S1 E2 Teaching Tips for the Beginning, Middle & End of Class

Teaching@Tufts: The Podcast

00:00 / 8 minutes, 13 seconds

Episode 2 of CELT’s Teaching@Tufts: The Podcast shares practical, evidence-based strategies for maintaining student engagement throughout a class period. Hosts Heather Dwyer and Carie Cardamone draw on insights from Dr. James Lang’s work on attention and distraction to offer three small changes you can implement today that will have a big impact on student learning and focus—from the moment students walk in, through the middle lull, to those critical final minutes.

Strategies for Instructors

1. Beginning of Class: Retrieval Practice – Instead of providing a recap yourself, ask students to recall key takeaways from the last class meeting. This strengthens their ability to retrieve information and sets a focused tone for class.

2. Middle of Class: Breaking the Plane – Re-engage wandering attention by having students focus on something new. In a physical classroom, you can move about the room, standing near different groups of students. In any modality, you can switch up activities, changing students’ focus from a lecture to a discussion or problem-solving.

3. End of Class: Consolidation & Connection – Create an exit ticket where students identify 3–5 ways the day’s material appears in the world outside your classroom.

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Resources & References

Articles:

Small Changes in Teaching: The First 5 Minutes of Class by James Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education
Small Changes in Teaching: The Last 5 Minutes of Class by James Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education

Books:

Lang, James M. (2020). Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Basic Books.
Agarwal, Pooja K. & Bain, Patrice M. (2019). Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. Jossey-Bass.

Websites:

Transcript: S1 E1 Teaching Tips for the Beginning, Middle & End

Heather Dwyer `[00:00:12]`	Welcome to teaching at Tufts the podcast. This podcast comes from Tufts, university, Center for the enhancement of learning and teaching. Today’s episode is hosted by myself, Heather Dwyer and my colleague, Carie Cardamone, teaching at Tufts. The podcast offers teaching tips, practical strategies and highlights from recent developments in higher education for the busy instructor on the go. And this season is all about engaging today’s students and what the learning sciences tell us about that. So, we’re really going to spend some time exploring the cognitive, emotional and environmental factors shaping how students learn today, and what you the instructor can do to meet them where they are.
Carie Cardamone `[00:00:53]`	So, today’s episode is teaching tips for the beginning, middle and end of class. We want to introduce some small changes drawing on the learning sciences that you can make today that would have a big impact on maintaining students learning and engagement throughout a class period. After listening, we hope that you’re going to leave with a toolbox of ideas for shifting students’ attention from the wandering mind and life’s distractions to your course content today we’re going to pull some ideas from Dr James Lang, an author in teaching and learning in the college classroom. We’re going to link to his book “Distracted”, and a few of his articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the show notes, as Lang writes in Distracted, we are built to pay attention to other human beings, whether we are using this cerebral machinery dedicated to recognizing individual faces or managing the complex web of relationships that we form throughout our social media accounts. So Heather, why don’t you get us started off with some ideas to capture that wandering mind as you start a class?
Heather Dwyer `[00:02:00]`	Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about the beginning of class. This is a period of time that’s really critical for focusing students. As you can imagine, they’re coming in from various possibilities, like other courses. Maybe they’re coming in from their job, maybe they’ve been socializing with friends, maybe they just rolled out of bed. And we really need to capture students’ attention at the beginning. So, one way to do this is to prompt students to remember what they learned last time they were in your class. And this technique is also known as an example of retrieval practice. It requires students to draw from their memories, and that’s going to strengthen their ability to recall information. And you may have done this before in that you’ve maybe done a little bit of a review at the beginning of class, you’ve provided them a reminder of what was covered last time, but turning it on the students, asking the students to do that work is actually more effective. It can be done pretty quickly, and we suggest even having them write it down, because that will ensure it’s not just a few students who are engaging in that exercise, but that everybody has the opportunity to spend a few minutes and do that. I’ll also mention, if you’re interested in learning a little bit more about retrieval practice and the various ways you can implement that, we recommend checking out the book powerful teaching by Pooja Agarwal, she’s a cognitive scientist who teaches at the Berkeley College of Music. So that’s an idea that you can implement at the beginning of class. And Carie, can you tell us a little bit about something folks could do in the middle of class to maintain student attention?
Carie Cardamone `[00:03:35]`	Thanks, Heather, yeah, for thinking about the middle of the class period. This can be a time when students get fatigued or they just become distracted. This is not a new phenomenon. We’ve always been distractible beings, but as our attention wanders, an important concept is to create these opportunities to re-engage students in the content, in the learning, in the activities. These things don’t need to be big or complex changes. For example, one simple thing you could do in a physical classroom is what James Lang calls breaking the plane. What he’s talking about is an invisible plane or barrier between students and instructors. This can feel very real, especially if you’re at a podium in a large lecture hall with students in the auditorium beyond. And what this involves is simply moving throughout the space in which students are sitting so that they’re going to focus on you and turn their head and see a new location, right, so that they’re just re engaging in their attention. So, for example, you might approach a student who has a question and then make eye contact to them as you listen to their reaction to your response. If students are working, you can come around the room and have informal conversations. Sometimes, this can redirect their attention on the task, and this also helps build a sense of community. Within the classroom, it can even be as simple as deliberately standing near different groups of students while they’re engaged in discussions or problem solving. Other activities beyond breaking the plane are anything that allows for a moment of re engagement by redirecting students’ attention so it could be changing from a lecture to a discussion question or changing from watching a video or looking at an image to thinking about text or solving a problem. So, throughout the class period, you might be thinking about refocusing their attention on the activity underway. What about the end of class, Heather?
Heather Dwyer `[00:05:41]`	Yeah, the end of class, it’s a tricky time, as you may have experienced, students are often eager to pack up. They want to move on to the next thing, but those last few minutes actually provide a powerful and timely opportunity for students to consolidate their learning. And Lang recommends and we do too not to waste these last few minutes by trying to cram in new concepts or go through a long list of reminders for students. It’s a very difficult time to try to do that, especially as students are a bit distracted and ready to move on. So, what we suggest, and what Lang suggests, is to consider wrapping class maybe five minutes before the end and tell students they can leave when they’ve identified a few ways in which the day’s material appears in contexts outside the classroom. As Lang writes, you’ll be amazed at how quickly they can come up with examples when this activity stands between them and the dining hall. So again, this this approach would really prompt students to recall things they’ve learned over the last hour and help them consolidate their knowledge. That’s another example of how to incorporate retrieval practice into your teaching. But also asking them to make connections to the world and their experiences outside the course can help them really better understand the importance, the relevance of the course content, and ultimately, that can be a big boost to student motivation.
Carie Cardamone `[00:07:07]`	So today we’ve covered three short tips, quick ideas of what you could change, drawing on the learning sciences to re-engage student attention throughout a course. You could start class off with a recall activity, prompting them to think about what they learned last time. You can think about opportunities to re-engage their attention in the middle by breaking the plane or switching activities to refocus them on their learning and wrapping up class by asking them to identify how what they’ve learned applies to the world outside their course to deepen their learning. We encourage you to try out one or more of these activities and reach out to us at celt@tufts.edu to let us know how it goes. You can also check our show notes for links to the articles and books referenced in today’s episode, with many more ideas for the class period. Until next time! Thank you for listening to teaching at Tufts, the podcast. Keep teaching, keep learning, and don’t forget to take care of yourself too.