> If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them.

I went to a relatively small private engineering school. It made a world of difference in my education knowing the professors, and having them know me, especially given that with small classes the professors offered office hours where I could come and discuss the material that was covered during class, as well as problems I encountered on midterms.

I still remember nearly all of my professors, fondly, precisely because of the dynamic small class sizes allowed for.

Same experience here. I wouldn’t trade small class sizes for anything.

I think it's wrong to think that lectures are always inferior. There have been many cases where a professor trying for a more interactive class has made the experience worse for me.

This most often comes in the form of prolonged rhetorical questions. A teacher, fearing he is losing the class' interest might pause to ask "And, what is the benefit of the scientific method?" The point here is clearly to gauge whether the class understands and is following along in the train of thought. Usually, the rhetorical question has multiple interpretations and valid answers. And usually, the students are not so much wrong, as they simply fail to track what answer the teacher is hoping for. For example, the students might answer the rhetorical question above with "It helps us understand the world.", "It allows us to test theories.", etc. In fact, the teacher was looking for something like "It allows for the independent checking and confirmation of the findings of others."

In a real world example, this sidebar of questions might have taken minutes, and more often than not, completely breaks my train of thought. Often, the teach has completely paused a valid train of thought to either measure or enhance class participation, and in doing so has made it harder for me to understand the lesson.

Sometimes this goes even more poorly, and the teach just wants to witness a "class discussion," which can often entail spending much of the class polling the students for their thoughts. Depending on the subject, this can be a total waste of time. Most of the students in the class are poorly informed, and their thoughts are much less useful than a traditional lecture would have been.

I certainly admit that interactive methods of teaching can be particularly effective, but they are not an unalloyed good. They can often be worse than a simple lecture.

What are you even talking about? Have you had any of that classes or are you speculating? I had years of college classes with under 10 students — some with 5 or fewer — and never experienced what you’re talking about.

> I think it's wrong to think that lectures are always inferior. There have been many cases where a professor trying for a more interactive class has made the experience worse for me.

A foundation of the bloated academic and teaching industry requires that that professors can not teach more than a small number of students at once, or at least not teach them well. And that people who were taught in schools with smaller classes that were more expensive must be better. All claims about teaching and learning should be considered with that in mind, especially when it comes from the industry itself.

That being said, interactivity with professors probably works better in most other settings than a lecture format.

This kind of thing is much more likely to happen in the discussion section of a large lecture class than in a small seminar, because the discussion section is likely taught by a graduate student with little prior teaching experience.

In my three student organic chemistry III class, the professor had each of us reading ahead and taking turns teaching the material ourselves. We'd be corrected for mistakes, of course, but it was very much a fire drill. We moved a lot of electrons.

That was quite the course.

I’ve had amazing large lectures and poor small classes. It always came down to the individual professor.

I actually think that putting a bad teacher in a small class makes it worse than a large one.