You shouldn’t be rigid in what you’re going to do. Go with the flow in the lecture. Don’t be rigid and think ‘I’ve got to get through these 15 slides today and if I don’t the world will end’ because it won’t.
Write your course before the semester starts so that you know what the flow is and what the connections are. If you’re always writing one lecture ahead of them you have no idea what’s coming in the future therefore you can’t make the connections across the whole set of lectures. It’s very important to be able to know what’s coming, know what’s gone behind and know what you’re doing at the moment.
Use a lot of eye contact, the people in the back row are not anonymous, make sure you’re talking to them and make sure that you see them. Make sure you’re looking at them. So you’ve got to focus on the whole class not just the people at the front, the people at the back as well.
So the strategy is to reflect, to change things, to be flexible, to talk to them but not talk down to them, and don’t be writing the lecture the night before.
