METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1974

THE PHILOSOPHER AS TEACHER: ARTICLES, COMMENTS, CORRESPONDENCE

TEACHING LARGE CLASSES : SOME SUGGESTIONS

JERRY H. GILL

Beginning with the premise that philosophy is an activity rather than a body of knowledge, a difficulty immediately arises when one considers the possibility of developing philosophical skill beyond the confines of a small, serious, and able group. For, dialogue is central to philosophy, and participation is necessary when acquiring a skill. Thus, any kind of classroom situation is awkward, at best, and when one is faced with class enrollments from fifty to a hundred-even in “small” colleges-the whole enterprise becomes downright ludicrous. Finding himself in this situation the average Mark Hopkins usually lapses, out of com- plete frustration, into meandering monologues vaguely addressed to the mob at the other end of the log.

In what follows I shall share some ideas that have proved fruitful in teaching classes with large enrollments, The focus will be on class discussion, written work, and examinations.

As long as the class is small, the usual seminar style discus- sion works well enough. When, however, one has between forty and one hundred students in a course, discussion is usually thought to be impossible. For several years now I have been experimenting with a method of organizing large classes so as to maintain a certain degree of meaningful discussion. This method involves dividing the class into groups of six to twelve students and rotating these groups so that only one is involved in dis- cussion on a given day or topic, but that each has more than one turn at it. While any one group is engaged in discussion on a given day, the remainder of the class is expected to be on hand, observing and following the discussion. These “observers” find this procedure no less interesting than the more usual ways of handling large classes (i.e. lecturing or conducting a kind of roving “our man in the classroom” interview session-which is usually and consistently dominated by a few highly verbal students). Furthermore, this procedure does provide every

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TEACHING LARGE CLASSES : SOME SUGGESTIONS 159 student with the opportunity to be more thoroughly engaged in discussion at least twice. And it provides the professor with the opportunity to get to know the students as something other than a number or name on a class roll, or a face in a crowd. Depending on the nature of the course, I either assign these groups fairly arbitrarily or allow students to sign up according to their interest in various topics.

Another helpful technique for enlivening class sessions is the use of recorded plays, current songs, and/or films as auxiliary foci for discussion. It not only makes a connection with some aspects of nonacademic life with which students will likely be familiar, but it provides a concrete approach to the treatment of a philosophical topic. This technique has proven very successful in Ethics courses, where I have used recorded excerpts from such plays as Antigone, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman as means for discussing Plato’s political theory, the problem of suicide, and the social contract theory, respectively. I have also used the mimeographed lyrics of such pop singers as Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel-along with playing their records in class-as points of focus for discussing various ethical issues. A similar advantage can be gained from employ- ing films or novels which one has reason to believe most students are familiar with. Yet another valuable move is to invite faculty from other departments to participate in an oc- casional discussion. This is a frequent possibility, since philoso- phy overlaps with so many other disciplines.

One other point about discussions. I have found it most bene- ficial to keep some kind of chart of the direction of the dis- cussion on the blackboard as various contributions and prob- lems are encountered. This not only assists the group in keep ing track of the ground and steps it has covered, but it serves as a reminder that the discussion should be “going someplace’’ as well. Discussions often degenerate into bull sessions, with one person giving his opinion and the others waiting (not listening) to give theirs. Focusing the discussion on the board greatly reduces these tendencies.

Now some remarks about written work. By and large philoso- phy students are assigned term papers in addition to mid-term and final examinations. Once again, the standard ten-page term paper becomes an impractical educational tool when one has upwards of fifty or sixty of them to read. Furthermore, it has yet to be established that such an assignment fits every situa-

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tion and I or student. For these reasons I have sought to develop other, more practical and meaningful forms of written work. In the courses where the students are divided into small groups, I ask each member of the group that has the responsibility for any given day to prepare a one-page “thesis paper’’ in which they briefly focus a major theme taken by the thinker under con- sideration and take a position with respect to it. In the course of the term each student prepares at least two such papers. One advantage of this technique is it guarantees that each member of the discussion group has wrestled with the topic in some depth. I t also helps the students learn to “go for the jugular vein” of an issue or position and to develop their own point of view. From the teacher’s perspective this technique allows for more frequent contact with each student’s work. I try to read, write comments on, and grade each thesis paper the same day of the discussion, so as to be able to correlate the student’s written work with his classroom participation. Also, it is most important to return the work to the student as soon as possible in order for him to receive maximum educational benefit from the experience. Perhaps surprisingly, it is a lot easier to deal with ten or so one- page papers three times a week than it is to face fifty or so ten- page papers at the end of a term.

In higher level courses I have found three other forms of written work to be quite advantageous. One is the “workbook”. This has been especially helpful in a course in the Philosophy of Language, where instead of asking for yet another term paper I ask each student to choose a key philosophical concept-such as personhood, meaning, reality, truth, or goodness-and make a workbook containing a substantial number of observations about the ways they and others actually employ the locutions which provide the “natural home” of these concepts, together with some suggestions how these observations might be used in approaching the standard philosophical puzzles surrounding such concepts. Alternatively, one could ask for workbooks in which the students take a particular philosopher’s insights- say J. L. Austin’s distinctions between locutionary, illocotionary, and perlocutionary acts-and compile observations of speech acts which illustrate, extend, or contravene those insights.

The second form of written work I have found educationally productive is the “logical outline”. In my course in Hume and Kant I asked the students to compose a succinct paragraph outline of the major steps in Hume’s Treatise and Kant’s first

TEACHING LARGE CLASSES : SOME SUGGESTIONS 161 Critique following a logical order of indenting sub-points and making extensive use of such logical connectives as “for”, “therefore”, and “because”. I stressed that this would not be the sort of thing one could put together at the end of the term, that it needed to be kept up with day by day so as to keep track of the argument in relation to the reading and class discussion. Not only were the finished products quite impressive, the actual class sessions were the best I have ever experienced because almost everyone was on top of the material as we went along.

Thirdly, 1 have occasionally asked students who are in a class organized according to small discussion groups to produce a “group report” on some topic of their own choosing. This works best when the groups can be given class time to meet on their own, with the professor rotating among the groups from one day to the next. Either students who have had a bit more philosophy can be selected by the professor to serve as co-ordinators, or the groups can be asked to organize themselves. I shall say a bit more about the importance of such group activities at the close of the essay.

Finally, some comments about examinations. Although few teachers of philosophy would stoop to giving objective-type examinations, hardly any ever question the educational pro- priety of giving long essay-type exams. My own approach to examinations has evolved over the past few years, and repre- sents an effort to get away from using them primarily as a means of evaluation. While evaluation is indeed important, it seems to me to be greatly over-stressed in our society, especially in our educational system. Therefore, I seek to challenge students into thinking of what goes on in a so-called exam as a vital part of their educational experience. I consistently refer to them as “Final, Integrative Educational Experiences” (a source of bemusement for my students), and I do my best to make them just that. They should be integral to what has been central in the course, and thereby integrative in character. They should be an actual educational experience in their own right, and thus should add a fresh dimension to or take a new angle toward a by now familiar subject.

If the final, integrative educational experience is to be written, I try to provide the students with a concrete situation to which to apply the main themes of the course. In a Philosophy of Language course, for instance, I gave out a few pages of Aynn Rand’s remarks on language, reality, and truth (from an issue of

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The Objectivist) and asked the students to analyze them in terms of the issues and thinkers we had been discussing (A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, et al). Another time I gave out a critical review of one of the books we had been using as a text, and asked them for a “review” of the review, including the sorts of things the author of the book might say in his defense. Most often I allow the students to use any and all materials that have been used in the course while working on such an assignment.

If, on the other hand, the size of the class and the character of the course have warranted it, I have frequently given “oral” final integrative educational experiences. When the class is small it is quite expedient to schedule, say a dozen forty-minute con- ferences over the last week of the term, and discuss the main aspects of the course with each student individually. Alterna- tively, when the class is large, it is possible to give oral finals in groups. I have experimented both with scheduling as many separate one-hour sessions as there are discussion groups, and with holding a four-hour session in which I discuss with each group for about thirty minutes while the others observe. In this latter case it proved helpful to ask each group to write out three broad questions to submit to a common pool, from which I selected different questions for discussing with each group. Al- though this latter method is quite tiring (though no more tiring than reading a huge batch of written exams), it has the advantage of putting the professor in direct contact with each student, if only briefly. Hopefully it will be an extension of contact already established through earlier discussions. It is, of course, very helpful to jot down some (coded?) notes about each student’s participation during and immediately after the discussion.

There has been a good deal of positive feedback from the students involved in these final, integrative educational experi- ences, a response which is neither unimportant nor all-important. I am convinced that these experiences take the fear and all-night cramming out of examinations, while at the same time providing a helpful means of furthering sound education and of ascertain- ing more clearly just what the students have got from the course as they have gone along.

ECKERD COLLEGE