In this section, Professor Verghese shares how the teaching team in 6.011 Signals, Systems and Inference supports students by offering collaborative problem solving opportunities, optional tutorials, and recitations.
The Evening Common Room
I think the evening Common Room is one of the best elements of the class, for those students—around a third to half of the class—who take advantage of it. I got the idea for it many years ago when visiting another university campus center after dinner, and found clusters of students sitting at desks and working collaboratively on homework and projects, though with no instructors in sight. For 6.011 Signals, Systems and Inference, we reserve a classroom for the three or four evenings that precede the day homework is due, and guarantee that at least one of the staff will be present there for 1.5-2 hours; usually we have the lecturer or a recitation instructor, as well as a teaching assistant.
We find students working individually as well as collaboratively, and periodically interacting with the staff, either at the board or at their desk—very immersed and engaged in the homework problems, and in sorting out ideas and misconceptions related to these. The staff will typically respond to student questions with other (well chosen!) questions or hints that guide them along, rather than with answers—and that makes for a very fruitful dynamic. We have never found the Common Room misused as a place to come and get fellow students to feed one solutions to the homework. I would absolutely recommend this to other faculty, if they have the staff resources and time. Our staff invariably finds the Common Room to be the most rewarding of the various settings in which they interact with students, and it is where they get to know their students best.
Optional Tutorials
"Our staff invariably finds the Common Room to be the most rewarding of the various settings in which they interact with students, and it is where they get to know their students best."
Our tutorials are run by the teaching assistants on an optional, sign-up basis, limited to 5 students per session. Some students—perhaps a third of the class—attend them very regularly each week, others occasionally or not at all. The idea here is to actively engage the students, have them go the board to work things out, rather than having the teaching assistant give a summary of lecture at the board and then work out problems for the students. The teaching assistants go prepared with a small set of basic problems, simpler than those on homework, and illustrating points that have come up in lecture. However, the tutorials are also teaching assistant office hours, and students are encouraged to come with questions they may have. Any general guidance that the lecturer or the recitation instructors may have for the teaching assistants usually comes at our weekly staff meeting, held on Monday to set plans and directions for the week and beyond, but we typically leave the teaching assistants to come up with specific problems for their tutorials, perhaps in coordination with each other. The teaching assistants also take turns helping the lecturer generate the problem sets and solutions.
Recitations
Recitations, by contrast, are sized at about 25 students each, and taught by a faculty member or (occasionally) a postdoctoral researcher. Our expectation is that students will attend lectures and recitations (each lecture is typically followed the next day by an associated recitation). Recitations are used to reinforce prior lecture material through problems, and generally not to introduce new material. They are kept interactive, even if students aren’t going up to the board. The recitation instructor may use problems that are analogous to the homework problems, but simpler. We expect that each recitation instructor will get to know their students well individually, as these instructors are ultimately the ones who decide on student grades, with guidance and coordination by the lecturer in charge.
