I am always excited to go to my teacher's class to do my observation hours, but during certain lab days I freak out a bit. The class has maybe 30 students and whenever there is a large lab that the class will do, all the students get super excited and I do to because it's awesome to see the students enjoy learning Science. The only thing that I freak about though is the students being safe during all this, they all get into small groups when the teachers has them group up. I know we can't be with all the groups at the same time, we have to let them explore on their own too but are there any ways to make it easier to keep an eye on all 30 students while each group does the lab.
This is always a daunting task and can be exacerbated by specific student or instructor personalities. I think age level is important here for gaining advice. When I taught high school laboratories, the 'motto' was 'Support Learning'. This was an easy reference to simply start all activities by reminding students to support learning through their actions. For my college students, behavior in the lab was a graded component, listed as 'professionalism', and included everything from showing up in the right clothes to using PPE to cleaning up their labware after the experiment to behavior during the experiment.
I am a student teacher and I have experienced labs in my placement with classes of 20-24 students, it is hard to see all students during a lab. I feel that it is essential to lay down the lab safety rules every lab so that the students understand the expectations. Another thing I feel goes in to play is the class itself, if you have a class that would be more responsible than another then it is easier to move about the class because they earned the trust of being responsible. For those classes that are not very responsible a demonstration might be in order instead of the full experiment if there is a safety issue involved.
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