DAY TWO: Teaching Evening (or Extended Time) Classes

The focus of our Day Two “idea” relates to the challenge of maintaining attention and engagement when the class is a long one. Consider these facts:

1. Research says that an adult’s attention span is not much more than 30 minutes, and for many, as little as 10 minutes is what they are used to! [Fact: Maintaining focus for 2-3 or more hours is tough!]
   
2. Add to that the mental fatigue for those students who have been working all day or handling other challenges during the day, such as childcare. [Question: How much mental energy do they have to process the learning experiences you have developed for them? Are there some types of experiences that can be handled better than others?]
   
3. Add the reality that many students need to shift mental gears from whatever they do during the day to think about the issues and topics in your course. [Example: Shifting from solving problems on the job that have nothing to do with the course’s content, for example, is challenging!]
   
4. Finally, a common situation that contributes to attention issues is students may be rushing from work to class without having time to eat anything, or at least nothing that the brain can use for thinking. [Brains need nutrition!]

Let’s take a look at #3 above for today. How can you assist your evening students in getting on track quickly, shifting gears to your course’s content?

• At the conclusion of the last class, put up on the screen and post to your course web site, the opening question that will be discussed at the beginning of the next class. Then, put that question up on the front screen up to 15 minutes before class, so that it is displayed as the students arrive.
  
• Begin the class with one of the following activities to help the students get on track quickly through active learning:
  
  
  • Display a focusing question related to the opening discussion topic in which students can reply anonymously with clickers. Use the composite answers that display on the screen to spark conversation. You may want to provide 3 or 4 of these clicker questions to wet their appetite and get all of their attention “on the same page” before launching other learning activities.
    
  • Display one or more focusing questions related to the opening discussion topic (in PowerPoint, or typed and projected using the document camera) that students in pre-assigned small groups are to discuss among each other for 10 minutes. Then, taking each question one at a time, have a spokesperson from each group share or be members of a panel for that learning activity/discussion.
    
  • If you have assigned study questions, an outline, a double-entry journal, or other homework assignment that involves summarizing the critical points from the reading, have the students join a pre-assigned discussion group to negotiate a common list of no more than five critical points. Each group can share one of them during the whole class discussion.
    
  • Play a short audio or video clip from a well-known movie or television show that contains a relevant story to that night’s topic. Invite students to pair up and generate three things that were happening in the clip that relate to the reading for that evening…this is an open-book activity that gets them back into the book from whatever they were doing before coming to class. Then, call on various pairs to share one of the themes they discovered as a starting point for a whole class discussion of the critical points.
    
  • Develop a series of scenarios in which the core concepts for the evening can be used to pose solutions. Have the students write down individual solution ideas, then pair up and discuss each other’s scenarios and solutions, and then have two of the pairs combine to form a group of 4 based on the color of their scenario (blue groups have the same scenario, for example). The new group is to use the text or other resource you give them to flesh out the details of a “best” solution. Then, each scenario is presented by a group along with the detailed solution. The rest of the class is invited to comment, ask questions, offer alternative analyses, etc.

Any of these activities can help students transition from their busy jobs or home life to the exciting world of learning about your content area. What other ideas have you used to jump start your evening classes? Use the Comment button below to share your ideas!