Difficult Teaching Situations

Brainstorming of some challenging teaching situations.

1. students who have different levels of knowledge in interdisciplinary courses
2. making an informationally dense or complex session engaging
3. not having enough visual examples for the topic
4. unresponsive classroom
5. students doing poorly on exams (consistently)
6. students asking you to increase their grade (probation)
7. offensive views in class (racism, sexism)
8. having students in class who are at very different places in their undergraduate careers (different levels of sophistication in their abilyt to assimilate the information. Intellectual and social maturity)
9. interacting with large classes
10. students with unmoving opinions who bog down class time
11. having students with different knowledge backgrounds (disciplinary backgrounds)
12. students who have a lot of difficulty expressing themselves in writing
13. as a lecturer, being caught unprepared
14. students who try and undermine you in class
15. students being offended by the course content
16. students who have difficulty expressing themselves verbally
17. distractions (inside and outside the classroom). Cellphones, playgrounds, Blackberries

Annnnnnd, solutions! 

1. 4: Unresponsive students

• intimidations (check the laws)
• change locations, rearrange classroom
• change style of questions (more leading, for example)
• use multiple style of teaching
• "this might be on the exam"
• incentives (such as candy) or extra points (participation grades)
• ask questions of students in smaller groups (they respond a s group)
• use technology (like clicker or showing multimedia, and then ask questinos about the film - for example)
• asking questinos that are related to the real world (so it's not jsut about theory - connect it with life)
• ask students to come with a response (to art, example) which brings guidelines to the classroom discussion
• re: marking. Encourage them to talk by promising the participation marks. 

1. 6: students who argue for more grades

• remind studetns that review of grades can go up or down
• engage the student in explaining why THEY should have a different grade
• preventative: compare notes with other TAs (for consistency)
• take a second look
• don't be intimitated by students
• allowing students to choose the weighting of the different assignments or do extra work

1. 8: dealing with range of abilities and experience
   

• establishing expectations for assignments at the beginning
• assess the level of diversity in the beginning (quiz)
• get students to develop own contract on grading
• diveristy of assignments to test different skills and abilities
• re: super students. Don't use them as the base standard to skew everyone else group. 

1. 9: Students to stick to options

• don't enage with arguement
• offer to talk to them after class
• know where to go if harrassment
• in syllabus: describe what effective argument is. 

1. 10: engage large classes

• clickers
• using groups (of two or four)
• ask students to write down a question about the lecture
• video clips (multimedia)

1. 13: being unprepared (eek)

• - pause and start over
• ask students to go forward
• email later to follow up on a different point
• reason through it with quetinos and steps
• change location to buy some time. 
• don't take it personally
• students will understand that you are human

1. 14: student who is trying to undermine you

• talk to them outside of class
• do they realize that they are being disruptive, not just funny?
• if then they don't stop: lay out consequence (remove from class, for example)
• ask them to take it offline (in webct, at the pub, in office hours)
• give them a small activity for the rest of class, and then talk to the individual student to see if they are serious or just having fun.