ABSTRACT
The variety of classroom practices is bewildering. Even in the 257 classes we observed, in only a tiny slice of the 994 community colleges across the country, we saw everything from a conventional lecture with eighty students to an intense discussion about Muslim history in a seminar of four students, from conventional classrooms with seats arranged in neat rows to vocational workshops in dairy barns and automotive shops, from remedial classes struggling with basic punctuation to the most sophisticated discussions of microeconomics, calculus, and the physics of heat transfer.
