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.
Only give them two or three minutes to work on a problem. That concentrates them and prevents them just talking about the football or whatever it is that’s on their mind. You need to keep changing the activity, rather than have extended activities. We want them to chat, but human beings won’t sit and chat about quantum mechanics for more than two or three minutes, they’ll get onto what they want for lunch. So it’s finding that balance. Two or three minutes seems to work about right.
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.
Students’ patience in thinking about this material is quite short sometimes. So don’t lecture the material for very long. Have a break and get them to do a problem. Do this after introducing the topic, once it’s getting a little bit more concrete, that is, when they can actually work through a problem.
Lecture for five or ten minutes and use work sheets, which they pick up as they come in. Let them work on the worksheets, then have a discussion and use a response devise, like their mobile phones, to feed back answers.
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.
