Smaller class sizes lead to better outcomes

Someone recently asked me this question during an interview. Thankfully, I had an answer ready to go: if teachers were given smaller class sizes (say 8, for argument’s sake), a lot of problems in modern education could be solved.

Here are some of them:

1. Less work to grade, decreasing the teacher’s level of stress;
2. More intimate connections with classmates, which leads to…
3. Better social-emotional outcomes
4. More intimate connection with the teacher, which, as Benjamin Bloom has pointed out, would lead to remarkably better student outcomes.

The list goes on. I had a class of 7 this last semester and the students commented that this was the only experience in college that they remember getting to know their classmates this well.

Written on 2024-03-21