A couple of years ago at the University of York, we switched from the 1-hour traditional lecture format to instead doing 90-minute interactive lectures. After spending years being a student with the traditional lecture format and then years again delivering that type of lecture, this was a break from a norm that took some getting used to. This has meant that, over the last two years, we have all spent time reflecting on and experimenting with this new format and asking ourselves – ‘what is it that makes a ‘good’ interactive lecture?’.
The answer, unsurprisingly, has been ‘it depends’.
One of the big factors is the number of students on the course.
I teach a third-year Green Politics module that usually is capped at around 40 students. With this relatively low number of people in the room, I’ve found it’s quite comfortable and natural to throw out occasional questions and gather responses as one would in a seminar. I have also found that providing breakout group exercises for 5-10 minutes has also worked well.
On larger modules (where I have between 200-300) students, my approach to interactivity has been different. I have made use of resources like Menti Meter to give students the opportunity to give quick feedback to questions using their phones/ laptops/ tablets/ etc; feedback that is then delivered live into a slides presentation. This feedback has then been a useful tool for hooking students back into the subject and making it feel more relevant and engaging.
Our larger modules are more likely to be in the first year and I took this technology-driven approach as, in the past, I have found that students are more at ease engaging this way at this early stage of their degree and in front of so many of their peers. By third year, I felt that students would be more at ease with contributing to a lecture-based discussion both because they would feel more comfortable in that environment and because the size of the lecture cohorts would have been reduced.
However, last week I had a first-year lecture where I decided to mix things up a little. I had slightly over 200 students in a very large lecture theatre for our Global Challenges module, where I had been asked to come and deliver a lecture entitled ‘Why is it so difficult to act on climate change?’.
Again, I used a Menti-based form of interactivity, asking students to rank how serious they thought climate change was and then spoke about the fact that 95% of them thought it was a ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ issue is not surprising when we consider demographic factors and how this matches/ contrasts with other data.
I then used Menti again to ask students, using scales, to rank how important they thought each level of governance is to combating climate change (you can see the results in the image below).
After this Menti however, I then asked them to do some ‘lone research’. I popped the slide below up on the board, and told students they had 5 minutes to research the climate action measures that may have been adopted in their local authority, with the suggestion that we would then have some time to share some examples.
My hope for this exercise was two-fold. Firstly, I hoped that this break in the lecture-Menti-lecture format would help change the rhythm of the 90-minute lecture and therefore keep students engaged. Secondly, I hoped that getting the opportunity to research something ‘local’ would make students more keen to share than if I had simply thrown out a question that was not as specific to them. In case I found that my call for people to share their examples fell on stony ground, I was ready to go with my own example of local authority action to try and get things rolling…
Well, I didn’t need the back-up plan! In fact, eventually I had to say “sorry, we’ll have to stop taking examples there, otherwise we’ll run out of time”. Hands shot up the moment I asked if anyone wanted to share the results of their research. It was fantastic to see that students were also really taking in each other’s responses and responding both to the slide prompt and to other examples they had heard.
So, what was it that worked here? My thinking at the moment is that this exercise benefitted from building on a low-cost earlier form of interaction that was related (responding to the Menti about the importance of the different levels of governance), because it did give students something a little different to do in the lecture, which kept things fresh, and because in Week 2 of their first year, it gave them a chance to speak about where they had lived prior to coming to university.
I have another lecture with the Global Challenges cohort in a few weeks’ time and so I’ve already started thinking about how I can try and repeat this format. I’ll keep ALPS posted with how that goes!