Student-Centered Teaching in Large Classes with Limited Resources

Written from years of training English teachers in Haiti, where a class of 80 pupils on benches, with no books and no electricity, is ordinary. The authors define a large class as 50 to 80 and set out what can still be done there. The ideas were tried by the teachers themselves, in their own classrooms, and kept only if they worked.

The article is organised around four problems every teacher of a big class knows: keeping order, getting pupils to work together, teaching without materials, and holding the attention of pupils at very different levels.

1. Let the class write the rules. Groups draft rules and consequences, the class votes, and the final list stays on the wall all year. Rules pupils made are rules pupils keep.
2. Build routines and a silent signal. Agree a signal for quiet - a raised hand, a bell - and never try to shout over the room.
3. Save time on the register. A sign-in sheet passed along the rows, or folded name cards collected at the end of each lesson, takes attendance and teaches you names.
4. Cut the marking. Groups produce one piece of writing between them, and every piece is self-checked and peer-checked before it reaches you.
5. Make group work quick to set up. Pupils work with whoever sits beside or behind them; groups stay together for several lessons, with roles that rotate.
6. Replace copying from the board. A dictogloss - pupils hear a short text twice, then rebuild it in pairs - puts the same notes in their books with far more thinking.
7. Plan for the fast finishers. Keep extra tasks ready, and use stronger pupils as helpers.

This is the article to start with. Its classrooms are larger and poorer than most in Sri Lanka, so almost everything in it transfers - the bench seating, the lack of copies, the pupils who need something to do while others finish.

The marking advice matters most in the O/L years, when every writing task multiplies by forty. One group paragraph, checked by the group first, is far more feedback than forty paragraphs returned late.