Lecturer Teams

There are over 700 students in our Fall Quarter calc-based course. Rather than have one large class, the course is divided into 5 sections. Each section is taught by a professor and a team of TAs. The professors, whose primary responsibility is the lecture, from each section meet on a regular basis. These are the lecturer team meetings.

There are a number of reasons why the lecturers need to meet on a regular basis (approximately once a week) to compare how their sections are progressing:

• Students inevitably transfer between the various lecture sections of the course between academic quarters, so it is important that the curriculum remain similar for each section. Along this line of thought, every student in the course takes the same final exam regardless of their lecture section.
• Due to the large number of students served, all the sections need to share laboratory space. Because our labs are tied closely to the lecture, it is vital that the pacing of the lecture sections remain approximately together.
• Students from each section talk to each other. If the work load is dramatically different between lecture sections, the students will complain.
• Student misconceptions or difficulties that appear in one section are probably in every section. Meeting on a regular basis will allow the lecturers to share strategies to overcome them.