Welcome to the Teaching & Learning Guide for Engaging Students in Large Classes! 

This guide includes information, tips, and resources designed to help you: 

• Create a welcoming environment in large classes

• Manage workloads in large classes

• Incorporate effective lecturing practices into your teaching

• Effectively assess student work in large classes

Academic literature lacks a consensus on the number of students that define a large class. Instructors who teach in-person classes know that teaching can become more challenging when they have classes with 50+ students. According to Lawrence et al., “Large classes are often characterized by less intimacy and trust between students and [instructors], with weaker student engagement” (67). Teaching many students at once is challenging for several reasons according to Lawrence, including: 

• Lack of opportunities for instructors to have one-on-one interaction with students

• Difficulty in using active learning techniques in large classes which leads to the over-use of lecturing

• Passivity among students caused by their thinking that they can hide among a large group

• Extra demands on instructors to grade large quantities of student work

• Difficulty in having class discussions since many students are fearful of speaking in front of a large audience

• Inability for instructors to tell if students understand the material

• Difficulty working with diverse student needs and backgrounds 

It is also important to acknowledge that there can be benefits to large classes. Many instructors feel invigorated teaching large numbers of students, citing a different energy in large classes. There is also more diversity in larger numbers of students which means more unique ideas and perspectives. 

While there may be more challenges than benefits, research shows that it's possible to create a classroom environment that is welcoming and engaging for large groups of students.

Creating a positive and supportive classroom environment is often the first step in encouraging students to be more active participants in large classes. As discussed, one of the main negative impacts of large classes is disconnection between students and their instructors. This leads to students feeling like they don’t need to participate in class or engage with the material because they can hide among their peers. Reducing students’ feelings of anonymity, then, can help you connect more with students. There are simple ways for instructors to interact with students, such as standing at the door when students are entering and exiting in order to talk with students as they pass by. Instructors can also do more in-depth research to learn about their students. We detail more ideas below. 

Connecting with Students

Learning about your students when you have a lot of them takes a bit more thinking and creativity. In small classes, instructors can easily learn the names and interests of their students through discussion and other classroom interactions. In large classes, instructors often rely on analytics and survey data to get to know their students. 

Many instructors gather data about their students from university systems. For example, you can see student majors and years on your roster in Web Advisor. It can also be helpful to gather data about students through surveys. There are a few different ways to gather information:

Give fun surveys for attendance. Many instructors take attendance using an online system like Mentimeter or a passed sign-in sheet. Instead of asking students to sign their names, you can ask them to write down their favorite activity outside of class or ask them which concept they struggled with most last class. These surveys can help instructors find patterns of interest and gauge the climate of each day.

Use Canvas assignments for Just-in-Time Teaching. You can ask students to complete assignments before or after class that are designed to assess their understanding. These can be quizzes, non-graded surveys, or short written assignments. With just-in-time teaching, instructors then use this information to tailor their lectures and in-class activities to target learning gaps. 

Consider community context. Connect with students by engaging with what is happening in the community during class. For example, there may be local current or historical events that can provide case studies or examples for different course concepts. In 2022 at TWU, several instructors included assignments in their courses around the public acknowledgment of Quakertown. Many instructors guided students to research the Quakertown neighborhood and there was a student showcase and student-led town hall discussion where students shared research and performances with the public. Bringing in community issues and events can help students connect tangibly to course materials and feel more connected to their campus communities. 

Give students flexibility to apply course concepts. You don't need to have a lot of information about every student. Instead, you can allow students flexibility to apply and engage with course materials and concepts in the ways that best serve them. For example, allow students to choose their own topics for projects and encourage them to make it applicable to their own lives. Choosing ideas can be difficult for students, especially first- and second-year students, so you can provide guidance on how to make materials relevant. 

With the rise in research on active learning, many instructors think they need to fill their classes with activities. However, in large classes, lectures might be essential to provide students with the information they need to succeed in the class. In fact, much of the research on engaging students supports using lectures to help communicate important information to students. The key is to make the most of lectures by adding effective lecture best practices. 

Effective lecturing starts with articulating goals. You build your course and sometimes your modules around module learning objectives, so why not also articulate objectives for lectures? It can be helpful to write down a broader goal and a specific goal, or a big why and a little why, when creating lectures. Some possible goals might include: 

• To focus on a difficult point

• To provide an explanation about a course concept

• To place course materials in context

• To interpret or expand the text

• To provide essential information students need to complete an assignment

You don’t need to necessarily tell students all of your goals, but it may be helpful to share a few lecture objectives with students at the beginning of the lecture. 

Although it’s not feasible or helpful to use active learning in all classes for every class, it is helpful to make lectures more participatory. There are many active learning strategies you can use in larger classes, including: 

• Concept Maps: Instructors ask students to create a visual representation of their understanding of a concept. 

• Think-Pair-Share: instructors develop a question prompt then guide students to complete three steps: 

  • Think: Ask students to think about the prompt and maybe write down their thoughts

  • Pair: Pair students in groups of two or three and invite them to share their answers with each other

  • Share: Ask students to share their discussion with the whole class

• One-minute paper: instructors ask students to write about a concept or question for one minute. 

For more ideas and information about active learning strategies, review the Using Active Learning to Engage Students Teaching and Learning Guide.

Since many students struggle with parsing out the most essential information in a lecture, you can provide them with a worksheet or note-taking framework to fill in as they listen. For example, the worksheet can include questions or key concepts with space for students’ writing. During lectures, you can let students know to fill in a particular part of the worksheet and give them time to do so. Note-taking frameworks don’t have to take much time to create and can really help students identify important information during a lecture. 

And, one of the most important best practices for giving lectures is to chunk information into smaller bits and give students a lot of breaks to process information. For example, many instructors give a few 10-15 minute lectures throughout the class time and sandwich these mini-lectures between active learning activities, full class discussions, quiet time to write or process, or breaks to get up and stretch. During each short lecture, it can also help to introduce one concept at a time and then spend time discussing how they all fit together.

Ideally, we want to provide students with as much feedback on their work as possible. Yet that isn’t always feasible in a large class. There are some best practices you can use to help address the challenges of large class assessments. 

Make Feedback More Frequent and Informal

When students are graded only based on a few tests for the entire course, it can put a lot of pressure on those few assignments. To help students feel less pressure, you can give more low-stakes assignments throughout the course. For example, you can ask students to do some kind of active learning assignment in class and grade them based on participation or use them to check attendance. You can check a small section of the assignments to help you gauge their understanding and help you write future lectures and activities. 

You can still provide students with frequent feedback without having to grade 70+ assignments after every class. For example, if you lead an activity or present a lecture, you can follow it with a discussion where you address common misconceptions students may have demonstrated. You can also expand in-class discussion to an online discussion board where you can continue to give guidance on tricky topics.

Scaffold Exam Questions

When it comes time for exams, make sure the questions you ask are not a surprise to students. When possible, provide exam questions that are related to the activities and discussions students have already participated in. You can also provide versions of exam questions in your note-taking framework. Difficult exam questions should have building blocks for students' mastery of it. And those building blocks should be apparent to students.

Ask Students to Help with Grading

One of the best approaches to assessing large groups of students is to share the load. This might mean asking students to self-evaluate or doing anonymous peer assessment for informal, non-graded in-class activities. The ultimate goal of assessment is to get a sense of how well students understand the materials and make sure they know where to focus their efforts. Guided self-evaluation can be a great way to help students assess their own understanding. Research also suggests that having to evaluate something, rather than just complete it, helps cement it into our brains. 

Self-evaluations and peer evaluations should often be accompanied by discussion and should also be instructor-led. This could mean taking class time to review the correct answers to an assignment or quiz and asking students to grade their own responses. You could also use live survey tools like Mentimeter so everyone can gauge understanding of specific questions in real time. The benefit of this approach is that students can receive immediate feedback.

Making Your Grading Policy Clear

In order to manage grade disputes for a large number of students, many instructors use the 24/7 approach. This policy states that students must wait 24 hours after receiving a grade before they can contact you to dispute it. This allows students time to process their feedback instead of disputing a grade rashly based on their feelings of disappointment. The policy also states that students have up to 7 days to dispute a grade. This helps ensure that you don’t receive a slew of grade disputes during midterm or finals week. You can also prepare students for the grading period by asking them to periodically check their grades in Canvas. 

Many instructors also require students to submit their grade disputes via email so they have a written record of all grade disputes. Asking students to write down their disputes can also help them further process and articulate their disagreement with the grade. 

Most importantly, be sure that your grade dispute policy is clearly stated in your syllabus and available for students to refer back to.

Thanks to Dr. Diana Elrod, formerly a professor in Biology and now the Director of the Center for Student Research for co-writing this guide. Dr. Elrod shared her invaluable research and experience to help create this guide. 

• Barkley, Elizabeth F., and Major, Claire Howell, author. Interactive lecturing : a handbook for college faculty. 1st ed., 2018. https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/1qrsekm/ALMA-TXWU51183762910001201

• Broadbent, Jaclyn. “Large Class Teaching: How Does One Go about the Task of Moderating Large Volumes of Assessment?” Active learning in higher education 19, no. 2 (2018): 173–85. https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/110i679/TN_cdi_crossref_primary_10_1177_1469787417721360

• Daou, Dayane, Marlene Chakhtoura, Ahmed El-Yazbi, Deborah Mukherji, Eman Sbaity, Marwan M Refaat, and Mona Nabulsi. “Teaching Critical Appraisal to Large Classes of Undergraduate Medical Students Using Team-Based Learning versus Group Discussions: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” BMC medical education 22, no. 1 (2022): 77. https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/110i679/TN_cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_94d67aa440d148ee8d88246d31619b3f

• Lawrence, Japhet E. “Teaching Large Classes: Engaging Students Through Active Learning Practice and Interactive Lecture.” International journal of teacher education and professional development 2, no. 1 (2019): 66–80. https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/110i679/TN_cdi_igi_journals_hing_Large_Classes_Engag10_4018_IJTEPD_20190101052

• Mantai, Lilia, and Elaine Huber. “Networked Teaching: Overcoming the Barriers to Teaching Experiential Learning in Large Classes.” Journal of management education 45, no. 5 (2021): 715–38. https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/110i679/TN_cdi_proquest_journals_2563283447

• Reddy, Mike Megrove. “Cooperative Learning as a Teaching Pedagogy for Large Classes: Enhancing Higher Order Thinking Skills.” African Journal of Gender, Society & Development, 2019, 31–49. https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/110i679/TN_cdi_proquest_journals_2250568041

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