Finally hit my stride in my toleration class this semester. It was a rough start because the room is just awful - small, crowded & very structured, and discussion is difficult at best. The registrar was either unwilling or unable to find me new space. So I've been suffering (tolerating, lol). One change I've made is to rely somewhat less on in-class discussion (I'm using online discussion instead). I decided to go in-depth into a subject rather than taking a mile wide and an inch deep approach, so since March 9 we've been focused on a single topic (classroom simulations). We've seen a documentary (A Class Divided), read a novel (The Wave), written a paper, had an all-class discussion of the paper executive summaries (by creatively re-arranging the desks) and it has so engaged them that I decided to stick with the focus another week. At their request, Tuesday I purchased (from amazon) and showed another excellent documentary called "The Lesson Plan" about the actual "Third Wave" class experiment.