Promoting Student Interaction in Large Lectures

When teaching a large lecture course, encouraging students to interact with the instructor and with each other raises the energy level in the room, helps students engage with lecture material, and provides more opportunities for informal assessments of student understanding.  With graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses, service learning, problem-based learning, collaborative (team-based) learning,  and simulations can be especially effective in encouraging students to think about solving problems in “real world” situations while still learning skills relevant to their field.

Getting Started

There are many effective activities that are easy to implement in a lecture and that promote student interaction with a faculty member and with other students.

Ask students to:

  • Work in pairs to identify major points (you may want to wander from group to group)
  • Work in pairs or groups to brainstorm answers to questions posed in lecture
  • Predict outcomes based on scenarios and evidence that you provide in a lecture
  • Apply what they have just learned to a set of hypothetical scenarios
  • Observe and interpret features of images or graphs
  • Construct quiz questions pertaining to the lecture

Faculty can:

  • Pause during the lecture and pose open-ended questions to students
  • Poll students on issues and ask them to defend their positions
  • Poll students to assess comprehension of complex topics or problems
  • Pose a question at the beginning of a lecture and call on students to answer at the end

Also on this site

Technologies to Consider

Additional Resources

 

 
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