The classroom has been the central place of learning for centuries as it should be.  In the classroom, students meet the disciplinary expert who has trained for many years.  Imparting this knowledge and fostering expertise in succeeding semesters of students is one of the single greatest joys of teaching.  After several decades of teaching, I’m grateful to be talking with and supporting former students in their current efforts. The relationships fostered in the classroom, the conferences, writing assignment feedback, hall conversations remain strong and vital.  In few occupations do relationships form such strong and important ties.

Of 15-30 students in each class, and teaching 5 classes a semester at the beginning of the career, with 1-2 classes for reductions to free time for administrative duties in later years, I would estimate that in a thirty-year career, I have taught as many as 10,000 students in three decades.  If I could have found ways to maximize learning in the limited minutes of each class a bit more effectively, then more of the thousands of students would be a bit more learned, more knowledgeable, more effective in their careers and lives.

Teaching excellence is about relationships, yes, and it’s also about teaching all students as much as possible. As my former boss at Georgia’s Board of Regents said, ‘All means all, Jeff.’  So let’s take a look at what is possible for extending the circle of influence to the students sitting in each class.

Maximizing the minutes means using the minutes we often neglect.  Jim Lang’s book Small Teaching(2nd ed) is a fine example of doing just that.  Focusing on bringing more cognitive exercises into the first-5, last-5, and intentional pauses to regroup, Lang encourages faculty to use Predicting, Retrieving, Interleaving, Connecting, Connecting, Practicing, and Self-explaining exercises.  A variety of activities like the quiz, the minute paper, journaling, guided class discusssions, and other writing prompts can facilitate the effectiveness of these cognitive exercises.

In my classes, I have used daily quizzes for years, but now want to return to my old quizzes to determine whether I asked of students more than mere retrieval, which is a good activity for a number of reasons.  But there are others that can develop other cognitive muscles.

Creating a Small Teaching Inventory is one way to put together a broad range of activities for use during the lost minutes of class.  And for the primary activities for the hour, selectively using technological tools like a course document, a course issues list, and other tools can go far to enrich the moments in class for student learning. Using student-led facilitation of discussion is vital for students taking ownership of the class and helps to decenter the class as well.  More students emerge as class leaders during their facilitation.

Finally, I require student conferences for each writing assignment and students must submit a rough draft a day before our scheduled conference.  During the conference, the student speaks first with something like ‘what I wanted to do in this essay was . . . ‘ and so on in such a way to allow me to validate their attempts, their draft, while also drawing attention to next steps, second draft, and so on.

Books of collected essays devoted to classroom enrichment are also available.  See below for a few of them that colleagues and I have produced at Emory’s Oxford College and at the Georgia Board of Regents.