Tips for Using Questions in Large Classrooms by Daniel J. Klionsky is a great essay in working a huge room (in Klionsky's case, a bio class of 300 students!). It's all about setting a comfortable tone, getting past the sort of "groupthink" that produces silence and fear and horseplay, and challenging students to keep thinking when the urge is to become passive audience members like someone at a blockbuster movie instead of a student learning new material.

I especially liked his suggestion to not ask for answers, but to have people raise their hands to vote on possible answers -- as if doing a "live" multiple choice test. This gets folks more comfortable raising hands and, as Klionsky puts it, "the very act of having to decide and make a sign of the commitment draws students into the discussion." That's true of courses of any size.

When I was a graduate student teacher in film history at the University of Oregon, I ran discussion sections for a large lecture class with 300 seats, too. Once a week small groups of twenty would talk about the prof's large lecture -- and I would run three of these classes per week. But during the prof's lectures my job was sort of like an usher's: I watched students to make sure they weren't disrupting the films or lectures, I distributed handouts, I eagle-eyed cheaters during tests. But our teacher -- my advisor, Kathleen Karlyn Rowe -- was kind enough to let the grad students teach one lecture per term to the whole class. (I gave lectures on German Expressionism and The New Hollywood). I'd get mic'd up and have a projection screen behind me the size of a drive-in theater, to use for overheads and analyzing film clips. It was like being a rock star or something -- the performative aspect of teaching took on a grandiose dimension. I'd make a silly joke and the room roared. I'd ask questions and have a field of faces to choose on at random. I could see thirty heads nodding in agreement when I made a point. It was a thrill. A daunting experience, but a thrill nonetheless. The best thing I ever did was ask questions and cajole the class into raising their hands and talking (nay, shouting, at times), tuning in to their needs rather than focusing so much on my own voice in the amplifier, the typo on my overhead projection, or my panic that the electricity might go out.

But the smaller rooms I teach in now are so much more learning-friendly. The larger the class, the more mechanized the process has to be in order to service so many learners. And the less likely the student will be able to disappear into the fabric of the crowd.

In "The Phil Donahue Approach to Large Lecture Halls", Gerald M. Goldhaber talks about working the audience by moving up and down the rows and breaking the invisible boundary line between audience and lecturer. He uses a seating chart and gets to know the students. But it's the movement between intimacy and distance that probably keeps students on their feet, guessing, attentive. It's a great technique to stitch yourself into that "fabric" of the crowd I mentioned above. And it probably works for any size class.

Okay, let's go to commercial...

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