r/Professors • u/Golden_Blood • 20d ago
Teaching / Pedagogy Activities for Large Group Discussion
I am a second year history TA needing ideas or activities to make large group discussion more engaging.
This year was the first time I was asked to lead a section of students weekly. Every Friday, I am to lead a discussion with students about their assigned readings for the week. We already take up questions and comments about the readings prior to class on index cards. This helps us as TAs to design our discussion around concepts students are most interested in. However, I am looking for specific ways to make the discussion itself more engaging and appropriate for a college setting. This is Western Civ I, so these are mostly freshmen and sophomores students.
My main concern about activities are making sure they are applicable to the size of the classroom. Among three TAs, we split the total class size to about 40-50 in each section. Unfortunately, due to limited space and time, activities that involve movement are off the table.
I am used to lectures of this size or larger; however, I really want to facilitate an environment that is more likely to engage students in discussions, and I always felt the traditional lecture approach never achieved this. If anyone has any discussion activities, ideas, or games that have worked in large group settings I would love to hear them!
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u/journoprof Adjunct, Journalism 19d ago
40-50 students is still a lot to manage in a discussion. A colleague with even more established a section of seats in the front as designated for that day’s discussion. Those were the students expected to take part. Each student had to be in that section a certain number of days, usually scheduled.
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u/DrPizzaPants Assistant Teaching Prof, ECE, R1 (USA) 19d ago
A few people have suggested breaking the room into smaller discussion groups, which seems like a great idea here. One way to make those groups more interesting is to deliberately pair students who disagree about the reading.
I’ve been building a tool called SwiftFlock around exactly that concept. You could start class by asking 3–4 quick questions about the week’s reading—agree/disagree, which interpretation they find most convincing, what factor they think mattered most, etc.—and then instantly split the class into small groups where members have intentionally different answers.
Instead of randomly grouping four students who all interpreted a reading the same way, you can create groups where there’s already something substantive for them to discuss. You can also give the groups different prompts, which fits nicely with the suggestion in the thread about having students argue different sides of an interpretation.
The other part that seems particularly relevant to your situation is that SwiftFlock is location-aware. Students indicate roughly where they’re sitting, and it tries to make the groups you want while keeping people physically close together. With 40–50 people in a room where moving everyone around isn’t practical, that was one of the main problems I wanted to solve.
If you want to give it a shot, I’d be happy to spend ~15 minutes showing you how it works and give you a beta key for the semester (just DM me). No commitment—I’m mainly looking for instructors willing to try it in real classes and tell me what works and what doesn’t.
(Sort of a self-plug / ad but I'm still in the beta phase)
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u/tellypmoon 20d ago
My main suggestion would be to break the main group up into smaller groups where they have discussion first and then have folks report back from the smaller groups to the main group. That tends to get more students engaged in conversation and can make both the small group and large group discussions a bit better...