Large Classes: Problems and Solutions

As my Nepali friends already shared, very busy schedule; attending the conference, presenting my paper, reporting the presentation of all presenter to the committee, doing volunteer job and many more. At the same time, I'm learning many things. This type of meeting is very productive; get to learn many things from other and share ours as well. I think this type of conference and seminars are great source of developing network with people of different parts of world. In ELT, developing network is one of the ways of professional development. I have my presentation on "Humanistic Education in EFL classroom". My main focus was on letting students self-realize, self-understand, discover themselves how they are which is one of the objective of Humanistic Education. It is the study of self- actualization, related with the feelings, experiences, memories, hopes, aspirations, beliefs, values, needs and fantasy of students. It believes that the feelings of the students influence the language learning. Based on this definition I introduced some humanistic games, talked about Johari window to make participants clear on what Humanistic education is.

About online course, this week we discussed on large classes and work on interactive power point. This week, it became a bit confused for me about interactive Power Point. To make me clear, Krishna helped me a lot. Thanks to him. Next, I got a lot of exposure on large classes; its challenges, problems, and solutions. It is true that large classes are challenge in itself. It is very difficult to mark homework, to build rapport among students and teachers, all the students can’t participate in the classroom because of time boundary, it is very difficult for the teachers to control or manage the class, difficult to address the need of mix-ability students, difficult to hear the response of students, and the most important thing is to remember the students name. These types of problem emerge other problems such as it demotivates the backward students as teachers can see the thing of active learner as s/he becomes active and be in touch with teachers. Though teachers want to be dynamic in the classes s/he can’t do.  S/he can’t use different kinds of classroom strategies. For instance: pair work, group work, project work etc. but in reverse of this, one of my friend said that large class is not problem in itself but the perception and attitude of teacher is problem. They see only the problems inside the classroom because of large class but they don’t try to find out the solution. I think her perception is somehow right in a sense; if teachers see only the problems who is there to search for its solution?

In my view, pair correction is one of the solutions for correcting homework in the large classes. Likewise, monitoring by active students can work somehow. To assess students, certain criteria can be set up like rubric where they can judge themselves and see for the next improvement. After all, students are very good to identify their own mistakes. Bringing authentic materials in front of the class can be one solution of the large class. It encourages students to be active and most prominent things are to share with colleagues and ask what they do. Try to apply the friends’ strategies in your classroom as well.

Thank you.