Big, but Not Bad

The professor enters stage left and strides to his mark. A thousand eyeballs

ALSO SEE: Large and Loved Tips From the Maestros The Sage on Stage Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Richard P. Halgin, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst known for the popularity of his large lecture courses, on how to teach large courses.

look up. The packed auditorium goes quiet. Class is now in session.

Richard P. Halgin always plays to a full house, and this Thursday morning in April is no exception. The professor of psychology is a master of the giant lecture course, the type of class often cited as proof that colleges care more about generating revenue than educating students.

But talk to Mr. Halgin's students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and you'll hear over and over that "Abnormal Psychology" is their favorite course. They don't love it because it's an easy A (it isn't), and they don't show up because they have to (the course is not required, and attendance is not taken). They're here two mornings a week because they want to be.

This is a big class that works. While there are lots of big classes that deserve their bad reputations, there are also others, like this one, at colleges across the country -- huge classes, in a variety of subjects, that win high marks from hundreds of students year after year.

Even so, the notion that small classes are superior to big ones is rarely challenged. Colleges with lots of small classes tout that fact every chance they get. No one brags about 500-seat auditoriums.

Big classes get a bum rap, according to Mr. Halgin and others who teach them. These professors say they demand just as much of their students as do colleagues who teach smaller courses -- and they point to teaching evaluations that meet or exceed those of courses with many fewer students. Several studies, including a recent one here, back up that claim. Some professors even argue that bigger can be better.

"I'd rather have a brilliant teacher in a class of 500 than multiple sections with mediocre teachers," says John A. Daly, a professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Yet even defenders like him acknowledge that big classes can turn into big disasters. Too often, professors who haven't had time to frame their graduate diplomas are pushed in front of a sea of staring students, handed a piece of chalk, and told to teach them something. Or, because of budget cutbacks, a class that was designed for 15 to 20 students is allowed to creep to 30 or 40. The point is not that bigger is always better, but that big classes can be, as the new book Engaging Large Classes puts it, "just as stimulating and rewarding as small ones."

Professor or Performer?

One of Mr. Halgin's fellow faculty members once told him that teaching a large class -- one with 300 or more students -- is easy. All you do is stand up there, tell a few jokes, show a slide or two, and call it a day. What's hard about that?

The casual remark still steams the psychology professor, who points out that his cavalier colleague had never actually taught a big class. There is nothing easy about teaching large classes, Mr. Halgin says. But over the more than 20 years he has done so, he has hit on a few ways to make the task less overwhelming.

Some of the advice sounds basic. For instance, all big-class instructors emphasize the importance of preparation. In Mr. Halgin's class, there is no formal script, but there might as well be. He plans each 75-minute session almost to the minute, from opening remarks to closing comments. Yet the lecture does not feel canned. Mr. Halgin's delivery is casual and conversational, as if he were chatting with a friend. He does not, under any circumstances, wing it.

Neither does Mr. Daly. The professor of communications has (surprise!) thought a lot about how to communicate effectively to a large number of students. This semester he is teaching two classes. One has 12 students. The other has 580.

"If you have 12 students, you can b.s. your way through class," says the frank Texan. "In a big class, students are less forgiving. You have to be crisp, collected, and ready to go."

He has watched helplessly as guest lecturers in his "Interpersonal Communication Theory" course have crashed and burned. In most cases, he says, the unsuccessful speakers didn't have a firm enough grasp of the material or hadn't considered the best way to present it. They just weren't prepared. The consequences of not being ready to go can be severe. In a seminar, students will suffer quietly. Not so in a big class. "They get up and leave. They work crossword puzzles. Cellphones go off and get answered," he says. "Big classes can be very impolite."

This is the point at which one expects Mr. Daly to go off on a crotchety, "these kids today" rant. Instead, he takes the opposite view: "In every case, I blame the teacher. If it's interesting, people listen. You only have discipline problems when you're boring."

Big and Boring

James B. Maas recently visited a big, boring class. A professor of psychology at Cornell University, he teaches what may be the biggest class in the country. His perennially popular Psychology 101 usually draws 1,500 to 1,700 students. The class he visited was one in which his son, a Cornell sophomore, was enrolled. "He wanted to drop the class after one week. I said, 'It can't be that bad,' and he said, 'Go and see for yourself.'"

So he did. And he was amazed. Of the 600 students in the class, about 400 actually showed up. Of those, he says, a third dozed through the midmorning lecture. Mr. Maas left after 10 minutes. His son later dropped the course.

What made it so unbearable? The instructor treated students to a monotone recitation of the textbook, Mr. Maas says. "It was insulting and dull."

No one calls Mr. Maas's course dull. While other professors bristle at the idea that part of their job is to excite and entertain students, he embraces showmanship and freely admits to being a "bit of a clown."

In a recent class he told about how Sarah Hughes, who won an Olympic gold medal in figure skating, had improved her skating by increasing the amount of time she slept each night.

When he finished the story, he introduced Ms. Hughes herself, who had been sitting in the audience, unbeknownst to the students. "If you can't make them interested in your material," he says, "either you shouldn't be there or they shouldn't be there."

Ralph G. Williams agrees, but with a caveat. The professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is known for his Shakespeare course, which usually draws more than 300 students. This semester, he is teaching three courses, all with more than 100 students. One of them, "The Bible in English," tops 300. Unlike many other large courses, which tend to be introductory, all of Mr. Williams's classes are upper-level electives.

"There is a genuine temptation that it become performance simply," he says. "One must keep in mind that the lecturer is not the point of the meeting, but the material being discussed."

Making It Personal

To keep his class from becoming only a performance, Mr. Williams says he tries to connect with each student in the classroom. This is quite a trick considering the number of students and the limits on class time. But he argues that it's not only possible, but necessary.

One way that the best big-class professors make their classes feel more personal is by trying to talk one-on-one to as many students as they can. Mr. Williams arrives well before each class so he can chat. The conversations can be about that week's reading, a forthcoming test, or what they had for lunch.

"I greet every student individually, even if it's just eye contact and a hello," he says.

Emily E. Hoover, a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, says that when she teaches classes of 400, she visits a different part of the auditorium before class each day. "I want them to feel that I'm accessible," she explains.

Technology helps, too, especially e-mail. Even professors who eschew PowerPoint presentations and other gizmos call e-mail a godsend. "I don't go to bed until I answer every single e-mail from my students," says Cornell's Mr. Maas, who gets 50 such messages on an average day. Austin's Mr. Daly says he responds to e-mail messages "religiously."

Mr. Halgin, too, is an e-mail fiend. Send him a message and a reply shoot backs before you leave your desk. But ask him about the key to teaching big classes and he does not mention technology. Neither do other big-class instructors. They all say the same thing: Hire teaching assistants. Lots of them.

Given the budget strictures of many colleges, it's unlikely that most professors can hire a flotilla of TA's. Indeed, at UMass, Mr. Halgin's department provides just two graduate assistants for his course. Because two is nowhere near enough, he recruits 15 undergraduate TA's, all of whom have already passed the course with an A or a B. Each one also has to fill out an application form, write a short essay, and provide letters of reference. Mr. Halgin gets three applicants for every position, despite the rigorous process and the lack of pay. (The undergraduate TA's do get three hours of course credit.)

They lead small discussion groups -- a 50-minute session each week -- and handle basic inquiries from students. If an undergraduate TA can't answer a question, he or she passes it on to a graduate TA, who, if necessary, relays it to the professor. By delegating most of the day-to-day administration of the class, Mr. Halgin is free to concentrate on content.

At 8 a.m. each Thursday, he meets for an hour or so with his assistants. The men among them wear ties to the meetings, as they do for classes and discussion-group sessions; the women wear slacks and blouses. No one wears jeans or tennis shoes. Mr. Halgin treats his assistants not like the unpaid helpers they are, but like colleagues. At the meeting, every TA gives a status report on the discussion groups. The businesslike atmosphere strikes a positive chord with the assistants.

"He expects a lot of us, and we don't want to let him down," says Adam Silevitch, a pre-med junior, who says sheepishly that he likes the dress code. ("People in the class wouldn't take us seriously without the ties," he explains.)

Mr. Maas hires two dozen undergraduate TA's for his mammoth class. Unfortunately, he notes, administrators at many universities often don't provide professors, even those teaching big classes, with enough financial support to hire teaching assistants, bring in guest speakers, or purchase video clips and other supplies. "You're given a lot of students and the dean smiles and says you're saving the university a lot of money. Fine and good. But the university has to be willing to invest in the course. It takes a lot more money to pull off a large lecture course."

The economics of big classes would indeed make a dean smile. They also make departments look good by keeping up enrollments, on which departmental budgets are often based. "If so-and-so teaches 1,000 students a year, that allows other people to teach the small seminars and the upper-level courses," says Mary Deane Sorcinelli, director of the Center for Teaching at UMass.

Keeping small classes small is important to many professors, especially at a time when budget cutbacks have created pressure to increase class sizes.

While big classes can be great, Ms. Sorcinelli says, that doesn't mean every course should be super-sized. "If you want intensive writing, it's going to be hard to do it with 500 students. And can you really teach Spanish to that many people?"

Besides, not every professor is ready for the auditorium spotlight. "Some people are well suited and some people dread teaching big classes," she says.

The X Factor

Even for those who are well suited, pulling off a large lecture course involves more than answering e-mail messages, delegating responsibility, and preparing properly. There is something else that separates big-class instructors from others.

Mr. Daly says he knows professors who are terrific with 20 students and terrible with 250. It's hard to put a finger on what it is, but it's easy to recognize who has it and who doesn't.

Mokhtar T. Atallah wishes he knew what it was. His "Introduction to Nutrition" class has 450 students and meets in the same room as Mr. Halgin's course at UMass. But the similarities stop there.

At a recent session, fewer than 40 of those 450 students came to class. It was an abnormally low turnout, according to the associate professor of nutrition, but even on a good day, he acknowledges, only 100 to 120 students are likely to be in the auditorium.

Of the few students who showed up on this day, a half-dozen were sound asleep. One student in the second row rested, eyes closed, with an elbow on the desk and his chin in his hand. As the professor explained that muscle atrophy is one of the symptoms of the disease beriberi, which is caused by a thiamine deficiency, the student slumped forward as if to demonstrate.

In short, the course is not going well, and Mr. Atallah knows it.

He has been working with the university's teaching center to figure out how to improve the course. "It definitely hurts the ego when you see that many students in the class," he says. "I want them to love it, but I don't know how to make them love it."

So what is it that Mr. Halgin has that Mr. Atallah doesn't?

Some might argue that abnormal psychology is simply more interesting than nutrition. But Mr. Daly isn't buying that. "Any teacher ought to think their material is inherently interesting," he says. "If I were a physics professor, I could teach a large class on physics."

Mr. Maas concurs: "I spend a third of my class talking about sleep. There's nothing more soporific than that. And I have them on the edge of their seats."

But the opinion that carries the most weight belongs to Jason R. Bileau, a freshman who sits in the very last row of Mr. Halgin's class. He skips most of his other classes but never misses this one, he says. "It could easily be boring, but it isn't." One of his back-row buddies, Amy Cavanaugh, nods vigorously. "This is by far the best class I've ever taken," says the freshman.

Part of the difference seems to be a matter of delivery. While Mr. Atallah is heavy on facts and light on stories, Mr. Halgin takes the less-is-more approach, figuring that students can open the textbook for specifics. The information he does mention in class is usually wrapped in a story.

"Whenever I feel like I'm losing them, I launch into a story. When I do that, you can see their eyes light up like little children," he says.

Thomas E. Campbell, a business lecturer at Austin who teaches classes as big as 550, likewise believes in the power of a good anecdote. "You have to spend time thinking about how to tell a story that makes a point," he says. "If I didn't have 10,000 stories, I wouldn't be able to teach big classes.

Along with plenty of stories, big-class instructors tend to have no shortage of self-confidence. In fact, it seems to be a prerequisite for the position.

Whenever colleagues ask Mr. Daly how he can teach so many students, he responds that he could teach even more if he had a bigger room.

"I always tell them: 'Put me in the stadium.' I've always wondered how I would look up there on the Jumbotron."