class participation, respectful interaction, etc. on the first day of class (and in your syllabus) and remind students throughout the semester. 
• Consider breaking up the lecture every 10-20 minutes with a polling question or an activity related to the content. You can use activities to verify their understanding of a topic, provide an opportunity for practice, and check for confidence in their understanding (e.g., I've got it, I kind of have it, I'm lost).
• If you’re concerned about the transition back to lecture after an activity, use a sound such as a chime or a countdown timer on your slide to make the timing clear. 
• Ask students to submit questions or comments at the end of class in Canvas or through Poll Everywhere . Answer a few of their questions at the beginning of the next class.

Simplify Assessment & Grading

While the thought of grading for a large class may feel daunting, it can be made more manageable with attention to the type and frequency of assignments and quizzes, grading policies, rubrics, and help from your TAs.

Strategies to simplify assessment & grading

• Review your assignments and assessments to determine which ones are most impactful for students and are closely aligned with the learning outcomes. When is feedback from the instructor most helpful for students? See if you can focus your grading efforts on assignments or assessments with the largest impact and reduce the numbers or grading load of other assignments or assessments.
• Consider whether an assignment can be shortened or modified, while still achieving the learning outcomes (e.g. writing up the data and results section of a paper, instead of the entire paper, asking students to create a poster or infographic instead of a long paper).
• Have students work together in groups or pairs on assignments. Collaboration can benefit the students and also reduces the number of assignments to grade. 
• Use low-stakes, formative assessments such as PollEverywhere questions or Canvas quizzes that can be auto-graded, graded S/U, or counted as participation. See the instructions on Getting Started with Poll Everywhere . If you’d like to see some ideas for using polling in your classroom, review Classroom polling ideas to engage students .
• Introduce brief in-class assignments that are either ungraded, graded S/U, or counted as participation
• Consider whether asking students to provide peer feedback would be useful for some stages or types of assignments. Using technology like FeedbackFruits may help and save time on managing multi-step peer review processes. See examples of use cases from Cornell faculty .
• Use detailed rubrics that clearly outline your expectations for projects and written work. Rubrics also reduce the need for comments. How to set up Canvas rubrics.
• Keep a bank of commonly used comments that you can copy and paste.
• Consider offering feedback on only certain aspects of assignments (e.g. feedback on the use of sources or data to support an argument, instead of correcting every grammar mistake).
• Consider using grading software such as Gradescope , especially if coordinating the grading among multiple TA’s
• Keep track of grading hours and adjust as needed to ensure you're allocating your time effectively considering the weight of the assignments
• If TAs are grading, discuss issues that come up and promote consistency (especially with rubrics). Share and comment on examples of excellent, fair, and poor submissions. Divide exams so that each TA grades a specific section.

Manage Logistics & Communication

Clear communication with your students, teaching assistants and course administrators can bolster attendance and create structure and transparency for everything from email response time to grading practices.

Below are some simple strategies to try.

Class Communication

• Use a microphone if available
• Clearly communicate course policies at the beginning of the semester and in the syllabus. Remind students at key points in the semester.
• Provide clear and frequent (weekly) communication through Canvas reminding students of upcoming assignments, quizzes, and activities. 
• Organize your Canvas site so that students can find the information they need quickly. 
• Make sure that the entire teaching team is communicating the same policies. Students become frustrated if there is inconsistency among co-instructors or TAs.
• Consider setting up a separate course email account that TAs or course administrators can manage and alert you to messages that are not straightforward to answer. 
• Ask students to include the course number in the subject line.
• Be up front about how often you will check and respond.
• Establish guidelines about where different types of questions should be directed and how. The Ed Discussion tool available in Canvas is a great space for general Q&A.  
• How many hours before an exam or project due date will you stop responding?
• Use calendaring software like Calendly to help manage your appointments.

There are several ways to encourage regular attendance:

• In-class activities, polling questions, problem-solving, or discussions that students feel are valuable and interesting will encourage regular attendance
• In-class assignments or activities that are collected in-person or submitted online (e.g. taking a photo of a worksheet and submitting it through Canvas)
• Post-lecture quizzes taken online in Canvas, which also encourage students to process what they are learning and check their understanding.

Grading Requests and Concerns

• Outline the process for re-grading requests in your syllabus 
• Require that requests be submitted in writing
• Build in a cooling off period by requiring students to wait 24 hours before submitting.

Working with Teaching Assistants

• Consider asking TAs to take the TA Online Orientation course through CTI.
• Set clear expectations about the kind of support your TAs should provide and how they should interact with students. 
• Provide regular feedback. Consider observing their sections or labs at least once a semester or set up a peer observation program.
• Invite their input and ideas and consider ways to involve them in activity design
• Meet on a regular schedule - weekly meetings work well.
• Keep the lines of communication open.

Activities for Large Classes

Questions are the simplest form of interactive teaching tool, particularly in large classes, and are useful in any discipline. They can help promote active learning and gauge students’ level of interest and comprehension. Ask questions from the first day of class to set a precedent; you will have a much better participation level than if you try to change your routine midway through the term.

• Develop key questions before class (they won’t occur to you on the spot – this also allows you to plan your time).
• Decide when you’re going to ask them. During lectures, ask questions early on to stimulate interest and gauge students’ level of knowledge; in the middle, to break the pace of the lecture; and/or at the end, to review main ideas and gather ideas for future classes.
• Ask questions that can be answered, but favour ones with complex answers.
• Vary the form of questions: those that gauge knowledge, require diagnosis or explanation, or challenge conclusions.
• Ask only one question at a time.
• Pause between asking and accepting replies (pausing gives students a chance to think of an answer, and by not asking the first person who raises his/her hand, you encourage quieter students to participate).
• Acknowledge all answers – repeat so the class can hear and/or write them on the board (this also helps to show you understood the answer).
• Move around the room – avoid focussing exclusively on the respondent.

Brainstorming

• Brainstorming can be simple and useful in all disciplines but it must be used appropriately to be effective. Choose a strategic point in your class for brainstorming: for example, when beginning a new topic or at the end of a lecture as review. Use students’ input to decide on sub-topics to focus on during your class, to identify possible lines of questioning, and to assess students’ level of comprehension and interest in your topic.
• Decide exactly how much time you’ll allot to the brainstorming, and enforce it.
• Present students with a question or issue that you want their ideas on: emphasize quantity over quality. For large classes you should use a prompt that asks for tentative responses rather than declarative statements. For example, “tell me what you know, have heard, or have read about this topic.” This allows your students to offer responses without having to fear being “wrong”.
• Use a few minutes of silence for students to write down their ideas before hearing them.
• Accept students’ input and organize it into logical groupings, if relevant.
• Apply only two rules: acknowledge every offering by writing it down and don’t allow judgements of any idea until brainstorming is over (this includes your judgements!).

Quescussion

Quescussion, as the name indicates, combines questions and discussion into one activity. The professor asks a question or makes a statement to the class (this question should be written on the blackboard or overhead projector). There are four basic rules when responding to this prompt:

• Discussion has to be in question form (No statements!)
• A person may speak only every nth time.
• No fake questions (i.e., a statement disguised as a question. For example, "small classes are better than large ones, aren't they?").
• No ad hominems: an attack on someone else (i.e., "a person would be crazy if they thought that, wouldn't they?" - this is also a disguised statement).

By following these four rules, the quescussion can occur effectively. All questions are recorded, grouped, and used to determine students’ exposure to and understanding of a specific topic. It can also be used to determine topics to cover in each lecture. By framing the discussion into questions, students feel less intimidated to speak in front of the large class. As well, the questions are tentative (impossibly wrong) responses rather than declarative (possibly wrong) responses. The rule of speaking every n times (for example, 3 or 4) generates a variety of voices and allows for reflection while waiting for a turn to speak.

A debate is a good way to encourage class participation in large groups without losing control, and they can work in any discipline – not just the social sciences. They can emerge spontaneously from classroom material but are best used with planning.

• The first step is to describe the background context, and explain why you are having a debate.
• Then decide on the two (or more) sides to the debate and physically group the class according to points of view. For example, the people sitting on the right-hand side of the room are for a concept, while the people on the left-hand side are against it.
• For large groups, you should have speakers raise their hands while you moderate. The debate will probably start slowly at first, but the intensity will pick up.
• You, as moderator, can ask provocative questions, but don’t express judgement on any point of view (at least not until afterwards!).
• After 10 to 15 minutes of debating, end the debate and reflect on what was said.
• You can use ideas and conflicts from the debate to lead into your lecture, review lecture concepts to end the class, or make a segue to your next class.

Think-pair-share

This is a good ice-breaking technique for early in the term. It’s also an easy way to make large classes interactive and encourages more students to participate than regular question strategies. Use the offerings of students after think-pair sharing to lead into a lecture or discussion of class material.

• Pose a question or problem to entire class: answerable but complex.
• Give students one to three minutes to think about it individually then divide students into pairs.
• Have them discuss their answers with each other for two to three minutes.
• Invite students to share responses with entire class: those whose ideas have been challenged, reinforced, or refined will probably volunteer.

One-sentence summary

This is one possible ungraded written in-class activity. This exercise not only enhances comprehension, but also writing skills, and can provide you with valuable written feedback. Used at the end of the class, the one-sentence summary can be a good review of material just covered. At the beginning of the class, it can review material covered previously and serve as a starting point for the lecture of the day. The one-sentence summary can also be used in its own right to enhance general writing ability.

• Objective is for students to state the major point of an entire lecture or section in a limited amount of writing.
• Select a recent issue covered in class, in relation to that issue, answer the following questions as quickly as possible in front of your students: “who did what to whom, when, where, how, and why?” and turn your answer into a grammatical sentence.
• Announce another, similar topic to your students and give them five minutes or so to produce their own one-sentence summaries.
• Collect these to determine if students recognized the key points of the lecture. One optional extension is to have students swap with the person next to them – have a few minutes’ silence for reading and formulation of comments, then a few minutes of discussion in pairs before discussing the summaries as a class.

One-minute paper

This shows students that they can write quickly and spontaneously, and enhances general writing ability. Like a one-sentence summary (and the ungraded quiz that will be discussed next), a one­-minute paper can provide you with a source of candid feedback on course material and your presentation style. It can also encourage students to think about the key concepts discussed during this class. You can assign one-minute papers at the end of a class to gauge comprehension, provide general writing practice, and give students an incentive to absorb and comprehend course material. Consider using the content of one-minute papers to plan content of upcoming classes: when students see that the instructor responds to their concerns, they will be motivated to participate in future classes.

• Give a prompt for the paper such as “what was the most important concept of this lecture and what was the muddiest point of this lecture?”
• Give students one or two minutes to think about the topic without writing anything.
• Give students one minute (or another short period of time) to write all they can.
• Collect papers (depending on the class atmosphere, you may ask students to put their names on them or keep them anonymous).
• You can also use this exercise as a measure of participation or as a short assignment and assign a grade to each.

Ungraded quiz

An ungraded quiz encourages students to pay attention during lectures by presenting them with a short-term, non-threatening learning objective. It can be done very quickly, and also provides you with a source of candid feedback on students’ knowledge level. Use ungraded quizzes at the beginning of a lecture to determine the level of knowledge, or at the end of a lecture as a review and incentive for students to retain and comprehend information. Alternatively, use an ungraded quiz at the end of a lecture to gauge how successful you’ve been in teaching the material.

• Write question(s) on the board, overhead, or handout.
• Give students five to ten minutes to respond on a blank sheet of paper (depending on the atmosphere in the class, you may keep the quiz anonymous or ask students to put their names on papers).
• Collect papers and report on responses next time the class meets. One variation: prepare multiple-choice answer options and present each one in turn, asking for a show of hands. Another variation: before (or instead of) collecting quiz papers, have students exchange and “grade” each other’s quiz papers based on the answers you present. This grading is to allow students to gauge their understanding and should not be used as a formal assessment.

Student liaison committee (“Ombuddies”)

“Ombuddies” or the student liaison committee can be an excellent way of getting feedback from large classes in particular. With this tool, a group of student volunteers act as a liaison between you and the class. The group can meet independently on a regular basis and then periodically meet with you to provide you with the feedback they have gleaned from their classmates. Or, this can be less formal, with the students simply reporting to you questions or concerns as they arise. The class should always know who the volunteers are and should receive regular reports from the “ombuddies” and/or you. There are two components that make this activity work:

• Provide the volunteers with some guidance about how to function as a committee and how to solicit and collect feedback from their peers.
• Students should know one another. Ombuddies should be used in highly structured programs or upper-year classes where students are going to be familiar with each other. If a student is reluctant to talk to you about an issue, they will most likely be apprehensive about talking to a fellow student who is a total stranger.

Suggestion box

This tool could involve bringing a suggestion box to your classroom every class or hanging an envelope on your office door. Students can use this method to provide you with anonymous suggestions regarding your teaching or the course in general

• Be sure to tell students about what types of suggestions you would like: the more open you are, the more unfocussed the suggestions will be.
• Scan the suggestions regularly to put them into context, summarize them for the class, and indicate which ones you will act on and why.
• Keep in mind that students who write their suggestions by hand may not be totally honest since you may recognize their writing. Encourage students to submit typed suggestions if they are concerned.

Blank index cards

Similar to the one-minute paper, blank index cards enable you to gather a small amount of feedback quickly and easily.

• Students respond to two questions that you pose, answering one question per card side
• Questions could be very general (i.e., What do you want more of? Less of?) or more specific (i.e., Are the problem sets too difficult?).
• Allow students one to two minutes to jot down their ideas. With any more time, they may become frustrated with the limited paper space.
• Collect students’ responses and answer any questions they have during the next lecture.

E-mail and voicemail

In large classes, it can sometimes be difficult to respond to every concern or question. E-mail and voicemail allow students to ask questions or provide feedback on a particular issue at any time of the day or night.

• Be sure to check your messages regularly, particularly before each class so you can respond to students’ questions as soon as possible.
• Clearly explain your guidelines for using these tools. Specifically, you should explain how often you will check your messages, the type of language that should be used (it is a lot easier to be unpleasant to a computer than it is to a person), and policies regarding timing of questions (i.e., you will not explain a concept in detail the night before the exam.)

You can use an electronic bulletin board or course website to post the course outline, course notes, assignment instructions, or administrative details (i.e., your office number, dates for tests and so on). More intensive use of the Internet could involve using bulletin boards, chatrooms, or on-line discussion groups to answer student questions or pose discussion questions. These tools work best in large classes if students are divided into smaller groups and are graded on their participation. Electronic polls can be used to get feedback from the large group on times for office hours, topics for lectures and for voting on debate topics. Also, consider what face to face activity you will eliminate from your course to make time for on-line discussions. Refer to the Centre for Teaching Excellence teaching tip on collaborative on-line learning for specific details or contact the Centre for Teaching Excellence, or Information Systems and Technologyfor more information about using computers in your course.

Clickers and twitter

You can use  clickers  to collect students’ responses to multiple-choice questions. You can extend the learning with clickers by having students first respond individually and then having them respond again after discussing their ideas with their peers. Some instructors, too, encourage participation via micro-blogging technologies such as Twitter: students have the option of participating verbally or of typing their contributions into a live  Twitter  feed.

If you would like support applying these tips to your own teaching, CTE staff members are here to help.  View the  CTE Support  page to find the most relevant staff member to contact.

• Blythe, H. and C. Sweet. It Works for Me! Shared Tips for Teaching. Stillwater: New Forums Press, 1998.
• Brookfield, S.D. and S. Preskill. Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1999.
• Cameron, B.J. Active Learning. Halifax: Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 1999.
• Cross, K.P. and T.A. Angelo. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.
• Davis, B.G. Tools for Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.
• Frederick, P.J. "The lively lecture - 8 variations." College Teaching vol 34. no. 2, pp. 43-50.
• Gedalof, A.J. Teaching Large Classes. Halifax: Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 1998.
• Haughley, M. and T. Anderson. Networked Learning: The Pedagogy of the Internet. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
• Millis, B.J. and P.G. Cottell, Jr. Cooperative Learning for Higher Education Faculty. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1998.
• McKeachie, W.J., ed. McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers (10th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
• Newble, D. and R. Cannon. A Handbook for Teachers in Universities and Colleges: A Guide to Improving Teaching Methods. New York: Kogan Page, 1989.
• Silberman, M. Active Learning. Needham Heights: Allyn & Bacon, 1996.
• Timpson, W.M.; Burgoyne, S.; Jones, C.S. and W. Jones. Teaching and Performing: Ideas for Energizing Your Classes. Madison: Magna, 1995.

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7 Great ESL Activities for Groups & Large Classes

Often in smaller classes you may only divide your classes into two teams for games and activities , but if you have larger classes you're going to have to divide your class into groups. In smaller classes it's easy to practice one on one using one person for from each team to compete. Pairing individuals to compete one on one in a large class is not efficient or practical. In large classes that is replaced by making groups compete against each other.

Some of the activities here will require some preparation and others no prep . Here are some examples of activities and games that work well with groups and large classes .

Warm-up Activities and Icebreakers

Elementary-Adults . For this warm-up activity and icebreaker you will need to have each group stand, pair with another in the group and stand opposite one another. Then they will ask each other get to know you questions. You can watch it here .

2. Give them a letter

Kids-Adults . This is an activity that works well as a warm-up or to fill spare time. It will work well with large classes or small. You can watch it here .

Vocabulary Activities

3. make a word.

Kids-Adults . This activity works well for teaching vocabulary and spelling. It works well with small and large classes. Depending on your resources it may require some prep. You will need a set of letters for each group. These you can find in a stationary store. Letter magnets are also a possibility or you can just make them yourself from index cards. 

You will need to write a letter on each index card (cut in half) and you will need doubles of the most common letters. Each group will need a set of letters. If you are short on time you could have each group help you make them. Paper is not recommended since it will get damaged. You can watch it here .

4. Pass the Marker

Kids-Adults . This is an efficient vocabulary activity where students get to practice speaking, writing and listening. If you have a large class of say 40 students you can divide the class into four lines of ten students each. You can watch it here .

Games for Sentences/Q&A

5. make a sentence.

Elementary-Adults . This activity for sentences/Q&A will work well in groups and large classes. This one is similar to "Make a Word" above. However, instead of a word we will make a sentence instead. You will need index cards or scrap paper for this. You will then take a sentence from your lesson and write down each word from the sentence on an index card or piece of paper. You can watch it here .

6. Standing Sentences

Elementary-Adults . For this activity for sentences you will need to prepare the same materials as above. You can watch it here .

7. It's a Mystery

Elementary . Power point games similar to this will often work well with large classes and groups. Instead of pairing one person from each team pair the group against another group. Have the group say the sentence or question and the fastest group to say it correctly wins. You can watch it here .

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Teaching Large Classes

Most teachers agree that teaching a small group of students is easier, more enjoyable, and less time consuming than teaching a large group. Unfortunately, due to budgets, space, or lack of teachers, many ESL schools only offer large classes. In some schools, large classes may consist of up to 50 or more students. While your class may look more like a University lecture hall, your job is not to lecture. Just like teaching a small class, you must come up with engaging activities that keep all of your students interested and participating with the goal of improving their communication skills. While there are numerous challenges when it comes to teaching large classes, there are many coping skills and activities that you can use to make your job easier.

Advantages of Teaching Large Classes

• High Energy: Classes with many students may be noisy, but they are also fun and exciting.
• Timing: Classes go by quickly in a large class, and you will rarely catch yourself looking at the clock. You will regularly find yourself with extra activities that you did not complete that you can save and use in your next class.
• Participation: There is always someone who is willing to answer questions even if they are just guessing. Make sure to take answers from a variety of students.
• Fillers: Teachers have less need for fillers since core activities and lessons take longer to complete.

Challenges of Teaching Large Classes

• Intimacy: Remembering student’s names can take a while. Teachers may feel that they do not get to know their students as well as they would like to.
• Anxiety: Some teachers feel anxious being so outnumbered by the students. In addition, some students are afraid to ask questions or participate in a large class.
• Student needs: Meeting individual needs can be difficult or impossible when class size is very large.
• Marking: Grading assignments and tests can be very time consuming, and your pay will generally be the same for a smaller class.
• Distractions: There are more distractions for teachers in large classes, such as latecomers and people chatting while you are teaching.
• Preparation: Making photocopies for a large class can be very time consuming. Other teachers may be bothered by how much time you spend using the photocopier.
• Noise level: Large classes can become out of hand when students are working in pairs or groups. At times you may feel more like a disciplinarian than a teacher.
• Monitoring students: Teachers may find it difficult to keep students on task as they monitor pair and group work.
• Space: There is limited space in a classroom for energetic activities such as role-playing.
• Textbooks and resources: There may not be enough textbooks or computers available for all students.

Strategies for Coping with Large Classes

• Use a teacher’s notebook: Attach a small notebook and pen to your belt loop. Take notes while you are monitoring pair or group learning. Review common errors as a whole group after an activity is complete.
• Spread out: Find another space that your class can use for energetic whole group activities. Find a lobby or spare classroom in the building that your students can spread out into when they are preparing a project or performance. Take students outside if there is no indoor space available.
• Create a participation grade: Make homework and attendance count by doing regular checks and making it part of their final grade. Giving a daily exam tip also encourages attendance.
• Encourage competition: Establish a fun and competitive atmosphere within the class, by dividing the class into teams. You may change the teams once in a while or leave them the same throughout a semester. Teams can win points for certain accomplishments (If noise and behaviour is a problem, students can lose points too.).
• Relax: Find ways to relax before class so that you don’t feel anxious. Never attempt to prepare a lesson in the morning, right before class. Always have a water bottle handy. Always have an extra activity on hand in case something doesn’t go as you expect it to.
• Establish trust: Learn unique ways to remember names and do your best to get to know something about each of your students. Create a seating chart on the first day and ask students to stick with it for a while. Tell your students at least one or two things about yourself beyond your role of teaching.
• Manage the noise: Establish a signal that you want your class to stop what they are doing and listen. This should be done from the first day, so that students become accustomed to it right away. Be careful not to use gestures or sounds that would offend anyone.
• Reduce marking and preparation time: Design quizzes and tests in a way so that you can reduce the amount of marking. Use peer evaluations when possible. If students submit journals, just read them and leave a short comment and/or suggestion, rather than fixing every grammar mistake. Designate a specific time when the teacher’s room is slow to do most of your photocopying for the week. This will save you from feeling guilty for taking up the photocopier for a long time when another teacher only has a few copies to make.
• Enforce a late policy: Notify students of your late policy on the first day and stick to it. For example, don’t let students enter your classroom after a warm-up has ended. If students miss class, make it their responsibility to catch up, not yours.
• Share your e-mail address: In a large class, you will find yourself feeling drained before and after class if you let students come early or stay late to ask questions every day. This alone can make you hate your job, especially if you are not paid for hours when you are not teaching. Encourage students to e-mail you with questions, and answer them on your own time. If you don’t like the e-mail suggestion, try finishing your class ten minutes early once in a while and allow your students free conversation time. Take questions on a first come basis during this time.

Activities to use in Large Classes

• Small group discussions: Use topics related to a theme, or ask students to submit topic suggestions.
• Who Am I?: Tape the name of a famous person to the back of each student. Students go around the room asking questions and trying to identify themselves. Once they guess who they are they can place their nametag on the front and continue helping other students identify themselves.
• Team spelling contests: Each student who gets the spelling correct gets a point for their team.
• Balderdash: Large class can be split into teams. Teacher calls out a word and students have to write down the part of speech and definition. Each student to get both correct gets a point for her team.
• Write the question: Large class can be split into teams. The teacher calls out an answer and the students have to write the question. (ex. “Lynn”) Each student to write the correct question gets a point. (ex. answer: What’s your middle name?”)
• Questionnaires: Students circulate around the room asking each other questions. Students can create their own questions on a given topic or theme, or you can provide the questionnaire handout. Follow up by asking each student to report the most interesting answer they received.
• Categories: The teacher calls out a category, such as fruit, and each student has to name a fruit when it is his turn. If a student hesitates for more than five seconds, he or she has to choose a new category and sit out the rest of the game. The last person to get out wins.

You may also like:

• 15 Problems and Solutions for Large Pre-school Classes
• 15 Variations for Large Pre-school Classes
• Teaching Small Classes

Thanks for sharing this information with us

Working on my final assignment for TEFL for large classes and struggling with activities, so this is a great help. Thank you so much!

Excellent. I could find the whole answer for the exam question. I went throgh several areas to find the answer.Thanks God I found this web site. Thanks Indeed.

250!! thats a BIG class Anna..best of luck!! you will be great,i know it..

The definition of what makes a ‘large’ group is a piece of string. I am preparing work for classes of 250. I would appreciate help from someone with experience in working with these very large numbers in a confined space. Thankyou.

Great ideas always enhance teaching, learning, understanding and networking. Thanks

Thank you for these ideas.I’m sure they can solve some of the problems faced in large classes,especially during groupwork.They provide teachers with monitering tools.

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Teaching Large Classes

What counts as a “large” class can vary from 10 to 100 students or more based upon the context (e.g., clinical lab, tutorial, online course, lecture) but good learning experiences can come in classes of any size. In fact, large classes offer some learning opportunities that small classes do not.

This collection of teaching and technology tips has been curated by CATLR and Academic Technologies to support four common lines of thinking about large class instruction: 

• Preparation – Planning the streamlined large class 
• Engaging Students – Making the large class active and inclusive
• Assessing for Learning – Grading and feedback in the large class
• Flipping the Large Class – Making the most of in-class time

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Planning the Streamlined Large Class

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Making the Large Class Active and Inclusive

Grading and Feedback in the Large Class

Making the Most of In-class Time

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Teaching Large ESL Classes

As an ESL teacher at a school or university, there are times when you will have to teach large classes. Many teachers think that because the class size is so big, they are limited in what they can do. However, by following the advice below, you will find your large classes a lot more enjoyable and manageable.

What are some advantages of teaching large classes?

There are many advantages to teaching large ESL classes. For example, when you teach a large class time goes a lot quicker. Activities take a longer time to set up and run. Rarely will you find yourself using all the activities you have planned. This means you can use them in the next class, which saves time on preparation. In a large class, you will constantly have a variety of personalities to contend with. There will always be students keen to ask and respond to questions. There will also be students who are funny and bring laughter to the class, so large classes are never dull.

What are some disadvantages of teaching large classes?

It is more difficult for teachers to work with students in classes larger than 25 or 30 students. Large classrooms make discussion and group work more difficult. Research has found that in larger classes, students engagement tends to be less than optimal. Added to this is the alarming fact that students who disengage the most are struggling students. To make matters worse, teachers in larger classes have more negative behaviours to deal with especially from those students finding the class a challenge. Therefore, it is useful to consider how and why there is less student engagement in large classes and what can be done to boost participation.

What causes students to not participate?

Attaining optimal student participation can be a challenge in a small class let alone a large one. To effectively raise participation in large classes, it helps to be aware of some factors that discourage student involvement. First, how students perceive their teacher develops through interactions in and outside of the class and can impact significantly on student participation. Secondly, many students choose not to participate fully in class because of fears of peer judgment.

How to build rapport with a large class of students

Cultivating a perception of the teacher that makes students more comfortable to participate actively in class can be a challenge in large classes. This is because it is more difficult to have meaningful interactions with each student. However, by deliberately working to project a certain demeanour, teachers can have a positive impact on student participation.

Teachers need to make it a priority to learn and use students’ names from the first lesson. One effective approach is to use cards that have students’ pictures and names. The teacher simply picks a card at random to call on students to answer a question or share an idea. By doing this, the teacher ensures that they are always using students’ names, and it helps guarantee that all students are being called on to contribute, which makes them less likely to disengage during class. This is also an effective tool for learning students’ names.

Teachers should also think of creative ways to establish a rapport between themselves and the class. At the beginning of each course, ask students to complete note cards that describe some of their interests. By reviewing the note cards and memorizing student names, you can get to know your students and attempt to greet them by name and speak with them as they enter the classroom. Approaches like this help build a better rapport between the instructor and students, which results in a more engaged class.

Be patient and positive when interacting with students in and out of class. By doing this, you show the students they are a welcome and valued member of the class, which can boost student confidence, and more confident students are much more likely to participate in class. Some students can shut down in a class if they perceive the teacher as being harsh or unapproachable.

If your situation allows it, think of ways to encourage students to visit you during office hours to discuss feedback, assignments, projects, etc. To make this more efficient in large classes, students don't need to meet you individually. Students can meet with you in groups of four over the duration of the course. When meeting your students, try to project your willingness to talk with them and answer questions. This provides an opportunity for brief social interaction between the teacher and students that helps build rapport. Meeting students in small groups also minimizes the number of times you have to answer the same questions.

If you don't have an office and are not able to set up office hours, set up a group chat in WhatsApp Line or WeChat so that if students need to ask you something or you need to pass on some important information quickly, contact is made easy. Students can also use the online group to practice their English by interacting with one another, so make the group chat English only.

How can peer judgment be discouraged in class?

Fear of peer judgment is a source of anxiety for many students that is more pronounced in large classes where students fear potential embarrassment in front of dozens of their peers. To best deal with the fear associated with peer judgment, it is crucial to encourage an environment of trust and mutual respect from the very first lesson. In this environment, students are more likely to feel secure enough to participate more freely in class. Using pair work and group activities is a good way to build personal connections as they help individuals become better acquainted. This helps build a sense of community where students are supportive and encouraging of one another. Finally, try to ensure that all students feel that they have a voice in class by not allowing some students to dominate discussions and making it clear that interrupting other students is not tolerated.

How to promote an active learning environment

It can be easy for teachers to fall into a more traditional and teacher-centred approach when teaching large classes as it seems easier to manage. However, it is worth making the effort to incorporate a variety of teaching methods such as student-led seminars or team assignments into your lessons as a way of boosting motivation, engagement, and participation. It also pays to plan activities and tasks in such a way that discourages students from becoming easily distracted.

Incorporate intermittent energy shifts into the lesson. This relates to the fact that learners of different ages having varying optimal attention spans. For example, the average attention span of a 6-year-old averages between 12 and 24 minutes whereas the attention span of a 12-year-old tends to be from 24 to 60 minutes. Therefore, consider how you might switch gears in the lesson to help maintain student attention and focus. This can be done in a few ways such as simply changing from direct instruction to pair work, or from individual writing to sharing work completed so far within a small group. For activities with a duration beyond the average attention span of your class, it is helpful to plan them in such a way that asks students to complete a series of steps that require different types of thinking or learning.

In certain lessons, teachers may be required to give mini-lectures to explain an important concept, process, or procedure. Rather than delivering an extended monologue, try to make these tasks more interactive. For example, you could try a think-pair-share activity that poses a question to students that they must consider alone and then discuss with a partner before deciding on a final answer. This can motivate students and promote higher-level thinking. A think-pair-share activity does not need to last more than three minutes and helps students remain attentive. How to promote increased participation in large classes.

How to promote increased participation in large classes

As it is easier for students to fade into the background in larger classes, always seek opportunities to elicit more participation. Some simple ways of doing this include asking questions that require a show of hands or asking a direct question to an individual student. Rather than just checking the register by calling out each name, tell the students you will check attendance and participation by asking each student a question or by getting them to speak English. Make sure you tell the students you will do this in a random order. So, as you teach the class, the students are always paying attention, because they don't know whose name is going to be called next. This helps to keep the students on their toes. By speaking to every student in the class, you will soon remember their names. Asking each student to contribute is easy, as within a lesson you have things like book exercises, activities, eliciting, modelling, concept checking, role-plays, readings, etc.

Additionally, when possible, try to have students work in pairs or small groups. When working in groups, each member should be assigned a role so that activities are more productive and communicative. For example, assign one student the role of leader whose responsibility is to ensure that the group stays on task and meets their objectives. Another could be nominated as a secretary to take notes and summarise the group’s efforts. There could also be a presenter who reports the group's findings to the rest of the class.

When a class is split up into teams or groups encouraging competition is easy. This creates a fun atmosphere within the class. For younger students, you can assign team points or small rewards throughout the lesson. You'll find that doing this helps increase the students' motivation quite dramatically.

Another important reason for having teams or groups in a large class is that the students can help each other learn. Stronger students and weaker students can work together. The students can build friendships and help each other understand what they are learning.

Some general advice for teaching large classes

Think about the practicalities of how you will perform formative assessment and provide feedback to students. You don't want to be constantly bogged down marking pages of homework each week. When reviewing students’ work, don't correct everything, but simply return it to them with personalized comments, suggestions, or general feedback on how they can improve or correct some of the more serious errors they have made. You can do a lot of informal assessments in class through monitoring participation in such things as activities and presentations.

Stick to your rules! If you have rules about lateness or behaviour, enforce them. This is very important in the first few weeks of class. Show the students you are strict about your rules, and they will conform. Once the students know what they can and cannot get away with, the class runs a lot smoother.

Make sure you have something to drink handy. You will find even with a microphone that you naturally speak louder, which takes a toll on your throat.

Always have a backup activity in case the class doesn't go as planned.

Final thoughts

For teaching a language, having a large class is generally considered a major disadvantage. Although large classes can often lend themselves to making a fun and dynamic learning atmosphere, this is not always the case, particularly if the teacher is under-prepared or the group struggles to gel. The main trap to avoid in large classes is for student participation to wain as this not only impacts learning but can also lead to behaviours that are unfavourable for both the teacher and the students. However, by reading this article, it is hoped that you not only have some awareness of how to better meet some of the key challenges of large classroom teaching but also how it is possible to establish and maintain an enjoyable and effective teaching and learning environment.

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Large classes present an instructor with a unique set of challenges, such as reducing anonymity, enhancing student engagement, and grading.

Making a large class small

It's easy for students to feel anonymous in a large class, and to disengage as a result. Even if the classroom is large, you should try to make it feel like a small class for your students.

• Learn as many names as you can. When students respond to your questions, ask for their names and use them when commenting on the response ("May I ask your name? Yes, you're right Dan. But let me ask you to clarify something you said."). Have your students use each other's names ("With whom do you agree, Jamal? Mary or Tara?").
• Work hard to be accessible to your students. Try to arrive early to class and stay for a while afterward. During this time, engage your students in conversation and give them the opportunity to ask questions they might not ask during class.
• Be a person to your students. Share your hobbies with them. Have conversations with them that aren't related to the class material.
• Enter the students' space. Walk around the classroom, in front of the lectern, and up the aisles.

Use active learning techniques

No class is too large for active learning techniques. One may be tempted simply to lecture, but the same techniques often used in small classes can be adapted for large classes.

• Make your classes interactive. You may want to try to use i>clickers, which were developed right here at Illinois. For a more low-tech solution, ask your students multiple-choice questions and have them raise their hands to indicate their answer.
• Use short, "low-stakes" writing exercises to help develop your students' writing skills. Even if the entire class turns in a one-page typed paper, they can be graded quickly as either being "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory." You can reduce the grading load by having half the class write one week and the other half the week after.
• Have the students work in pairs or small groups. The size of the class may preclude you from using some group techniques, but students can have discussions with their neighbors in classes of any size.

Grading Considerations

• Don't use the class size as an excuse for slow grading turnaround. Take the class size into account when planning assessments. Balance the time required to write your test questions and the time required to grade them. For example: essay questions can be written quickly but take time to grade; quality multiple-choice questions take time to write but can be graded quickly.
• Certain grading scales lend themselves to more efficient grading. For example, it can be easier to determine whether a short in-class paper deserves a mark of "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" compared to determining whether it deserves an A, B, C, etc. For assignments that have a low impact on students' grades, consider using one of these easier grading scales.

Practical issues

The larger the class, the more complicated its logistics. Some structure is required to keep order in a large class, but careful planning can help the class feel more flexible to your students.

• Consider using online tools, such as a course management system for announcements and handouts. Students may miss an announcement you make at the end of class, due to the noise of the class packing up. By making announcements via email or a course website, they are more likely to get them. Similarly, by putting handouts online, students can get them if they miss class—just be sure to put handouts online far enough in advance so students can print them out before class.
• Since large classes usually require rigid schedules, make sure your students are aware of the schedule.

Working with teaching assistants and graders

If you have teaching assistants or graders for your course, see our advice on working with teaching assistants .

Where can I learn more?

• A Survival Handbook for Teaching Large Classes, The Center for Teaching and Learning, UNC Charlotte
• Teaching Strategies:  Large Classes and Lectures, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan
• Teaching Large Classes , Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University

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column | Higher Education

How to engage students and support learning in large classes, by bonni stachowiak (columnist)     aug 28, 2019.

Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, teaches one of that university’s most popular courses: Justice.

Photo courtesy of edx.

This article is part of the collection: Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak.

The following is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column . You can pose a question for a future column here .

Dear Bonni,

You have shared often about active learning strategies and the impact they have on student learning. However, I am dubious that the approaches you describe work with large classes. What about when you have 50-60 students in a class? Or even hundreds?

In my experience, it’s true that small classes provide greater opportunities for student engagement and for professor/mentor relationships to occur. However, there are certainly those who employ methods that put this perspective to the test.

As I’ve been thinking about this issue, I keep coming back to two key questions:

What can we discover about the relationship between class size and student learning?

When we teach large classes, what approaches can we employ that will have a greater opportunity to engage students and help students learn more?

A study was published by IDEA, a non-profit organization that focuses on academic success in a higher education context, which explored whether class size is a factor in perceived learning. The authors—Stephen L. Benton, Dan Li and William H. Pallett—analyzed data from 490,333 classes that were tracked by the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction systems. Over 400 different colleges and universities were included in the research.

That study concluded that there isn’t a significant relationship between the size of the class and how well the students did in demonstrating learning outcomes. It’s worth noting, though, that the courses that were large tended to emphasize knowledge-based material. In online courses, the size of the class matters less than the reasons that students cite for enrolling.

Some large classes can create a shared experience for students that will be a class that they don’t easily forget. Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, teaches one of that university’s most popular courses: Justice. It became so popular that Harvard now offers it as a free version of it on the edX platform. He is a master at the Socratic method of asking questions that get even the most passive of learners thinking. When my students watch his videos, they say they feel like they are sitting in the same Harvard classroom that is being filmed and are participating in the dialog with the other students. If you would like to see Sandel in action, the Justice videos are viewable on YouTube , without needing to enroll in the course.

Some approaches I observe Sandel using are:

• Asking open-ended questions and having all students silently reflect on their answers before anyone shares to the broader class.
• Inviting students to predict what will happen next in a story, or what they think will be the result if a specific choice is made.
• Using minimalist slide decks, and therefore not overwhelming students with lots of text to digest while he is speaking.
• Starting each class session by asking students to recall what was discussed in the previous session.
• Calling students by name, even in such a large class. He asks each student who speaks to identify themselves, and he regularly refers back to that speaker much later in the same class session.
• Painting pictures in the students’ heads through excellent storytelling.
• Exploring many different applications of the same concept. For example, what does libertarianism look like in historical events, in bioethics, in compensation, and in human rights?

Another master teacher of large classes is Michael Wesch. He is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University whose expertise as a digital storyteller has won him widespread attention for his videos, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, viewed by more than 20 million people and featured at conferences and film festivals around the world.

One of his large class projects is ANTH 101 . The course is designed around ten different challenges that students wrestle with during the semester. And all students, even ones not formally enrolled but who find the free course materials online, are encouraged to share their learning with others . His teaching assistants have engaged with students in the class from places such as Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Samoa and Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the memorization of a set of definitions in the discipline of anthropology, Wesch invites us to “a new way of seeing the world that can be valuable regardless of your career path.”

He challenges us to see how the structure of his course helps us to put on these new lenses. He suggests a simple truth about learning :

“You can’t just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.”

Some approaches I observe Wesch using in ANTH 101 are:

• Centering the class around 10 big ideas and linking the assignments around those same ideas.
• Referring to assignments not as traditional homework, but as “challenges,” and making sure that each one represents something that will be relevant to the students’ lives, both now and in the future.
• Encouraging students to share their learning in a radically public way. Both students who are formally enrolled in the course and those joining in because they want to are asked to share their responses to the challenges on instagram, on blog posts, and on Twitter using the #anth101 hashtag. These answers are curated on the main ANTH 101 website .
• Extending the learning from ANTH 101 out to other institutions. He offers a free set of resources for instructors who wish to use the ANTH 101 materials.
• Telling innovative digital stories through his extensive collection of videos . What he does is not technically difficult (in terms of video editing), but he has done lots of iteration and thinking differently about how to keep viewers engaged.

Way back on episode 25 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I talked to another expert at engaging large groups of students: Chrissy Spencer, who teaches at Georgia Tech. One of her big lessons is to invite her students to become active participants—in one example she invites them to play the part of a chili pepper population in a simulation designed to teach evolutionary processes.

The big challenge of large classes is keeping students engaged. But such engagement is not just an issue in big classes. Quality Matters suggests we need to consider more ways to get our students active in their learning, and to focus on the issue no matter the class size.

For Spencer, one key strategy is having students do focused group work and reinforcing their learning through means other than strictly relying on passive listening to lectures.

Some approaches I observe Spencer using in her large classes are:

• Actually having students in the class embody parts of the concepts she is trying to teach.
• Employing prediction as a means of deepening learning through a series of interrupted case studies. These structured experiences allow Spencer to identify when students misunderstand concepts early on, before they have gone too far into the case without receiving feedback.
• Offering team-based, low-stakes assignments to get students explaining what they are learning to others in the class.
• Including service learning as part of course assignments, so that students can experience how what they are learning can help the local community in some way.
• Bringing something she loves (like chili peppers) into the classroom and helping that passion spread over to the students.
• Using tools like the CATME Team Maker to carefully construct teams that consider everything from demographics, preferences and even whether or not a student has transportation to participate in the service learning opportunities into the mix of how groups get created.

I am among those who treasure what can happen in small classes. However, when I am exposed to people who are masters at engaging students in large classes and helping them succeed academically, I am reminded that class size is not as important as I might sometimes find myself thinking that it is.

Bonni Stachowiak is the host of the long-running podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed . She is also director of teaching excellence and digital pedagogy at Vanguard University of Southern California.

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Practical Tips For Teaching Large Classes

Teaching kids is not easy, and with large class sizes, teachers may feel overwhelmed and feel like their oversized class is unmanageable. Kids are often easily distracted and find it difficult to follow simple instructions. To help you manage your classroom with many students, follow these 5 practical tips for teaching large classes.

You May Also Like: 15 Fun Classroom Attention Getters

5 Practical Tips For Teaching Large Classes

1. have a classroom routine, begin every class in the same way..

This lets students know that break time is over and it is time to start the class. For example, when it is time to start the class, the teacher can begin a countdown from 5. When the countdown reaches 1, all students should be sat in their seats and ready.

End every class in the same way.

For example, the teacher could, at the end of the lesson, ask the students to pack their bags and stand up behind their chairs. Once all the kids have packed up and are standing behind their chairs, the teacher can let the group of students who are standing quietly go first. Not only does this help to keep order at the end of the class, but it also prevents 30+ kids from running for the exit as soon as the bell rings, which can be very dangerous.

Use the same simple classroom language in every class.

Practice/drill..

Making groups, lining up, moving around the class, etc, can be chaotic with 30+ students in a small classroom. Establish a routine and practice/drill these routines. For example, to make groups the teacher can say “Group work!” to signal that the students should make a group. Then the students move their desks/chairs as they have practiced.

2. Use Quiet Music

Volume is important.

TIP : If using YouTube to play the music, minimize the window so you can only hear the music. If the kids can see the video, they will just watch the song and not focus on the task at hand.

3. Minimize Distractions

If students don’t need it for the lesson, don’t allow it on their desks..

You’ll find with these things on the desk, rather than focus on what the teacher is saying, kids will often do things like rearrange things in their pencil case, draw things on their books, look through the textbook, rearrange their color pencils, etc.

Don’t give out worksheets, board games, materials, etc, until you have explained and demonstrated the activity.

If you provide young learners with the worksheets/game materials first, you will find that they will be looking at, and playing with the materials, rather than listening and focusing on the teacher. Instead, demonstrate the activity first, and then model the activity with a student. Then you can check their understanding before handing out the necessary materials.

Encourage young learners to use the bathroom before the class starts.

4. timing is important.

This is also true when explaining and demonstrating games and activities. Plan in advance how you will explain and model how to complete a task. This way you can ensure that your explanation/demonstration is short, concise, without significant gaps so that the students don’t have a chance to get distracted.

5. Keep Students In Their Seats

Thanks for reading. I hope you found these tips for managing large classes useful. Before you go, be sure to check out our free resources for teaching English, including ESL games , ESL worksheets , PowerPoint Games , PowerPoint Lessons , and more.

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Large ESL Classes: Tips and Tricks for Teaching Speaking Skills

• Teaching Large Groups , Teaching Speaking
• December 27, 2020

For many who teach English abroad , one of the biggest challenges is to teach speaking skills to a large class of 30 or more students.

When there are so many students, it is difficult to get them to practice enough in order to continue improving. The other three macro skills – reading, writing, and listening – sometimes present difficulties in logistics, organization, and mostly marking because of the sheer amount of students’ work.

However, when it comes to teaching speaking skills, the number of students makes it more difficult to organize activities and foster participation in the classroom.

Speaking Activities – Large ESL Classes

Teachers must make sure that as many students as possible get a chance to practice their speaking skills in class since they do not usually get this chance after they leave the classroom.

The amount of time it often takes to get students organized and ready to start a speaking activity is one of the main difficulties that teachers face with large classes.

Some things to bear in mind are:

• Make sure everything’s organized ahead of time
• All aids and props need to be ready
• Instructions need to be very clear
• Activities need to have possible variations so they can be transformed into pair work or group work so that more students can be speaking at the same time
• Have students coach each other so they can spot pronunciation mistakes and give each other advice on how to improve
• Have a clear plan for how you will assess and/or evaluate the students while they speak

It is very important to have different kinds of activities that are solely or mostly for developing speaking skills.

This needs to be clearly planned ahead of time and it is important to have enough weekly or monthly speaking practice sessions since it can be easily overlooked.

Participation – Teaching Speaking Skills to Large ESL Classes

One solution for making sure that students have enough chances to participate and speak in class is to have a ‘participation list’ where you check off the students that have participated already and you make a point of calling on students who have not spoken yet during that class.

A great way to do this is to use a random name generator. Many smartphones nowadays have them as Apps, but you could also use one online for free at primaryschoolict.com/random-name-selector/. It’s very user-friendly and reliable

If you do not have a computer in your classroom, using the class list and running your finger up and down the list without looking until a student says ‘stop’, can be effective as well with some classes.

Also, having the students’ names in strips of paper in a hat or bowl can ensure you choose students randomly and you give everyone a chance if you don’t return the names to the bowl once they are taken out.

Another solution to make sure that all the students can participate is to have them record themselves.

If you have computers available for at least half of your class, you can ask your students to use a program called Audacity: Free Audio and Recorder Audacity, which can be downloaded for free, and have them record short presentations or spoken answers to different questions.

If students have their own smartphones they could do this on their phones as well and then email you the file so that you can review and/or even mark it later.

The benefit of having students record themselves is that they can all make the most out of each class. However, this method can represent a big load of marking for the teacher later on.

More tips on assessment and evaluation, ideas for speaking activities, and pronunciation practice for large ESL classes to come in future posts.

Get certified to teach English in Canada or abroad. 

Related Articles:

Speaking Activities for Large ESL Classes

Teaching Large Classes: Problems and Advantages

Reading Comprehension for Large ESL Classes

Teaching Speaking Skills: Debates in the ESL Classroom

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Teaching Large Enrollment Courses

Senior Lecturer Kristin Smock reflects on an early experience teaching an in-person large enrollment course:

"My first semester teaching at Ohio State, I was assigned two lecture courses in Independence Hall. The total enrollment for my two classes was nearly equal to the enrollment of my undergraduate university. To say I was nervous is an understatement.  “After my first lecture of 700+ people, a student waited patiently to introduce herself—she said she wanted to meet me because I ‘looked like an ant’ from her seat in the back. Very large lecture halls create a sense of disconnect—I try to be aware of that and navigate to the far reaches of the classroom during lecture, when possible.”  

Teaching in a large lecture hall can indeed be a stress-inducing experience. And from the student perspective, learning in a large enrollment course has its own challenges. You may be here because you are teaching a large lecture for the first time, or you may be looking for ideas to rethink one you have taught previously.  

The definition of a large enrollment class is subjective and dependent on who you ask (whether instructors, students, or researchers). But in general, classes of more than 100 students are considered to be large enrollment courses (Cash et al., 2017). This guide is framed around that definition and covers a range of approaches to teaching large enrollment courses effectively. We'll focus heavily on the in-person classroom environment, but considerations for teaching large online courses are also highlighted throughout.  

Recall the first tine you stood at the podium at the front of a large lecture hall, staring out at a sea of student faces... How did you feel in that moment? How did your first class go, and what might you do differently today?

Both instructors and students can be apprehensive about the ability of large enrollment courses to support learning, but employing certain evidence-based instructional approaches can help.

• Knight and Wood (2005) studied the effects of introducing more active learning in a large upper-division developmental biology course and found that students in the more interactive course had increased learning gains and improved conceptual understanding compared to those in the more traditional version of the course.
• Students and instructors were surveyed about larger classes and results suggest students perceive larger classes as feeling smaller when various instructional approaches are used (Cash et al., 2017). For example, instructors who were engaging, often walking around the lecture hall, and using small group activities, helped make a large class feel smaller.
• Wisenhunt et al. (2019) examined three pedagogical strategies in their 2012 redesign of a large introductory psychology class: "(a) encouraging active student engagement , (b) reducing students’ feelings of anonymity , and (c) providing individualized feedback " (Wisenhunt et al., 2019, p. 121). To better understand the influence of the course redesign, they surveyed students in multiple courses at the beginning and end of the term to examine their impressions of the classes in relation to the three strategies employed. Findings suggested that student impressions significantly improve over the term in large classes. While it appears that the instructional strategies may have improved student impressions, individual instructors may have also played a role in this positive change.

Below we dive into  specific approaches to teaching large enrollment courses across the following key areas:  classroom management, community building, logistics, assessment and feedback, diversity and inclusion, and instructor resiliency.

In Practice

Whether you are teaching in a face-to-face lecture hall or in an online classroom, the strategies outlined below will guide you to support student engagement and learning in large enrollment courses.

Classroom Management

Consider this quote from an anonymous student in an introductory Biology course:

"It was a class of 600 people so participation other than Top Hat was difficult. [The instructor] was encouraging of questions and would answer them, but the large class size was a bit discouraging because it was hard to hear the person speaking.”

You may find that teaching in a large course environment presents unique challenges. Like many instructors, you may feel nervous at first and struggle to cope with the added demands and stressors as compared to teaching a smaller class (Mulryan-Kyne, 2010). Fortunately, the strategies below can help you mitigate barriers and leverage opportunities to make your larger courses a success.

Being prepared is one of the surest ways to lessen your feelings of anxiety before your first day teaching a large class.

• Visit the classroom before the first day of class and familiarize yourself with the space. Learn more about the technology available in your particular room .
• Log in to the computer to learn how to use the available software and wireless projection in order to avoid surprises on your first day.
• Take inventory of any additional materials you may need to communicate with students, such as a microphone (see more below). If you use your own microphone, connect it to the system and test it.

Using CarmenCanvas

Whether you’re teaching in-person or online, setting up the essential components of your course in Carmen before the term starts will help you (and your students) get off on the right foot. Read more about Carmen essentials and applying Carmen Common Sense or view this workshop recording of Carmen Essentials for Student Success .

No matter how or where you’re teaching, it’s important to be explicit and transparent in the information and instructions you communicate to students. In a large lecture hall though, students may simply have problems hearing you and their peers.

• Always use a microphone. A wireless microphone will allow you to move throughout the space. If a wireless microphone is not already available in your classroom, you can rent equipment from Classroom Services .
• Remember that students can’t hear each other. If a student asks a question aloud, repeat the question for the entire class before answering it so that all students can engage and follow along.
• Be explicit with students about the preferred ways they can reach you outside of class as well, whether via Carmen, by email, or by visiting your office hours.

Large rooms present learners with more opportunities to become disengaged . Be proactive with measures to keep your students’ attention on class activities.

• Reduce noise levels as much as possible. If students are often talking, you might have teaching assistants seated throughout the room to help control off-topic conversations.
• Intersperse lecture with time for individual reflection or activities that foster on-topic conversations among students. Read more about minimizing traditional lecture below.
• Create engaging presentations—limit text-heavy slides and incorporate visuals and multimedia to convey your content.

Lecture can be an effective instructional tool, particularly when it leverages your expertise in your field. However, traditional “sage on a stage” lecturing for the majority of class time has fallen out of favor due to copious research showing improved learning and retention rates when instructors use active learning techniques (Freeman et al., 2014). Implementing active learning in large lectures—particularly in online courses—can be challenging, but there are established techniques you can employ.

Break up your lectures by interspersing individual, pair, or small-group activities during class time.

• Promote student-student interaction through Think-Pair-Share activities .
• Use Top Hat for quiz-like knowledge checks or more open-ended discussion questions.
• Present short Writing to Learn activities —for example, probe students’ background knowledge on a topic, ask them to make a prediction, or have them mind map a concept.
• Leverage students’ mobile devices to have them take guided notes or complete digital worksheets during the lecture. Learn more about strategies for leveraging mobile devices for active learning .

Establishing your presence in a large-enrollment online course environment is typically accomplished through an interplay of lecture videos , written instructions and overviews, regular communication with your students , and sometimes synchronous meetings via CarmenZoom .

Here are some tips for building instructor presence and managing an online learning environment.

• Be upfront about the unique challenges of teaching an online course with higher-than-average enrollment, both for students and the instructor (Lake, 2019).
• Create a clear communication plan that establishes specific guidelines and parameters about instructor availability, response frequency, professional boundaries, and feedback expectations (Chen, Anderson, et al., 2015; Lake, 2019).
• Minimize the length of lecture videos and consider employing alternate methods of instruction, including more authentic and active methods of learning (Miller, 2016).
• Forge deeper connections with students through introduction, overview, and lecture videos that showcase the instructor’s face, voice, and personality (Trammel and LaForge, 2017; Zhong, 2018).

Read more about establishing your presence and connecting with students in  Online Instructor Presence .

Community Building

As class sizes increase, it becomes increasingly impractical to know every student by name and face. For students in large enrollment courses, particularly online ones (Chen et al., 2014), anonymity is easily achieved. Fear of speaking up increases as well, making call-and-response questions challenging. Research suggests students are more engaged in their courses when they feel a sense of belonging.

"Even though it was a large lecture, I still felt like I was in a small class because [the instructor] still answered questions and had us engage in the material with the people around us." - Anonymous student

Below are some tips for establishing and maintaining community and a sense of belonging in your large enrollment courses.

Research shows that using students’ names is an important way to build connection and create community (Cash et al. 2017).

• At the start of the term, encourage your students to use  Namecoach  in Carmen to record the pronunciation of their names and identify their pronouns. 
• For in-person classes, have students write their names on a piece of folded cardstock to create a “name tent” so you can easily use their names during discussion (Cooper et al., 2017). Students can list their pronouns if they would like as well.
• Along with their preferred names, have students upload a profile picture in CarmenCanvas . Ask them to use a profile picture (if their cameras are not turned on) for any synchronous meetings in CarmenZoom. Note: Students must log in to CarmenZoom before joining a meeting for their profile picture to appear. 

See more tips for learning student names .

Set a positive tone to make students feel welcome, even before the first day of class.

• Welcome announcements on Carmen, "get-to-know-you" assignments and icebreakers , and online discussions via Carmen or other approved platforms can encourage students to engage personally.
• Introductory discussions need not be related to the course content. You might consider questions such as: What is challenging or exciting about this semester. Post a picture of your pet!
• Help students get to know you—share about your experience, what excites you about the course, or a bit about your personal life or interests. Consider using an introductory video  for this purpose.

Devote time to community building during your first class.

• Explain your philosophy on student-instructor and student-student relationships. Let students know their success is your priority, that it's okay to be wrong, and that you will always support them.
• Plan an activity that involves interaction, such as low-stakes polling, icebreakers , and/or small-group discussions. A large class setting can prevent you from communicating with all groups, but it is possible to engage meaningfully with a few groups during the course of an activity. Try to move away from the front of the lecture hall and interact with distant groups.
• Wrap up activities by encouraging a few students or groups to share out to the entire class. Thank them for sharing, using student names at every opportunity. Students will feel more comfortable speaking up when you show that it is welcomed and encouraged.

If you have teaching assistants (TAs), empower them to help you build and reinforce community throughout the term.

• Involve TAs as a part of your team by referencing them, their work, and how they are involved and assisting in the course often throughout the term.
• If TAs attend lecture, have them facilitate small-group discussions and activities and report back to you. Some students may feel more comfortable sharing with a TA than the lecturer, so take advantage!
• If your TAs lead a small section, such as a lab or recitation, encourage them to build community in those sections, too. You might provide them with suggested activities.
• When teaching online, your TAs may seem even more anonymous or invisible. Encourage them to share their own introductions, facilitate and respond to online discussions, and share feedback. You might include your TAs’ photos, names, contact information and brief bios along with yours on the course homepage in Carmen.

"I am very shy and have major stage fright so I would never yell out a question. Having the TAs walking around helped make it seem more personal." - Anonymous student

Building a community of trust, openness, and learning is one of the greatest challenges faced by instructors of large-enrollment online courses. In general, peer interactions need additional guidelines and parameters to make sure that discussion remains civil, generative, and easy-to-follow. It is also helpful to break your students up into smaller learning cohorts to make graded discussions more manageable.

Here are some tips for managing student interactions in a large-enrollment online learning environment.

• Explicitly define the roles, duties, and responsibilities of yourself and your TAs (Chen, Lowenthal, et al., 2015; Kelly, 2013). 
• Draft clear instructions, response expectations, and social norms for all online communications (Loder, 2019).
• Create larger-than-average discussion groups for collaborative work to ensure a more equitable division of labor, using peer review and anonymous surveys to gauge student engagement (Trammel and LaForge, 2017).
• Create ungraded social spaces such as class “cafes,” and Q&A forums, where students can ask questions, offer feedback, request assistance, and form independent study groups (Riffel & Sibley, 2005; Lake, 2018).
• Develop substantive, open-ended prompts for collaborative work, with clear response expectations and ground rules for interpersonal conduct (Trammel and LaForge, 2017; Lake, 2018; Loder, 2019).

Read more in Student Interaction Online .

For additional ideas for building community in your course, see Shaping a Positive Learning Environment .  

Every instructor encounters a set of logistical constraints when they teach:  What resources and technology are available in your assigned classroom? What will the seating arrangement be in the classroom? How much time should you spend answering emails? These constraints become even more challenging when teaching a course where everything is scaled up. Consider the following:

• Instructor-student interaction: As compared to a small classroom, an instructor of a large enrollment course can expect more emails from students, more students to talk to before and after class, and more students in office hours or asking for appointments (Chen et al., 2015; Oranella, 2006). 
• Activities and assessments: Doing a hands-on activity that requires materials may be much more manageable in a smaller classroom than in a lecture hall (Trammel & Forge, 2017). A large enrollment instructor needs to consider the number of materials needed as well as the additional time to prepare them, provide instructions, pass out and collect work, and grade or give feedback on assignments.
• Classroom spaces: When teaching in large rooms or lecture halls with fixed seating, students may have limited desk or writing space. Group activities may be difficult if there isn't ample room to move around. Students in the back of the classroom may have difficulty hearing or seeing you and become disengaged. Classroom space can even become an issue during exams—students often sit very close to one another in lecture halls, which can make it harder to prevent or monitor academic misconduct (Chen et al., 2015)
• Online learning spaces: In large online courses, additional measures and parameters to guide online discussions and student interaction may be needed. Smaller peer groups or cohorts can be helpful, so additional time may be needed to plan activities and set up groups in Carmen . 

How can you tackle these logistical challenges?

Know what tools are at your disposal, where to find helpful resources, and who to contact for guidance when you have questions or need support to solve a problem.

• Take advantage of Carmen features that allow for management of large courses. For example, if you are getting similar questions from students, use the announcement feature to communicate to the whole class and minimize the time spent responding to individual students.
• Look into lecture capture , which is available in many large halls and will be a valuable resource for students who miss a class session or need a review.
• When administering multiple choice assessments, use scantrons for efficient exam delivery and grading. Your department may have equipment to read scantrons, but if not the Exam Scoring Services office can quickly grade and analyze the scantrons.
• Delegate responsibilities beyond grading to your TAs, such as helping you field questions from students after class or taking scantrons to the testing center.
• Investigate your department’s resources and contacts for teaching support, or browse our Teaching Support Forms to request a consultation.

See the Managing the Classroom section for more tools and approaches to facilitating class in a large space.

Teaching in a very large space or fixed-seating lecture hall can feel limiting. It may seem less flexible or harder to promote interaction, but with thought and preparation, you can become accustomed to the space and how to work with its constraints.

• Check out your classroom before you start teaching. You can visit it in person or virtually through classroom services to see the classroom design and provided technology ahead of time.
• Plan appropriate learning activities for the space. If in a lecture hall, you can use Think-Pair-Share activities or have students share in small groups with those seated nearby. Consider polling and other activities that leverage technology or students’ mobile devices to help you meet outcomes. Read more in Assessment and Feedback.
• Make two copies of exams. Students in large classrooms will be sitting close to each other, resulting in more opportunities for misconduct. Two versions of an exam with the questions in different orders can prevent students from being tempted to look at a neighbor’s responses.
• If your classroom has a whiteboard or chalkboard (and you think students will be able to see your writing from all seats) bring a backup supply of your own markers or chalk.

When there are many students enrolled in a course, it can be more challenging to foster instructor-student interaction, especially with every individual. 

• Set times in your schedule for answering emails and meeting with students, and clearly communicate these times to your class. Tell students to expect one business day for you to reply to emails.
• Encourage students to visit your office hours as much as possible. When teaching online, you can conduct open office hours or have 1:1 meetings with students via Zoom.
• Plan to arrive to your classroom early and stay late—about 10 minutes before and after lecture—in case students have quick questions that don’t warrant email or office visits.
• Create ungraded social spaces or Q&A discussion in your Carmen course for instructor-student communication, in addition to using the announcements  and other Carmen features.

If you are teaching online, learn more about logistical considerations for online courses in Policies for Online Teaching .  

Assessment and Feedback

Assessing student knowledge of your learning outcomes and providing feedback are cornerstones of effective instruction. Large enrollment courses are a special context in which some methods of assessment shine and others are more challenging.

Some common challenges you might face with assessment and feedback in large courses include:

• Grading and providing in-depth feedback can be prohibitively time-consuming
• Assessing student understanding during class time can prove difficult
• Consistency in grading and feedback may be tough, particularly when multiple instructors or TAs are involved
• Activities that work in smaller class sizes might need to be adapted for a larger class.

Use the strategies below to be intentional about assessment and feedback in large-enrollment learning environments.

Know that you may need to adapt assignments to be feasible and productive in a large enrollment course. As we noted before, any learning activities you plan should make sense for the capacity of your course and the room itself if teaching in person. Consider physical space factors such as space between isles, desk size, and the ability for students to see and hear you before simply reusing assessments you developed for smaller classes.

To adapt activities in the large enrollment context, it is ideal to:

• Allow students to work from their seats. For group activities, they can turn and work with the other students seated around them.
• Provide support and feedback from TAs or yourself during the activity. This might mean engaging with individual groups as students work, or pausing the activity to discuss, answer questions, or elaborate on concepts with the whole class.
• Avoid passing out or collecting materials. Conduct activities using tools like Top Hat or easily accessible mobile apps. Leverage digital materials and submissions rather than printing any materials.
• Eliminate any confusing logistical components. The simpler and more efficient the better. If you are providing digital materials, post them in Carmen beforehand so students can preview and prepare in advance.

In smaller classrooms, it is easy to use call-and-response style questions to get a sense of whether students understand the material. In larger spaces, you can’t talk to many students one-on-one or even see many facial expressions. It can often be difficult to decide when to provide more guidance or move on to the next concept. Students who are struggling with material can easily get lost in the shuffle.

Consider how the approaches below may help you better assess student learning during instruction.

• Pause your instruction to provide time for questions and clarification of concepts, especially during lecture. For example, you might build “Q&A” slides or quick knowledge checks into your PowerPoint presentation at intervals after you’ve covered key content. If you’re teaching online and recording your lectures, Mediasite quizzes enables you to insert knowledge checks into your lecture video.
• Give students time to reflect on a question before sharing their responses, especially for higher-order questions. You might use quick writes to have students gather and organize their thoughts and then invite volunteers to share out their ideas.
• Incorporate Think-Pair-Share , peer instruction, or other activity formats that encourage students to discuss their ideas with peers before speaking up to the whole group. Some students may be more confident speaking up in larger classrooms if they have a chance to get feedback from peers first. See more about peer instruction.
• Use classroom polling tools like Top Hat to gather answers to posed questions from the entire class. This will allow you to quickly assess whether students are on target with a concept or need more support.  
• Note that allowing anonymous responses increases the likelihood of inappropriate comments—be upfront about this and warn students that inappropriate or offensive comments will result in the loss of this option.
• Collecting regular feedback from students, including and beyond a mid-semester survey, may be especially valuable in a large enrollment course so that all students have a chance to provide input and be heard.

When teaching a large enrollment course, it is especially important to keep major assessments minimal and grading manageable. Only include graded assessments that are needed to support student learning and assess your outcomes. B e explicit and transparent with students about all assignment instructions and expectations.

The following strategies can lessen the time and effort needed to grade fairly and effectively.

• Develop clear rubrics for major assignments and discuss the criteria with your students. A well-designed rubric aligned to outcomes can speed up the grading process, especially for open-ended assignments.  
• Leverage technology that simplifies your assessment and grading processes, such as the assignments , rubrics , and SpeedGrader  tools in CarmenCanvas. You might use auto-graded options when possible; for example, many textbooks offer companion products for students to do practice problems.
• Utilize peer review. This is best for drafts or formative assessments because it gives students the chance to build on their own skills by seeing an example of another student’s work and providing feedback based on assignment expectations. Read more about Implementing Peer Review in Your Course and using the peer review tool in Carmen .
• For formative in-class assignments like worksheets, only grade a selection of the questions that help you assess the assignment goals. Alternately, you can grade formative assignments based on participation only.
• For summative assessments , like exams and papers, leverage your TAs and provide them with clear and easy-to-use rubrics when applicable. For exams, you may decide to use only multiple-choice questions for easier grading. Alternately, you might have TAs grade any short answer questions; even so, keeping these questions relatively brief and easy to grade (e.g., lists or labeling versus essay questions), will keep the grading process manageable.

Assessment variety  

It may be tempting to default to insubstantial, choice-based assignments that do not accurately assess student learning and growth. Try to strike a balance between making grading manageable and promoting student engagement and success by including a variety of assessment and assignment types. 

When assessing the work of so many students, it’s crucial to pay attention to consistency in your grading practices, particularly when you have multiple individuals grading (instructors and TAs).

Consider the following to ensure multiple graders are aligned in their approach.

• Walk through all rubric criteria with your TAs, as well as any instructions for grading and the tools used in the process.
• If you are using short-answer questions on exams, consider having one TA grade the same question for the whole class (rather than an individual TA grading all questions for a subset of the class). This keeps grading consistent because the individual only needs to focus on one question.
• Select student responses to use as examples, ideally representing a range of understanding or quality.
• Have your TAs grade and provide feedback on those assignments using the rubric.
• Afterwards, have the graders compare the grades and feedback they provided based on the rubric and come to consensus. ​​​​​ If necessary, you may grade one more assignment to see if grading consistency has improved.
• Note : Sometimes a grader could be assigned a particularly high-achieving or low-achieving group of students. To account for this, compare the grader’s subjective grading of their students’ assignments to more objective measures, such as that group’s multiple-choice exam grades. For example, imagine one TA has given significantly lower scores on a research paper as compared to other graders. If their students’ exam grades are also low compared to the rest of the class, the grader may actually be grading consistently.

CarmenCanvas provides several tools that can assist you in streamlining, maintaining consistency, and lessening the time and effort of grading. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Quiz question banks
• Automatic feedback generated by quizzes for correct or incorrect answers
• Due dates and other quiz and assignment restrictions 

Design online assignments that allow for depth, variety, and substance while also making your week-to-week grading tasks manageable. 

• Establish deadlines that recur at weekly intervals throughout the term and communicate them clearly to students (Trammel and LaForge, 2017).
• Use worksheets, templates, and open-ended Carmen quizzes as a replacement for essay-based writing assignments (Lake, 2018).
• Mix multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions with automated responses (Lake, 2018).  
• Develop ePortfolio, collaborative problem-solving, and peer review assignments (Trammel and LaForge, 2017; Fukuzawa and Boyd, 2016).

Rubrics in Carmen workshop recording

The effectiveness and efficiency of your grading process for any given assessment hinges on the rubric you create. Whether you’re teaching online or in person, this  recording of the Rubrics in CarmenCanvas workshop  will walk you through types of rubrics, best practices for designing effective rubrics, and how to set up a rubric in Carmen.

 Learn more in Designing Assessments of Student Learning and Creating and Adapting Assignments for Online Courses , if you’re teaching online.  

Diversity and Inclusion

Students in your course have diverse identities and experiences when it comes to race, ethnicity, religion, language, age, abilities, socioeconomic background, educational background, disciplinary knowledge, learning preferences, and more.

Stereotype threat occurs when a student thinks they may confirm a negative stereotype about an identity group they belong to, and these thoughts can have negative impacts for student performance in your course (Spencer et al., 2016). When teaching a large enrollment course, you will have less time to dedicate to supporting each learner. Students can more easily be “lost in the crowd” as large classes inadvertently foster a sense of anonymity (Mulryan-Kyne, 2010).

Consider the following approaches to creating a classroom environment that is welcoming and supportive of all students.

“ Effective instructors meaningfully consider the role that content plays in creating a learning environment where students see themselves reflected and valued.” -  Kachani et al., 2020

Students report that seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum creates a sense of belonging (Kachani et al., 2020). This is particularly important in large courses that may have greater diversity than a smaller class.

Consider the following practices when selecting course readings and resources, building your syllabus, and designing course material.

• Highlight contributions of a range of individuals or groups, especially those that may be systematically underrepresented in your discipline. This allows students of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and abilities to better picture themselves in your field.
• Feature a diverse range of perspectives and ideas from different cultures within your course.
• Apply Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy by encouraging students to integrate their own interests, cultures, and backgrounds into the course (Paris, 2012). For example, provide time at the end of a lesson for students to reflect on how the content covered relates to them personally. Allow students to document their reflections in whatever format is most comfortable for them.
• Take time to promote any special events celebrating diversity on campus, especially in your field or specialty.

In your large lecture course, students will have a range of abilities, experiences, and culturally-specific approaches to learning.

• Use Universal Design for Learning in the design and delivery of your course to remove barriers to learning and support the engagement and success of all students.
• Assess students’ initial content knowledge at the beginning of the course. Apply what you learn to scaffold learning activities or provide supplemental interventions and resources as needed.
• Promote student metacognition through frequent reflection. This will help students understand what and how they are learning and give them a sense of control over their course journey. Read more in Supporting Student Learning in Your Course .

Making your course accessible is a proactive and intentional process to ensure all students can access and benefit from your materials and learning environment.

While accessible design is imperative for students with disabilities, all learners will benefit from the UDL and accessibility measures you take in your course (Chisholm & May, 2009). For example, a student studying in a noisy coffee shop might take advantage of captions when viewing video content in Carmen. The guided lecture notes or study guides you create to support some learners can be utilized and appreciated by all students.

Employ the approaches below to support all learners in your course.

• Familiarize yourself with the legal and institutional requirements around accessibility. Explore more in Ohio State’s Digital Accessibility Center .
• Deliver content through multiple modes (e.g., visual, auditory, textual) so students can access the same information regardless of ability or preference.
• Use accessibility best practices to create your course material, including providing captions for videos, transcripts for audio recordings, and alternative text or captions for non-decorative images. Ensure all text and documents in your course are accessible for screen readers. 
• Make sure your Carmen course content is accessible. Read more in Five ways to improve accessibility in your Carmen course .
• If you’re teaching in a physical classroom or lecture hall, consider students’ ability to see and hear you and their peers, the usability of the technology, and the functionality and flexibility of the seating. Reserve the first couple rows of seats for students who prefer to sit closer to you or the projector.

You will likely have many students with disability accommodations and hidden disabilities in your course.

Familiarize yourself with the services provided through Student Life Disability Services (SLDS) and know options for supporting learners with accommodations in your course.

• Explore best practices for facilitating access in your classrooms.
• Know expectations for managing accommodation requests as an instructor .
• Consult with SLDS for more support regarding specific student accommodations or concerns related to large enrollment courses and classroom spaces.

There has been little scholarship on the subject of incorporating inclusive teaching practices in high-enrollment online courses specifically. That said, apply the following commonsense solutions for building inclusivity and equity into your online course.

• Remain stringent about digital accessibility standards, particularly when sharing or authoring multimedia content.
• Select diverse and representative course materials that offer a richer, more inclusive selection of perspectives on course topics.
• Author assessments and activities that empower students and allow them to share their perspectives in a safe, generative fashion.
• Be transparent with students about the sort of inclusive learning culture you are striving to foster and create, sharing a specific outline of course expectations if needed.
• Strike a balance between synchronous and asynchronous course components. Use your regularly scheduled meetings for a variety of tasks and activities, such as lecture, discussion, student-led presentations, problem-solving activities, roleplaying activities, and unstructured instructor-student interactions.

Find more ideas for creating an inclusive environment in this  video recording of the Fostering Inclusive Learning Online workshop .

Instructor Resiliency

Part of being an effective instructor is being present, connected, and supportive with your class (Cavanagh, 2016). But stress, whether at work or at home, can lead us to feel unprepared, nervous, scattered, and even burned out — unable to fully connect with our students and their learning.

Large enrollment courses in particular can compound stress. You may have anxiety about teaching in front of so many people or being accountable for so many students’ learning. The additional logistical components, including more communication with students and more grading, can also add to feelings of being overwhelmed. 

The tips and reflection questions below will help you decrease stress and maintain a healthy mindset when teaching a large enrollment course.

Having a growth mindset can improve your resiliency as an instructor and positively affect your students' performance (Canning et al., 2019; Spurgeon & Thompson, 2018)

According to Dweck (2008):

• A growth mindset is the belief that a person’s attributes can change through practice. For example: “While that class activity didn’t go as planned, I know how to make it better next time.”
• A fixed mindset is the belief that a person’s attributes are not able to change. For example: “I am terrible at developing class activities. Why bother?”

Reflection questions:

• What do I say to myself about my own teaching? Do those thoughts reflect a fixed- or growth-oriented view of my instruction?
• How can I foster a growth mindset when receiving feedback on my instruction?
• In what ways do I present a fixed mindset to my students? Consider the language you use, your course or assignment design, and how you respond to incorrect and correct responses from students.
• In what ways can I support my students to have a growth mindset?

Finding personal meaning and purpose in their instruction can help educators persist and flourish, especially during difficult times ( Spurgeon & Thompson, 2018 ). If you are feeling overwhelmed or struggling with aspects of your course, remember the motivations that led you to teaching in the first place. How does teaching bring you a sense of purpose, joy, or accomplishment?

• How does teaching align with my personal values, strengths, and goals?
• What impact do I want to make as an instructor?
• How do I want my students to be changed by this course?
• What have I received from students or peers that makes me feel excited about teaching?

Consider your sleep, nutrition, exercise, and mental health needs. Did you know that you can access five complementary counseling sessions through the Ohio State Employee Assistance Program  if you are seeking support?

Mindfulness practices have been shown to increase resilience in a number of different high-stress occupations, including teaching (Cavanagh, 2016; Brammer, 2020; Rosner et al., 2012). Your Plan for Health and the Wexner Medical Center offer a number of free mindfulness recordings and resources you can explore.

• What baseline needs must I satisfy to feel healthy?
• Will adopting a mindfulness practice benefit me? When and how will I practice?
• How will I stick to my self-care plan during busy periods in the semester?
• If I can't stick to my plan, can I adjust it to be more realistic?

Talking with fellow educators can normalize your experiences and bring new perspective. Connecting with your peers, in both formal and informal settings, can provide a range of insights, resources, and strategies to employ in your courses.

Acquaint yourself with the professional learning opportunities available to you across Ohio State campuses, such as the workshops and learning communities offered by the Drake Institute and other Teaching and Learning Resource Center partners. Keep an eye on our Learning Opportunities feed for offerings that interest you, and browse our Teaching Support Forms if you need assistance to solve a specific teaching problem.

• How do I currently engage with peers and contacts in my department? Beyond my department?
• What colleagues, learning communities, workshops, conferences, or other networking opportunities would support me to reach my teaching goals?
• Can I engage in mentoring to support my development as an instructor (or support others to develop)?
• What supports are available in my department or at the university if I need guidance to solve a problem in my course?

If you need individualized support to solve a problem you encounter when teaching a large enrollment course, browse our  Teaching Support Forms  to request a consultation.

While there are unique challenges to teaching and learning in a large enrollment course, it can also be very rewarding. Whether you are teaching in person or online, knowing the constraints and opportunities you will encounter—and planning accordingly—will enrich the course experience for you and your students.

• Classroom Management: Large enrollment courses can be intimidating, and it is easy for learners to feel anonymous. Make sure students can hear you clearly, have a plan in place to mitigate classroom distractions, and avoid traditional lecture in favor of active learning techniques as much as possible.
• Community Building: Prioritize community by finding ways to develop personal connections with students throughout the semester. Set a supportive tone, reinforce instructor-student and student-student connections as you go, and utilize the individualized support your TAs can provide to the class.
• Logistics: Think about how you will use class time and physical classroom space differently, leverage available support resources, and be available to students outside of scheduled class time.
• Assessment and Feedback: Adapt your assessments and activities to run smoothly in a large enrollment context. Find ways to monitor and assess the learning of all students. Simplify and maintain consistency in grading and feedback processes.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Develop inclusive course materials so students can see themselves represented, consider how to meet the needs of students from varied educational backgrounds, and proactively design your course with UDL and accessibility in mind.
• Instructor Resiliency: Cultivate resiliency by developing a growth mindset, reflecting on your purpose, attending to self-care, and leaning on the support and advice of your peers.

Learning Opportunities

Brammer, M. S. (2020). Faculty resilience in higher education: A review of the literature. On J Complement & Alt Med. 5(2).

Canning, E. A., Muenks, K., Green, D. J., & Murphy, M. C. (2019). STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes. Science advances , 5 (2), eaau4734.

Cash, C. B., Letargo, J., Graether, S. P., & Jacobs, S. R.... (2017). An analysis of the perceptions and resources of large university classes. CBE—Life Sciences Education , 16(2), ar33. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.16-01-0004

Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The spark of learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.

Chen, K.-Z., Lowenthal, P. R., & Bauer, C. (2015). Effectiveness and student perceptions of high-enrolment health studies online courses. H ealth Education Journal , 75(3), 343–357.

Cooper, K. M., Haney, B., Krieg, A., & Brownell, S. E. (2017). What’s in a name? The importance of students perceiving that an instructor knows their names in a high-enrollment biology classroom. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 16(1), ar8.

Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American journal of physics, 69(9), 970-977.

Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House Digital, Inc.

Eckhart, B. (2011). To share or not to share: Cancer and what teachers should tell students about it. Talking about Teaching.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415

Junco, R. (2012). In-class multitasking and academic performance. Computers in Human Behavior , 28 (6), 2236-2243.

Kachani, S., Ross, C., & Irvin, A. (2020). 5 principles as pathways to inclusive teaching. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/02/19/practical-steps-toward-more-inclusive-teaching-opinion

Knight, J. K., & Wood, W. B. (n.d.). Teaching more by lecturing less. Cell Biology Education, 4(WINTER), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.1187/05-06-0082

Kuznekoff, Jeffrey H., and Scott Titsworth. "The impact of mobile phone usage on student learning." Communication Education 62.3 (2013): 233-252.

Muenks, K., Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Green, D. J., Zirkel, S., Garcia, J. A., & Murphy, M. C. (2020). Does my professor think my ability can change? Students’ perceptions of their STEM professors’ mindset beliefs predict their psychological vulnerability, engagement, and performance in class. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Mulryan-Kyne, C. (2010). Teaching large classes at college and university level: Challenges and opportunities. Teaching in Higher Education , 15(2), 175-185.

Orellana, A. (2006). Class Size and Interaction in Online Courses. Quarterly Review of Distance Education , 7 (3), 229–248.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational researcher , 41 (3), 93-97.

Roeser, R. W., Skinner, E., Beers, J., & Jennings, P. A. (2012). Mindfulness training and teachers' professional development: An emerging area of research and practice. Child development perspectives , 6(2), 167-173.

Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education , 62 , 24-31.

Spencer, S. J., Logel, C., & Davies, P. G. (2016). Stereotype threat. Annual review of psychology , 67 , 415-437.

Spurgeon, J., & Thompson, L. (2018). Rooted in resilience: A framework for the integration of well-being in teacher education programs.

Trammell, B. A., & LaForge, C. (2017). Common Challenges for Instructors in Large Online Courses: Strategies to Mitigate Student and Instructor Frustration. Journal of Educators Online , 14(1). 10-19.

Whisenhunt, B. L., Cathey, C., Visio, M. E., Hudson, D. L., Shoptaugh, C. F., & Rost, A. D. (2019). Strategies to address challenges with large classes: Can we exceed student expectations for large class experiences? Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology , 5(2), 121–127. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000135

Related Teaching Topics

Best practices for recording instructional videos, planning your course for the general education curriculum, universal design for learning: planning with all students in mind, related toolsets, carmencanvas, search for resources.

Considerations for Large Lecture Classes

Six ways to make lectures in a large enrollment course more manageable and effective, 1. establish learning goals..

Once you and your students know where you’re going, the trip is easier and more efficient. And often the very act of creating learning goals results in reducing the amount of material to be covered, since you have brought your course into more focus.

2. Cut down on the amount of material you are trying to cover.

Content Tyranny is a problem for most college instructors, that is, trying to cover too much material. The result is usually opposite--less material absorbed at a more superficial level--of what we hope for. Be harsh with yourself and cut the material that is not absolutely essential. Lectures, particularly in large enrollment courses, should cover the following kinds of material:

• key points and general themes
• especially difficult material
• material not covered elsewhere
• examples and illustrations
• material of high interest/relevance to students

Steps to take: Read through your syllabus and mark every topic as either “essential” or “helpful.” Cut out all the “helpful”—move them to “suggested further reading.” If you’ve marked everything “essential,” ask a colleague to mark your syllabus the same way. If all else fails (and 90% of the time, you’ll be able to cut material), you need to redesign the goals of the class, perhaps in consultation with your department curriculum committee. But this is rarely necessary, if you are honest about what can be cut. Remember, you cannot teach everything in one course: it just doesn’t work. (And if you could, your students wouldn’t remember, anyway).

3. Focus your lecture on analyzing issues or problems, rather than on conveying factual information.

Rely on students to get facts from their reading. Devote lectures to more in depth discussion and analysis. For instance, begin each class session with a question that you will devote the session to answering. This also leads to more focus and engagement.  Practical Pointers on Preparing and Giving Lectures  covers these ideas as well as others that will lead to more effective lecture classrooms.

Steps to take:  Turn a general topic into a question (the same thing we ask students to do for papers). Instead of “The ways lodgepole pines propagate” make it “Why do lodgepole pines need fire to propagate?” Instead of “The Rise of the Middle Class in Postwar America” make it “What factors were the major drivers in the rise of the middle class?” And you can ask for ideas at the beginning of class, as a way of involving the students in answering the questions.

4. Engage your students through active learning practices and interactive lectures.

“What professors do in their class matters far less than what they ask their students to do.” (“Teaching for Long-Term Retention and Transfer,” Halpern and Hakel). It’s difficult for anyone to sit for 50 or 80 minutes and simply listen. Attention span begins to fade after about 20 minutes, so you need to stop every 20 minutes or so and do something new.

Steps to take:

• Break the class into groups (yes, even in a large class—you can just ask them to turn to the two or three people around them) to investigate a problem or answer a question; after five minutes you can randomly call on groups to respond. Just one of many ways students can collaborate during lectures.
• Hand out three x five cards and ask students to jot down a question they have as result of the last 20 minutes. Have them pass the cards three or four people to the left. Ask various people if they can answer the question on the card they now have.
• Stop the lecture for a general discussion.
• Show a short, relevant video clip.
• Discuss the topic as it has appeared in the news.

Consider having your students sit in lecture with others from their section, and you can then direct exercises and questions to them by section. Not only will they be more inclined to engage with people they already know, but you will be reinforcing the importance of the sections and making the course seem more of a unified whole.

5. Provide more and shorter feedback to students throughout the semester.

Don’t rely just on midterms and finals to let students know how they’re doing. By providing them with frequent feedback on their progress, you ultimately save time (and anguish). Not all assessments need to have grades attached. Quick, frequent, formative assessments help students to focus on areas they need work on, while also breaking up lectures and increasing student engagement. 

Feedback on their learning:

1) Hand out 3 x 5 cards at the end of the class and ask students to identify the major points covered. This can be anonymous or not. Collect them, skim them, and begin the next class by talking about their responses. Ask those students who were off to see you or their GSI, or to review their notes, etc. 2) Ask them to identify the “muddiest point” in the lecture. 3) Begin the lecture by soliciting questions (on cards or not) based on their reading for the day. 4) Stop a lecture at any time after a difficult topic and ask them to explain it to an intelligent high school student who knows nothing about the topic.

Feedback on your teaching: Using the same techniques, ask them about the pace of lectures, use of presentation tools, clarity of examples/explanations, flow of the course or anything else you would like to know about.

6. Poll students to gauge student understanding and adjust your content

Use a student response system (e.g., iClicker Cloud or Poll Everywhere) to get instant feedback on your students' comprehension of a concept:

If your class is too big to track how individuals are doing between exams, have your students take a quick anonymous poll to gauge whether or not a concept was understood. With a student response system, you can poll students on the fly and adjust your content appropriately. This saves time spent unnecessarily on concepts that are already understood and allows you to follow-up only where needed. Keep students engaged by asking thoughtful questions they can answer individually, and then asking the class to respond to the collective results.