Big Classroom Student Engagement – Overcoming the challenges
Earlier this year, I published a blog about how to engage students when they are in the classroom. As the choice of learning – its mode, pace, sequencing, frequency - becomes widened by digital technology, I argued that it is critical to make our teaching engaging, relevant and worthwhile, if we are to support student learning and development. I suggested that switching up your engagement method every 15-20 minutes through running activities, such as ‘think, pair, share’, sharing media on screen, or taking opportunities to get to know your students will help to build rapport and community to improve belonging. These are all methods that are becoming increasingly common across our sector, where there are endless innovations in technology and teaching approaches that are making teaching in the modern classroom truly engaging. However, the difficult question I often get asked is, “what if I have 200+ students in my classroom – how do I engage them?” This important question is something I’d like to address in this blog.
“It's alright for you and your small class”
In discussions around student engagement and belonging, there are colleagues who may respond to any mention of classroom engagement challenges with the retort, “I don’t have a problem with this, my class is wonderful”. With a little probing we then come to realise that they are often teaching a cohort of 20-30 students, on a small degree programme. We then think, “it's alright for you and your small class, but I am teaching 80-500+ students in a large lecture theatre, where it’s a challenge to just recognise faces in the room, never mind learning each individual by name.” Although teaching in higher education in small class sizes and spaces is not free of its own challenges, it is more often than not that the questions around student engagement in the classroom relate to large classroom sizes. In smaller cohorts we can quickly learn students’ names, oversee engagement during learning tasks, spot when someone is not there, and create community through smaller more intimate discussions. By contrast, in the large lecture theatre - which can feel as though one is confronting ‘wall of students’ – or, even more challenging, the long flat classroom, supporting the above mentioned activities is much harder to facilitate.
Theatres of learning
The lecture theatre in higher education holds a good degree of prominence, as it stems from a lengthy historic tradition as a learning and teaching method. Traditionally, the academic stands at the front, often behind a lectern, to deliver their address. Spaces from lecture halls of teaching rely on purpose built acoustics, with often fixed seats curved to face to lecturer – these rooms place the opportunity for learning at the centre, with the individual on stage. In modern lecture theatres, the speaker is now electronically supported, with lights addressed towards them, microphones to give volume command and even their position of power emphasised by control over the literal ‘Power Point’ in the room. Often a room booking made following course recruitment success, having your course in the big lecture theatre on campus is an achievement, but in reality these spaces offer a set of challenges and considerations for student engagement that need greater consideration.
Known challenges we all experience
The challenges in large spaces for student engagement are likely well known, but I feel these are important to repeat before we get onto exploring recommendations. First, running interactive learning where students talk amongst themselves is very difficult to facilitate in these large spaces (not least because you simply cannot know if they are on task or talking about their plans for lunch). While it is good to provide students opportunities to discuss and consolidate learning, enacting pair and share or group discussion across 100+ people can get very loud and it be very hard to draw people back together. Icebreakers can become chaos makers – where our efforts to create discussion in the room can create an overwhelming cacophony of voices and make it very difficult to draw the discussion to a close. Second, the seating itself prevents collaboration, with stacked bolted-down seating makes it very hard to turn around to speak to the people behind you, which removes any chance of any meaningful group work, we can only really operate laterally in these spaces – talking amongst our seated neighbours.
There is also the student tidal drift towards sitting at the back, where challenges in attendance can see a rooms that seats all 200 only get a 50% attendance. Students mostly gravitate toward the back of the room which means you are greeted with gaping void in the front part of the hall. This issue is further exacerbated as students faces sitting at the back in the dim cinema-style lighting are often very hard to see, let alone hear students’ contributions from sometimes many metres away. Finally, the anonymity the lecture theatre provides students can lead them towards going off task on electronic devices, talking during class, and, worse, using the theatre doorways at the back of the hall to walk in and out of class during teaching. This states just some of the challenges of engagement in large lecture theatre spaces.
Beyond the built learning environment of the room, the teaching techniques employed sometimes also create further challenges. With a lectern and computer fixing us to the front, we remain in our formally allotted position – dictated by the room layout - often in the corner of the lecture theatre ‘stage’. Academics will then also often do as the room name commands and ‘lecture’, where instead of experimenting with a variety of activities, the academic will dictate a monologue towards the students for one or two hours without breaks for engagement, consolidating learning, or a moment to chat to peers.
For our students entering these spaces for the first time, they may not be most prepared for the learning experience en-masse - having mostly come from classrooms of 20-40 students. Setting the tone and expectation for students and their learning in this space is crucial in these early weeks. Students coming into this space may be tired from late night work or be operating on non-9-5 sleep patterns, or they may have other commitments on their mind, or their digital devices may be taking their attention. They may hold preconceptions of the lecture as being a passive experience and do not understand that even in the lecture their role is active in making notes and connecting content with prior learning. Add to this a darkened room and the risk of quite literally ‘drifting off’ all contribute towards a challenging environment for both staff and students to manage. Finally, there is also the issue of disruptive behaviour in class; this is something I will return to in a later blog.
The lecture is here to stay
Despite differing preferences in academics and students in whether they prefer small-group or large-group teaching, we must accept that the lecture theatre and large group teaching is here to stay. Undeniably, the lecture can also be an exceptionally powerful tool if done well and the focus is placed upon cognition over content delivery. Equally, as course numbers and popularity fluctuates within providers, it is likely that changes made by government policy to pre-18 studies will continue to see peaks and troughs in course interest (notably realised following Psychology’s A Level promotion in the 2000s, Creative Writing A Level promotion in 2010s, and more recent emphasis placed on STEM). Beyond education, wider societal interests can also influence applicant decisions, creating unexpected peaks, such as those influenced by crime drama television series, which contributed towards the staggering increase in popularity in Criminology courses, or the increase in Pharmacy studies following COVID-19 pandemic.
Making the contact time and class size work for you
When harnessed for its potential, the teaching mode of the lecture can be a great learning experience for students, and it can be shaped into a far more active and engaging experience for students. As lecturers, and professional service staff invited into class, we should consider the simple steps below to ensure engagement in large group teaching. All of these recommendations are applicable to smaller groups, and to many will not be new, but are critical when looking to improve your practice in the large lecture theatre.
- Setting expectations at the start: This may feel a little like crowd management, but it’s important to set expectations for the session and how you will manage it early on. Give early indication that there will be opportunities for discussion at particular points and any other activities and what they involve (technology or talking to their neighbour) before you get started. It’s also useful before setting people off for their activity to remind them how they will be brought back together – you might like to use a visual aid (e.g., a slide behind you indicating the end of discussion) alongside an audible one. This sets and manages expectations clearly for any activities in the session and pre-briefs students to listen and look out for the cues to listen to you.
- Moving from behind the lectern (and get a clicker!): When teaching in such spaces, we often feel compelled to remind behind the lectern where the microphone, mouse, screen and our notes are located. One way to be free to is to use a clicker to enable you to use the full stage (or even room) to be more engaging and take yourself toward the students. Try to source a roaming microphone to further free yourself from the stationary position of the lectern and make use of the space around you. In addition, using a table beyond the lectern for your notes, or if a university estates manager is reading, requesting access to additional monitors throughout the room to unlock you from the lectern will have further benefits.
- Set parameters and even clearer instructions on any discussion activity: If you are planning to run any activity where you are going to get your 200 students to talk, go even further in detail on the instruction. This can be through providing greater clarity on the start and end time, specific questions, expectations following the activity (e.g., feeding back) and more targeted activities. I always like to pre-empt the feeding back to the room part by incorporating one person to be the scribe and/or spokesperson for the conversation – it’s another helpful tactic to build in expectations from the start. Essentially, the less ambiguity or confusion with the task, the easier transitions into and out of the activity will be.
- Use the microphone: Many lecturers I meet say they don’t need a microphone, often saying “I speak loudly” or “I have been teaching for years”, but we must avoid assuming that just because we think we are loud, that we can be clearly understood. Particularly as you cannot predict who may be in the room and who may have hearing difficulties. Lecture spaces require differing levels of audio support but theatres and large 100+ rooms certainly require it depending on the acoustics, or if you are in a busy city or campus like London. Working out what works for you and your teaching style, and for your students sitting at the peripheries of the class is important to be heard and understood. However, please remember you are not doing a rap battle or karaoke, so you do not need the microphone so close to your mouth that you are somehow at once both muffled and deafening for those in the room – a good 20cm distance from mouth to microphone will do nicely!
- Audience participation technology: Often the first answer to engagement given in large classrooms is the use of audience participant technologies. These are increasingly part of the student experience and it is with good reason. They provide useful breaks in the session to help students consolidate learning and participate in processes of elaboration and active recall. Quizzes in particular can help both you and the students understand their learning. It is important to remember with these activities that they should hold purpose and clearly relate to the lecture to ensure students’ see the relevance. If they are gimmicks and not integrated fully into the session’s learning outcomes, the loud sighs from students will be like a wave on the beach as students pull their phones out.
- Share practice and work as a team: Most lectures are delivered in the ways that the individual leading it once received it as a student. Practices are inherited and it is assumed that this inherited practice is the gold standard. However, taking time to speak as a team about your approaches to engagement methods in large group teaching holds immense value. It can help to understand what they have found works and what you might be able to implement in your own teaching practice. At the School of Finance and Accounting at the University of Westminster, we are encouraging staff to support one another and talk about what engagement methods are working and, importantly, where things have been tried and did not work.
- Apply other scholarly informed pedagogical practices: The above steps are very practical and do not take account of the vast field of pedagogical approaches which can be equally applied to large group teaching. Focusing on other strategies such as relational pedagogies, constructivist strategies and ensuring you are taking steps towards accessibility through Universal Design for Learning practices are all worthy of reading to support your teaching (see the reference list below).
Supporting each other to find the solution
The lecture room and our teaching practice can often feel like a personal space, where we have control, but if our students disengage and learning, attendance or engagement measures decrease, this space can be brought very quickly to the attention of others. Although teaching is about people, each cohort of students, academic discipline, and importantly the room, will have different engagement solutions required to engage the students in our current higher education context. Key to developing our own practice is sharing experiences between our colleagues within departments, across different disciplines, and finding opportunities to discuss this with colleagues in different universities.
Tom Lowe has researched and innovated in student engagement across diverse settings for over ten years, in areas such as student voice, retention, employability and student-staff partnership. Tom works at the University of Westminster as Assistant Head of School (Student Experience) in Finance and Accounting where he leads on student experience, outcomes and belonging. Tom is also the Chair of RAISE, a network for all stakeholders in higher education for researching, innovating and sharing best practice in student engagement. Prior to Westminster, Tom was a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Portsmouth, and previously held leadership positions for engagement and employability at the University of Winchester. Tom has published two books on student engagement with Routledge; ‘A Handbook for Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theory into Practice’ in 2020 and ‘Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge’ in 2023, and has supported over 40 institutions in consultancy and advisory roles internationally
Readings:
Carlos, V., Rodrigues, M., Matos, B., Gonçalves, L., Ribeiro, F. and Fardilha, M., 2023, September. Engaging large classes of higher education students: a combination of spaced learning and team-based learning. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 8, p. 1129763). Frontiers Media SA.
Langston, T., 2025. Understanding Lecturers' Perceptions and Motivations When Using Audience Response Systems in Their Teaching. Journal of Educators Online, 22(3), p.n3.
Lawrence, J.E., 2022. Teaching large classes in higher education: challenges and strategies. The Educational Review, USA, 6(6).
Merry, K.L., 2023. Embedding universal design into intensive learning experiences. Journal of Block and Intensive Learning and Teaching, 1(1), pp.17-27.
