I agree, less than 20 is where the best teaching happens. My 3rd year course has 18, but due to timetabling snafu, I have them split into two groups (this is all wholly off the books; but the ones that can't make it on the assigned day and time, we found another two hour slot that fits everyone and we just meet in my office, so NO ONE CAN COMPLAIN ABOUT IT), so I have ~12 in one group and 6 in the other. My tutorial group for the intro class is one group out of 6 (each having 11-13 students), which means the lecture itself is ~70, but even though that's a pretty large group, I've been very satisfied with my attempts to make it not just "the sage on the stage". I'd say about 30 of them will regularly ask questions or answer questions I pose to them during lecture, and each week it's a different subset, so it's not the same 5-10 "know it alls" that are always speaking in lecture, which can sometimes happen.
The dept. was originally not going to give me a tutorial group at all for the intro course; they were all assigned to PhD students and it was only a week before the start of term when I asked, "uh, when will I know when my tutorial is?" that I found out that I wasn't going to have one! I put my foot down and insisted. This is the first time I've taken over this course here, and I was counting on having the personal connection with at least one group of students in order to be able to keep a closer tab on the pulse of the course. (As it turns out, enough students enrolled in the class that we needed to have a 6th tutorial. In fact, it would've been better to have had a 7th, and had 10 students in each.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-02-18 03:32 pm (UTC)The dept. was originally not going to give me a tutorial group at all for the intro course; they were all assigned to PhD students and it was only a week before the start of term when I asked, "uh, when will I know when my tutorial is?" that I found out that I wasn't going to have one! I put my foot down and insisted. This is the first time I've taken over this course here, and I was counting on having the personal connection with at least one group of students in order to be able to keep a closer tab on the pulse of the course. (As it turns out, enough students enrolled in the class that we needed to have a 6th tutorial. In fact, it would've been better to have had a 7th, and had 10 students in each.)