Written and designed by the staff of the Center for Teaching and Learning. Reproduce with permission only.
October 1989
One of CTL's ongoing projects is a publication which we call the "teacher's desk reference." We have been interviewing faculty and TAs about what they know and like about teaching undergraduates at UNC. We thought that instructors might find the methods and ideas of their colleagues useful in their own teaching. This newsletter highlights some of the ideas of Professor David Griffiths of UNC's history department.
"I was young and enthusiastic. Now I'm enthusiastic but I can't sustain it as well. Following certain practices, being conscious of methods, being more aware of what you're doing helps."
David Griffiths has been teaching for 20 years. One of the courses he teaches is History 30, a survey course of Russian history. The classes are large--enrollment is usually around 150 students--and he has three teaching assistants to help him. He talked with us several times about many aspects of teaching large classes. In our meetings three themes emerged: the teaching strategies he has developed over the years; the critical role of the teaching assistants; and the importance of recognizing and improving student learning, "not just what they learn but how they learn." Listening to Griffiths talk animatedly about teaching and how he teaches, it becomes clear that he is an enthusiastic and involved teacher who cares about both his students and his teaching assistants.
"I like teaching. It's my profession. I can't imagine what I'd be doing if I weren't teaching."
"In large classes the teacher must be more organized and more concerned with method."
When Griffiths first started teaching, he relied more on his own enthusiasm for the material than on organization or teaching methods to teach his students. He says that now he understands the necessity for structure and planning in a course, especially a course like History 30 ("one thousand years in one semester") which he teaches every year. Here are a few of the methods that help him to manage the great amount of material and large number of students in such a class.
"The first thing I do is say that the material is vast, I can't cover it all, but here are seven major themes that are going to come up again and again..."
He identifies the seven or eight themes that unify the material and he carefully plans the entire semester of lectures and discussion sections to emphasize those themes. Griffiths formulates questions for the discussion sections that will get the students to analyze the readings and to relate the themes of the course to the readings. He plans his lectures on index cards, a note-taking technique he recommends to students, though as he says, "It is not just for the students. It helps me in organizing my material. I don't have to rewrite a lecture. If I've found something new or if I want to reorganize or if I want to combine two lectures; the material is there and it is just a question of reshuffling."
"I use a description of the books, and a justification for assigning them, as a method of accenting what I think is important in the course, and the themes I'm going to come back to again and again."
On the first day of class, Griffiths introduces himself to the students and goes over the syllabus. His syllabus outlines the course week by week, including all the usual information about textbooks, readings, exams and grading. He introduces the reading list by stating what the book or reading is about and how it relates to the themes of the course. The students know when there will be a discussion section and what readings they need to have done beforehand. He follows a "fairly strict schedule" because of the necessity of presenting material needed in the discussion sections. He warns students that he talks quickly but that "I'll say everything twice. If you miss it the first time, hang on, it'll come around a second time." Before the first lecture, he tells students that if something is not clear, "raise your hand immediately, I'll finish my thought and then I'll call upon you." Griffiths takes the entire first class meeting, and sometimes part of the second class period, to go over the syllabus in detail, introducing the organizing themes for the course and explaining what the students' responsibilities are--he believes it's important that students know what to expect and what is expected of them.
"You have to give an introduction and state at the beginning of your lecture the major theme or problem you're addressing."
"I have the outline follow the development of the lecture, including the organizing themes."
Griffiths writes an outline of the day's lecture on the board before class starts, including any terms that the students will need to know. He finds that "younger students in particular have a harder time picking out what's important and significant; [it's] harder for them to pick out the trends and generalizations and to separate them from specific data." The outline on the board helps them to organize their note taking and also helps Griffiths to cover the material which relates to those themes. "I won't permit myself to get so far off-track that I can't cover that material." He refers to the outline several times during the lecture and points out the terms as they come up. When students have questions during a lecture, he will sometimes answer with a question that the asker or another student may answer. "I want them to tell me when something is not clear" but generally he does not encourage lengthy discussions in the lecture classes because of the amount of the material to be covered. There are many opportunities for discussion and debate in the precept (discussion) sections.
"About nine times a semester, we break the class into small sections..."
Griffiths likes the "precept method" of teaching, dividing a large class into small discussion sections with a TA as the preceptor, or leader, for each group. The goals of the precept sections are to integrate the course readings with the lecture material and to sharpen the students' critical thinking and communication skills. With these goals in mind, Griffiths and his TAs compile a list of questions for the groups, and a week before a precept session he distributes the list of questions to the students. The questions start with basic factual information and become "more general, demanding more analytical thinking." He tells the students that if they do the readings, they will be able to answer the simpler, content-based questions. Griffiths has observed that when students are confident in answering the factual questions, they feel encouraged to attempt the broader questions that require more critical thinking. The students are further encouraged to participate in the discussions because part of their final grade is based on active involvement in the precept sections.
Griffiths believes there are three important, but sometimes overlooked, aspects of the precept technique. One of these is careful planning. When he first started using discussion groups, he left much of the organization and planning to the individual leaders. The results of this were that "the sections were not structured enough--there were too many differing experiences." Now he writes the discussion questions with the TAs and he goes over with them what he expects their students to gain from the precept sessions. This guarantees that students will all have the same materials and information needed for the exams.
Evaluation is the second critical component of the precept method. Immediately following a precept session, he meets with the discussion leaders to evaluate the sessions. They discuss how the questions work--if they are worded correctly, if the students understand them, and if they draw sufficiently on the reading material. Griffiths keeps detailed notes of the evaluations so that when he and the TAs begin planning for the next semester they have a record of the changes they decided on when the material was still fresh in their minds. This is not to say that the questions that worked will automatically be included in the next semester's list. Griffiths and the TAs adapt the questions each term, allowing for new materials or leaving out readings that are no longer relevant.
"Having good TAs is a big help . . ."
The third important element of the precept method is what Griffiths sees as the "critical role" of the teaching assistants. He finds that having good TAs is "an essential part of the success of the course" and he spends a good deal of time working and planning with his TAs. He also stresses to the students the importance of the precept sections and the TA's role in the class to help establish the TA's authority with the students. Griffiths and the TAs meet in May to begin planning for the fall semester. They evaluate the previous fall semester's class to see what worked and what must be changed or dropped. They decide on readings so that books can be ordered, and draw up a preliminary class schedule of lectures and precept sections. A week or two before the semester starts, Griffiths and the TAs meet again to fine-tune the schedule, begin work on the precept session questions, and to talk about their responsibilities in the course. Final decisions on the class schedule and precept questions are made by consensus ("their time and ideas are as important as mine").
"...neither the readings nor the lectures by themselves are sufficient."
In addition to the precept sections, Dr. Griffiths has other ways to integrate class readings with his lectures. He recognizes that "there is a very real temptation to assign a book and then say "Ok. You read the book and I'll go on with my lectures." But experience (and student evaluations) have shown him that there may be a gap between his perception about how the reading and lectures connect, and how the students are actually putting them together. To overcome this problem, he rereads the text periodically to be sure he uses the same terms that are in the text. He indicates where the textbook authors stress a certain point, but he'll stress a different point. He says "I don't repeat the reading material in lectures, what I say complements rather than repeats the readings. I'll present a theme in new ways or go into much more depth on a certain subject." Griffiths relates the text and his lecture material to the organizing themes of the course so students understand the overall structure of the course.
"I start each lecture by giving a 5 minute resume of the previous lecture."
For a number of years, Professor Griffiths would begin his classes by asking if there were any questions on the previous lecture, but he discovered that many of the questions students asked could be preempted if he gave a short summary of the material from the last class. Now, he starts each class by reviewing the previous lecture, reemphasizing the important points and relating them to the overall themes of the course. He encourages students' questions, telling them "the only stupid question is the question that isn't asked."
The mini-review reflects Griffith's intent to help the students learn to pick out the important points in a lecture, in much the same way his blackboard outlines do. He wants them to grasp the content of the course but he also wants them to be able to summarize and analyze the information for themselves. He thinks that many students' notes are "flat," everything having equal value, and he wants them to understand that "some things are more important than others." By repeating the main points and themes of the course on different days and in different ways, he emphasizes what they need to learn, and with the outlines and rephrasing shows them how they can learn.
"No exam should ever be a surprise."
Griffiths believes it is important that students know what to expect on exams. In the survey course, he gives two one-hour exams and one final, consisting primarily of broad essay questions but also including some identification questions for vocabulary words and important terms. His essay questions are similar to the questions that are used in the precept sessions, and he tells students that if they understand the precept section questions that they'll be "in great shape for the hour exam." Because of the many ways he and the TAs emphasize the themes of the course, he feels that students should be able to identify and discuss those themes in an essay test. He wants to find out how well they analyze and synthesize the course material. He tells students "There are no right or wrong answers, only well-argued or poorly-argued responses."
"Students should be able to say these are the themes the teacher has stressed, therefore something related to one of these themes should be on the exam."
He has several ways to prepare students for tests. Before the first exam, he holds an evening review session that is mandatory for freshmen and optional for other students. In the first fifteen minutes he describes how to answer an essay question, comparing the structure of a good essay to sonata form (A-B-A) and identifying what each part should contain. After this introduction, the students read old exams and interpret the answers based on what they have just heard about writing essays. They must identify what the question asks and discuss how well the answer addresses the question. Griffiths believes that this preparation will help students think more critically and respond with greater precision when writing their essays. He emphasizes that "questions have directions to them, they are not open invitations."
A week before each exam, he gives out copies of previous years' exam questions. He uses different exams each year so students understand that they can't prepare a specific question ahead of time. But the sample questions allow the students to practice organizing what they have learned into a cohesive essay.
"The students have put effort into the course and you have an obligation to put effort into grading fairly."
Griffiths uses a system of checks and balances for grading. Most of the students' exams are graded by their precept leaders, but Griffiths himself grades a stack of them so he can gauge how the class is doing. He then regrades all A, D, and F papers "to avoid the possibility of systematic differences between graders." Griffiths also regrades because he wants to get to know the A students so he can acknowledge their good work during the semester. He likes to know who is not doing well too, so he or the TA can help before it's too late. He says that if there is a big discrepancy between two grades on an exam, each grader will regrade the paper and if the split is still there, a third grader will grade the paper. Griffiths reports that out of 100 papers, only 10 to 15 will have been graded by three graders. He acknowledges that this system is labor intensive, but feels he owes it to his students to grade them as fairly as he can.
We hope you find Professor Griffiths' ideas helpful in your own classes. For more information about teaching large classes, including books and articles, contact the Center for Teaching and Learning at 966-1289.
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