How many students are in a class can have a powerful impact on how effective a teacher can be. Students each have their own level of ability and optimum way of learning. Having too many students in a class can make it far more difficult to teach any of them well.
Consider a class in which half of the students learn best in a more structured environment and half the students learn best in an unstructured environment. Even a simple division like this means a large increase in the amount of work that a teacher has to do to maximise the learning of all of their students. If you then factor in the fact that some children are likely to be more intelligent than others and learn faster while others are likely to be less intelligent and learn slower, then things get even more complicated.
In university, this was something that I noticed frequently in tutorial groups, which could contain anywhere from ten to twenty students. In a class of twenty students, I would, typically, encounter two or three that were clearly better at the subject than the others, along with two or three who were definitely struggling just to pass. The others would generally be more middle of the road, with dispersion toward both the top and bottom end.
My challenge, as a tutor was to teach the material in a way that allowed as many of my students as possible to understand as much of it as possible. Ideally, the delivery of course material would be customised to suit each student’s ability and learning style, but the real world is far from ideal. Given a limited amount of time and resources, there are times when you have to resort to what is essentially academic triage.
This involves aiming squarely at the middle of the class using methods designed to accommodate the most common learning styles. I am well aware of how cold-hearted this sounds. But the facts of the matter are simple: instructors have a finite amount of time to teach a set amount of material, and this means trying to teach as much as possible to as many students as possible.
Inevitably, the ones who are least well served are those at the very top and those at the very bottom. Of course, those at the very top aren’t in any danger of failing the course. They are frustrated at not being pushed hard enough or not learning as much as they know they are capable of. In contrast, those at the bottom are in trouble because they are the ones in danger of failing the course. There were suggestions that tutors aim their teaching at the bottom of the class, but there was no way that we would ever be able to cover the material in the time available if we did that.
That was where my consultation hours came in.
I would ask students who I knew where struggling to come to my consultations hours, so that we could cover the material again in a manner better suited for their learning style. Not all of them took up my offer. But some of them did, and I think they were much better for it.
What I’m trying to say here is that when you hear talk of class sizes, it isn’t just some random metric. Class sizes can have a very, very big impact on how good a job teachers do. A teacher’s time and attention is finite. Splitting it up between more and more students with different needs is only going to end with those students being more and more poorly served. And the ones who suffer the most aren’t going to be the middle of the road students. No, they are probably going to be okay. The ones who suffer the most are going to be the ones at the bottom, the ones who are most likely to fail the course.
If you want to read more about my thoughts on writing, education, and other topics, you can find those here.
I also write original fiction, which you can find here.
