Dear colleagues:
I 'm looking at a practical course-related problem, and I hope that
someone might come up with a creative solution that I hadn't thought of
yet.
My yearly introductory history of education, family & childhood course for
first-year students is a 30-hour affair with (next year) about 220
students. In previous years, I still relied on good old lectures with
some media support, and at the end for everyone a written exam. For next
time I want to make an entirely new course, allowing for more student
*activity*. After a few basic theme introductions, I want to offer the
entire group on a regular basis a choice from some small source-related
assignments, the results to be handed in in the week after. For example,
things like a few questions requiring that you carefully compare two
representative parent's manuals text fragments from different centuries,
etc.
The collective meetings would then serve mainly for drawing some general
conclusions from the previous assignments, and introducing the new ones.
With some help, I may succeed in developing a series of fairly standard
assignments beforehand, and also to read and evaluate all weekly hand-ins
during the course.
My as yet unsolved problem is not in the material: it is mainly
organizational. Because of the numbers, I won't be able to discuss each
student's individual results. I cannot even have some kind of weekly
evaluation in smaller discussion groups: even groups of 30 would still
mean 7 separate groups, which is out of the question. So how do I make
sure that students do also get some feedback and discussion on their
assignments at an **individual** level? And how, for that matter, will I
prevent some less motivated students from simply starting to copy each
other's findings, without me even noticing?
I happened to read something in the Web lately about "peer reviewed
learning", where students are supposed to discuss and evaluate each
other's work in small groups or random couples, almost without teacher
intervention. Frankly, this sounds very 1970s to me and I'm rather
sceptical about this (especially with first-year students) but I've no
experience with such an approach.
Is there anyone who actually tried something like that, and did it work?
Or is there anyone who can think of another practical solution for an
organizational problem like this? (and before you ask: no, I cannot really
use the Internet as part of a solution: many of these students do not yet
have Web access, or even email).
Thanks for any suggestions! And if you think I'm just mad, by all means do
tell me...
Dr. Henk van Setten -
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Associate-Professor, History of Education and Childhood.
Editor, The History of Education Site:
http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/
Website email: [log in to unmask]
Personal email: [log in to unmask]
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University Nijmegen,
dept. Algemene Pedagogiek,
PO Box 9104,
6500 HE Nijmegen,
Netherlands
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