Do a demonstration, for example, a little explosion where you get a fluorescent gas coming off. It’s in a way related to the material, but it’s more about keeping them awake and engaged. It’s just a little bit of fun. That helps. They obviously enjoy it. Keep the didactic, formal teaching very, very short, and just mix it up quite a bit.
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 things from everyday life. Things that they’re going to be interested in - solar energy, or designer drugs. So it’s mixing up a bit of everyday life with things that make up the interests of the majority of the students and that they are going to find fits with their future studies.
Do a lot of group work in lectures where students help each other. Randomly allocate them, so the students are in groups which are a mixture of strong people and weak people. The strong people can help the weaker people. The students are actually very good at doing that, it gives you another set of people in the class to help you.
Mix up who the students work with. They’ll sit where they choose in the lecture theatre and then turn them around so they work with people behind them. In that sense even if they’ve sat next to their friend, by turning around, or working randomly with the people in front or people behind, you can mix them up a little bit.
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.
