Make the students think about the ideas themselves. Have them talk amongst themselves about it. If there’s too much lecturer in the lecture it just washes over them after five to ten minutes. They need to have a break, think about the problems, do a couple of problems and talk amongst themselves. That seems to keep them engaged, especially with the variety of students in the class. It keeps their attention. Lecture for five or ten minutes and use work sheets, which they pick up as they come in.
Use response devices. In the larger first year classes you can use socratic mobile phone quizzes or other technology to get responses from the whole class. Also you can pass around the microphone to hear their answers to the questions. But it’s often the extroverts who will volunteer to do that. Sometimes it can give you the wrong impression of the class, because the ones who are responding are the ones that understand it. Whereas the ones who don’t understand it are keeping quiet. So the response devices are quite a good way of just trying to get a better picture of the whole class.
