Max. Classroom Capacity

Loren Naidoo

Max. Classroom Capacity

January 2016

Loren J. Naidoo

Dear readers, I am very excited (and daunted) to follow in Marcus Dixon’sfootsteps with Max. Classroom Capacity! It’s an incredibly tough act to follow (if you haven’t read his farewell columnlast issue, you must!). To use a basketball analogy, I feel a bit like how Alonzo Gee must have felt replacing LeBron James after he “took his talents to South Beach” and left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010. Ever heard of Alonzo Gee? Exactly… Nevertheless, let’s get started! 

I’ve had a few months to reflect on what Max. Classroom Capacity has been and where I think I can take it. My two goals for this first solo column are to (1) tell you a bit about myself and (2) provide a mission statement of sorts to give you a sense of what to expect in the near future.

As to goal #1, let me tell you a few stories about me. I am an associate professor of Psychology at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. While I spend a lot of time and energy conducting research, I am proud to consider myself first and foremost a teacher. I am the son of two teachers. My father was a chemistry professor at a small college in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where I grew up. My mother was an occasional substitute teacher who spent most of her work life as a reporter for a small local newspaper. As early as elementary school I remember feeling a great sense of satisfaction when I could “translate” my teachers’ lectures to classmates in ways that (hopefully) made them better understand and connect with the material.
 

Later on, during my final year as a psychology undergrad at McGill University, I started working as a trainer for Industry Canada in a government program designed employ tech savvy (and inexpensive) college students to train small and medium-sized businesses in the use of the Internet, which was relatively new back then. Starting (and ending!) in 1999, we also provided Year 2000 or “Y2K” readiness training. I like to think that our actions were critical to averting the collapse of western civilization that otherwise would have transpired as a result of computers believing that time had run backward to the year 1900. You’re welcome! 

I learned at least two lessons from these experiences. First, organizational climate is potent. Within a few minutes of arriving at a client’s offices I could tell whether this was going to be a place that I would look forward to or dread coming to. Those consulting experiences really solidified my interest in I-O psychology. Second, teaching is really fun! You get to meet a lot of new and interesting people, you learn a lot, and if you do a good job, students learn too and really appreciate your efforts. Everybody wins! 

I have very fond memories of teaching intro to psych and social psych starting in my first year as a PhD student at the University of Akron. I loved teaching so much that when Bob Lord, my advisor, offered to support me on a research grant in my second year, I actually at first decided to turn Bob down because I was so dismayed at the prospect of not teaching for a year! I’m very grateful to Dr. Kevin Kaut who changed my mind, gently pointing out that I would teach many classes in my career, but chances to work with such a giant in the field would not be so frequent—and he was right. 

As a newly minted PhD at Baruch College in 2005, I vividly remember teaching an early morning social psychology class of 114 students. I had never taught so large a class, and I was a bit intimidated by all of the tough looking New Yorkers! One day I spotted a student in the back row who had fallen asleep. I had been advised by my colleagues to set clear expectations for classroom behavior so I felt like I couldn’t just ignore him—I had to make it clear that sleeping was not OK. The problem was that I hadn’t learned his name, so I couldn’t call on him, nor had I learned the names of the students sitting near him. So I continued talking and started walking up the auditorium steps, hoping that he would wake up before I reached him. He didn’t! I had no idea what to do at this point—I didn’t want to raise my voice any further nor did I want to shake him awake. So I struck his desk with my hand, and the noise and vibration finally woke him up. After class he came down and solemnly apologized for sleeping in class, saying he meant no disrespect and that it wouldn’t happen again. Then, with tears in his eyes, he opened up his bag, which had been sitting on his desk, and showed me the screen of his laptop computer, which I had broken when I struck the desk! He explained, his voice shaking, that he couldn’t afford to buy a new laptop, and didn’t know how to tell his parents who would be so disappointed in him for sleeping in class. I felt ashamed at what I had done, and I had a hard time summoning up the courage to ask my department chair, Glenn Albright, for help. Glenn was so supportive and managed to arrange for some of our computer tech staff to fix the screen for the student for free—I’m very grateful to him for that. 

I learned two more lessons from this experience. First, I should learn my students’ names. There are so many benefits of doing this, including showing that I care about students as individuals, that they aren’t anonymous, and that we (teacher and students) are together integral to and responsible for our learning as a class. I’ve taught many 100+ classes since then, and over the years I’ve devised a system which allows me, with some effort, to learn all of my students’ names each semester. In brief, it involves assigning students to seats, having them send me pictures, having those pictures linked to a diagram of the classroom in MS Excel in which names and images “pop-up” when I click on a seat. If you want to know more, shoot me an e-mail. Second, I’m not cut out to be the “bad cop,” and it’s probably no fun being the student of a bad cop. Now if I see a student dozing off in class, I’ll call him or her (by name!) and ask if they are OK. That usually solves the problem. 

I hope to find and share more teaching stories with you in the future, because I think we can learn a lot from each other’s experiences, and especially from the mistakes. If you have a teaching story that you would like to share, please e-mail me—I’d love to hear it! 

When contemplating the history and future of Max. Classroom Capacity, I did what any student would when required to research something—I Googled it! Turns out the first website that comes up is from the Texas Education Agency on procedures for getting approval to exceed their mandated class size of 22 for kindergarten to 4^thgrade. Hopefully we can bump that down! The second hit pulls up Marcus’s first MaxClassroom Capacity column, in October of 2009, in which he eloquently describes his vision for the column. We are going to continue to work towards Marcus’s goal of building our collective Max. Classroom Capacity. We will focus on the classroom and other settings for student learning in I-O, HR, and OB at the undergraduate and graduate level. We will keep hearing from SIOP’s Education and Training Committee and from past SIOP teaching awardees. We will continue to discuss trends in higher education, debate new educational techniques and technologies, and highlight research that identifies teaching best practices. In addition to what’s been done before I would like to share stories about teaching. I’m curious about how I-O and OB are taught in different institutions, in different countries, and at different levels. We’ll also have interviews and Q&A with folks engaged in novel teaching strategies or under unusual circumstances. I can’t wait! In the meantime, if you would like to reach me, please e-mail me at Loren.Naidoo@baruch.cuny.edu.