Engaging students in large group teaching

As a foundation, make sure you are audible and well paced, and aim to communicate your own interest in the subject.  

You can use a strong structure to minimise student confusion: 

• Divide material into shorter ‘chunks’, for example use ten minutes for a specific concept, concluding with a small recap. 
• Create a bullet point outline or a visual map. You can display this at the start of the session, then return to it and use other signposting (“Now we’re turning to...”) to guide students. 
• Find a shape for the session that fits your material. You could model the processes of analysis, use storytelling elements, or an explanatory structure: compare/contrast, cause and effect, problem/solution, debate.

Dr Yally Avrahampour (Management) presents the case of Enron, initially describing its appearance as a well-run company, then contrasting its demise. 

“The great thing about discussion led by the teacher is that you can lead students down one line of thinking, then another. This was compelling, the opposite was compelling: How do I make sense of these two different ways of understanding it? The learning is the mind moving between two alternative ways of understanding this particular situation."  

More on Yally’s practice. 

Parts of lectures often serve different purposes: giving an overview, talking through an analysis, illustrating a concept with an example, contrasting two theories. Explicitly stating the kind of conceptual work you are doing can enable students to respond appropriately and make useful notes. 

Similarly students are performing many tasks simultaneously, when listening and taking notes; as LSE’s Learning Lab describes, note-taking can help them to concentrate, to process ideas, to note their own observations and questions, and to create a record for later revision. Good note-taking therefore involves significant comprehension, selection, and paraphrasing/summarising. You can support them through: 

• Emphasis and reinforcement: repeat, rephrase and return to key concepts, and ideally include retrieval activities for students. 
• Offering time to process information and take notes: include pauses, particularly at moments of high complexity. 

Some ways your slides (or other visual aids) can support your lecture: 

• If students are reading a slide, they will often miss spoken elements. Avoid overloading slides with textual information, and/or don’t show a textual slide until after you’ve provided the spoken explanation. 
• Visuals or diagrams can be more useful than text to communicate concepts during a liver lecture. 
• If you prefer to share slides with substantial written information as a revision resource, you can include these but ‘hide’ them during the lecture. 

Creating accessible PowerPoint slides 

The following activities can be introduced into a traditional lecture format to encourage active learning. 

Cognitive engagement. Lectures can require students to reflect and make decisions related to the material. 

• Short questions for students can be included throughout, even if you don't take responses. 
• Ask students to make a prediction based on the information they have, and pause for them to reflect and note it down. 
• Encourage speculation and conceptual connections: display an image/picture/object/word/quotation as students enter the lecture space and ask them to consider its significance, which you then return to later in the lecture. 
• Include retrieval and elaboration activities for students; ask them to think back to previous weeks’ concepts or give them time to think through the implications of new material. 
• Using other media (visual, audio and video clips, diagrams and illustrations) can keep student attention and also require students to understand concepts in different ways which is useful for retention.  
• Minute papers: students write alone for a short period on a prompt given by you. This can encompass many of the kinds of thinking already noted: reflection, decision-making, speculation, retrieval and elaboration. These can be solely for student use, but you can also collect them through Mentimeter (see the LSE shared templates). 

Connecting to peers. Having to explain a concept, or giving a rationale to a peer is a form of cognitive activation. Students can also experience peer activities as a form of peer support, as they learn from their peers and are reassured about shared areas of confusion (Loughlin and Lindberg-Sand 2023). Some simple peer activities include: 

• Summary break. After a complex concept, ask students to the person next to them and take turns explaining. This can also be used to recollect materials from previous sessions. 
• Think – pair – share. Students think alone, then discuss with a peer. Make sure to leave sufficient time for consideration and pick a sufficiently complex question for discussion. After the activity, you can: 
  •  accept volunteers to share 
  • ‘cold call’ pairs to contribute 
  • use Mentimeter to gather responses (see below). 

Checking understanding. Checking the understanding of your large group is useful to students (having them concretise their thinking at intervals) and to you (knowing what has been grasped and what may need more attention). Inviting student responses also encourages attention and accountability. You can pose a question and use a show of hands, invite individuals to speak, or use Mentimeter (see below). 

You can also include time and encouragement for questions to you from students, not only at the end of a lecture but at key moments of complexity. Mentimeter enables anonymous questions. 

To identify possible areas of active learning for your own sessions, you could draw on learning outcomes: what do you want students to be able to do? Even if the main goal of a lecture is knowledge understanding and retention, how will they be able to use that knowledge? Can students begin that work during the session itself? 

The suggestions above are for smaller changes, but larger shifts may also be possible. 

Dr Carrie Friese (Sociology) shifted a course on qualitative research methods from a lecture + seminar format to a three-hour interactive lecture for 80 students. The format, and the teaching space, enable the sessions to move seamlessly between lecture, large group and small group discussion/activities, generating more energy and engagement as a result. A GTA supports the session, interacting with students and talking about their own research. Nametags allow Carrie to call on students to contribute. 

More on Carrie's practice, speaking at the LSE Education Symposium and in her case study on SO492

LSE has also committed to supporting active learning through its teaching spaces, designed around activities that benefit from co-presence: structured discussion, live debate, applied practice, and encounters across a diverse student body. This includes flexible spaces to support peer interaction, and enhanced and consistent audiovisual tools. 

As mentioned, Mentimeter can be used to check student understanding and gather perspectives.  

Eden Digital has created resources for getting started and an overview of Mentimeter. You can also get 1-2-1 support through eden.digital@lse.ac.uk or your departmental adviser. 

• Benefits for academics: you can get feedback on students understanding and pick up on misconceptions. Anonymity can support student honesty, encourage participation and a wider range of student contributors. Built-in visual tools and analysis can offer summaries of large numbers of responses. It can also gather perspectives (rather than test ‘correct’ answers). You can use Mentimeter as a springboard to invite students to verbally elaborate on points.  
• Supporting learning: activities involving Mentimeter, such as making a choice, or articulating an opinion, can help to further understanding and cement later recollection.  

A few well-designed activities with Mentimeter involvement are preferable to many quick polls or checks. For instance, multiple-choice questions or the Quiz competition can be used as a final check for a more complex cognitive task (e.g. asking ‘what is the last digit of your result’). 

Templates can be shared between colleagues easily, for a course or programme teaching team.  

Mentimeter can support peer instruction (as developed by Eric Mazur to teach undergraduate Physics). The lecturer poses a question on a concept, and judges students’ understanding through their answers (which are not shared with students). If understanding is present but not universal, students are asked to find someone who disagreed with them to discuss the concept. After this, students respond to the question a second time.

Professor Stephane Wolton (Government) uses Mentimeter to teach game theory in session with up to 350 students. His activity asks students at intervals to recap what they know and then to make a decision.

More on Stephane’s practice. 

Useful Mentimeter functions include: 

• Text responses can appear blurred out until you reveal them, showing students that contributions are being made, but not influencing their judgement. 
• Open-text responses can be clustered by AI into categories, helping make large groups’ responses manageable 
• Results can be integrated into Moodle for student review and reflection.  
• Mentimeter can also be used before or after a class.  
• Multiple choice questions can track patterns across more than one question. For instance, you could ask students a demographic question and then show the split on a later question. You can also use this tool for information without sharing the results (e.g. checking that students from different programmes are not diverging in terms of comprehension). 
• Open-text responses can be used as a “backchannel” for students to ask questions throughout a session, which you can address at intervals when convenient, in the subsequent session, or through another route (e.g. Moodle forum). 
• Q&A and Upvoting features allow you to identify popular points for further discussion or clarification, as suggested by the group. 
• You can also identify trends over time by reusing questions across sessions and reviewing the presentation’s session history.  

More benefits of live polling from Eden Digital. 

Both staff and students can find it hard to break away from traditional lecturing. Academics can conceptualise lectures primarily as venues for knowledge transmission and synthesising content, rather than as spaces for direct student engagement (Arora et al. 2026). 

Students can also experience discomfort with active learning; it can involve more uncertainty and confusion than ‘passive’ learning, and the requirement to take more responsibility and engage with peers can raise challenges. Students can feel that they are learning less, despite actually learning more (Deslauriers et al. 2019). 

• Ways to reassure and enthuse students about active learning could include:
• Explaining the purpose of activities and approaches 
• Using short reflective activities to help students see their own progress 
• Ensuring instructions and expectations for activities are explicit  
• Acknowledging the challenges faced by students within the material itself and beyond, in terms of the pressures they face. 

Eden Centre departmental advisers can suggest how to implement these and other mitigations. 

The Harvard Case Method, initiated in legal and business studies, requires students to prepare for contact time by studying a case - a written description of a genuine situation with a problem to be solved. During teaching, the academic elicits and interrogates students' explanations and proposed solutions. 

This highly interactive approach aims to develop students' academic and transferrable skills: knowledge and analysis, but also decision making, the application of theory to real-world problems, communication and group dynamics, and adaptability and flexibility.    

The full Harvard Case Method requires a lot of students and staff: students must prepare considerable material, alone and in a small group; staff have to actively facilitate long discussions. Resources – pre-prepared cases and materials – can also be costly.   

Academics have adapted the method to address these challenges including using shorter, more visual case studies, or returning to the same cases through the term to explore different concepts (Mu and Hatch, 2025). 

You could also adopt some individual aspects of the method:

• Use real-world cases to introduce a concept or theory, to enhance understanding, bring out nuance and add interest. (The use of cases can also be extended into assessment.) 
• Pose a problem, or set specific sense-making or analytical work, for students preparatory work. 
• Call on students to contribute, routinely and in low-stakes ways throughout a session (having given them notice and guidance). 

This example from LSE Sociology shows benefits of adopting longer and more interactive lectures.

Some quantitative disciplines have historically prioritised knowledge transmission in lectures and large-groups teaching. With a large body of settled knowledge, active learning can seem both harder to achieve and less useful. Students may place a lower premium on attendance, as recordings can be viewed later; as one LSE student explained, “the fact that you can really slow down and listen at your own pace makes a really big difference” (Arora et al. 2026).    

However, active learning does enable learning in these disciplines, and can be supported by the approaches outlined above, including increasing cognitive engagement, peer interaction, and testing understanding. 

In support of students’ cognitive engagement, pedagogic theorists of quantitative subjects have outlined different forms of conceptual work students can undertake. Smith and Stein (1998) identify a continuum from ‘memorisation’ to ‘doing mathematics’.

• Memorisation, where students memorise or reproduce datum (e.g. rules, formulae, definitions, etc).  
• Procedures without connections, where students carry out specific procedures or algorithms, but without either having to make direct connections between the mathematical task and the underlying theory or explain the procedure and how they are applying it. E.g. "Use the method of linear regression to..."; "Use the substitution u=… to find the integral …" 
• Procedures with connections, where students are given (either implicitly or explicitly) broad general procedures which requires some cognitive effort before students can start work. E.g. "Model this situation as a differential equation and solve using appropriate methodology."  
• Doing mathematics: tasks that require complex or non-algorithmic thinking. These might also require ‘metacognition’; self-monitoring or self-regulation. Examples might include complex projects or problem-based learning, with initially incomplete information about solution methods. 

Their article gives examples of each (at a level below HE, but which is illustrative).  

Similarly, Smith (1996) defines three groups of assessment tasks, based on the skills and approaches required: 

Group A – Routine procedures  

Recall of factual knowledge / fact systems, comprehension, routine use of procedures 

Group B – Using existing mathematical knowledge in new ways  

Information transfer, application in new situations 

Group C – Application of conceptual knowledge to construct mathematical arguments  

Justifying and interpreting, implications, conjectures and comparisons, evaluation 

Smith suggests increasing activities in groups B and C (in assessment tasks) to improve student understanding and retention.  

Either taxonomy can be useful when considering the framing of lectures, and the thinking required of students in large-group teaching. Could the nature of explanations and tasks be changed, to increase cognitive demand at key points, without overwhelming students? The articles suggest ways to identify the existing cognitive work of an activity and ways to increase it; there is also a simple early stage example in this LSE resource.  

Arora, R., Schulte, J., Hoang, L. & Gordon, C. (2026) Declining Lecture Attendance at LSE. 

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L.S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K. & Kestin, G. (2019) Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116 (39) 19251-19257. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

Loughlin, C., Lindberg-Sand, Å. (2023) The use of lectures: effective pedagogy or seeds scattered on the wind?. Higher Education. 85, 283–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00833-9  

Smith, G. et al. (1996) Constructing mathematical examinations to assess a range of knowledge and skills. International journal of mathematical education in science and technology. 27 (1), 65–77. 
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/0020739960270109 

Smith, M.S. and Stein, M.K. (1998). Reflections on Practice: Selecting and Creating mathematical Tasks: From Research to Practice. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. 3(5), 344–350. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41180423