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Hello Maci,
I know this is a little late - but if you happen to be in a small class again, here are some of my thoughts and experiences:
I have had a few small classes in my career and I found them to be great opportunities to delve deeply into topics, conduct some very interesting projects and really become a cohesive group. I also discovered that I could monitor and coach students much better. The small class size helped me be more of a mentor than a teacher.
On a practical level, you can perform labs and experiments that require elaborate or expensive supplies that would be impractical and almost impossible with a full class. Larger projects are easier to manage and student presentations took up much less time. Coordinating field trips was not cumbersome and I could take smaller classes to places that weren't set up to handle larger numbers. Because of the smaller scale, I know that I was able to try some really innovative and new things with much less headaches. Report writing and marking is considerably less onerous and you really did get to know weaknesses and strengths of your students.
Somewhat counter-intuitively I found that we could have better conversations and discussions. It feels like I had good discussions in a bigger class but as I reflect on it I believe that there were just more extroverted students who would always participate and many students were happy to sit and listen. In the smaller classes it was easier to coax quieter students to participate and 'lazier' students couldn't hide.
The upshot - revel and enjoy having smaller classes and try the advantage to do some cool things.
Hope this helps!
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