Student engagement is a powerful influence on lecture presentation success. If students do their jobs and are attentive during the lecture, and if you have done yours and are well prepared, you will most likely deliver a successful lecture. If students are uninvolved and passive, your lecture will not be a success even if your delivery has been outstanding.
It can be tempting to blame students for any lack of engagement, particularly when you have done your job in preparation and delivery. However, students—particularly ones new to higher education—may not know how to engage in a lecture. They may not know how to read ahead of the session or to prepare, take notes, and think critically for the purpose of formulating questions. They may not know how to focus their attention. They may not know how to reflect on what they have learned.
Many of our techniques in Part 3 of this book can help scaffold those activities so that students do learn how to be good lecture participants. But in addition to those, you can help students understand their roles in lectures by setting Terms of Engagement, which are a listing of the expectations for student participation in a lecture.
To develop a useful set of Terms of Engagement tailored to your unique situation, consider the following suggestions:
Decide what students should do before a lecture to prepare for it. Should they think through what they already know about a topic? Read from a textbook? Develop a list of questions?
Clarify your expectations for how students should act during the lecture. Should they take notes? Think of appropriate questions?
Consider what students should do after a lecture. Should they fill in any gaps in their notes? Write and reflect on what they have learned?
Develop a set of terms based on these expectations.
Share the terms with the students early in the course; consider including them in the syllabus or alternately creating a separate handout, which you may or may not want to have them sign to signal their agreement to the terms.
Example
As a variation, consider having students write the Terms of Engagement themselves. This approach will have the benefit of student buy in. You may wish to provide them with a sample, however, so that they know where and how to begin.
