How do I make my lectures interactive?

To engage students in class add interactivity to the instructional sequence of activities before, during and after class. Below is a sample instructional sequence that includes activities to be used before, during and after class.

Before class: Post an online quiz on Blackboard. The pre-class quiz should help students demonstrate what they have learned from the reading assignments, and to prepare for the in-class activities to come.

During class: Try the following strategies.

1. Concentrate your lectures around the fundamental concepts of your discipline for 20 minutes (the maximum attention span of most audiences is about 20 minutes, according to research).
2. Display a question. The quality of the question makes all the difference in how successful the interaction will be. Try to develop questions that are not just knowledge recall. Try composing a short conceptual question that is qualitative rather than quantitative.
3. Ask students to work together in pairs or small groups for about 2 minutes. Allow time for students to engage the concept, grapple with it and explain their understanding of it to others (research shows this improves comprehension and retention). Good questions generate good discussion. If you don't hear students haggling about how to figure out the problem during this time, the question may be a simple knowledge-recall question, or perhaps it is so difficult that they don't even know where to start.
4. Students use clickers to submit answers, which are then displayed back to the class in a histogram, pie chart, or bar graph.
5. Lead a "post-question" class discussion. The first part of this discussion may focus on the question itself. Students may have misunderstood a particular vocabulary word, or have been bothered by the way a question was worded. A student may respond, "You had the word never, so I ruled it out." This preliminary discussion helps clarify the question so students can work out the solution. The instructor may want to verbalize the solution for the students in order to model the thinking students should emulate.

After class:

1. Publish the SRS questions on the course website via Blackboard, along with your commentary. This gives the instructor the opportunity to clarify concepts and misconceptions and to stress the core concepts your students must master.
2. Students can review the questions and commentary to prepare for quizzes and exams. Students who may not have understood the point of a question from class can take the time to work through the question at their own pace.