Managing small groups in large groups

Video >> Lecture room There is the sound of conversations in the room as students work in small groups. Interview Do Coyle: “I was giving a session with over 300 students in one of the tiered lecture theatres; it was a one hour session. I knew that there was going to be follow-up in smaller …

Using aims at the beginning of a session to aid learning

Video >> Do Coyle: “I think it’s really important that at the beginning of any session, with any learners, that there’s clarification around where we’re going in a particular session. “I would expect them to do that with, say, pupils in school. I would expect the most erudite of professors to do that with their …

Monitoring small groups in large groups

Video >> Group working session There is the sound of many conversations in the room as students work in small groups. Interview Do Coyle: “There may well be instances where you want to monitor what the students are discussing, but the presence of the teacher or tutor in a group affects what people are going …

Demonstrations and visual aids in lectures

Video >> Liz Sockett: “I use props a lot in lectures, probably the least today actually, but it’s very important to have something that isn’t just PowerPoint. Not just because it’s monotonous having a lot of PowerPoint – you can hear people starting to get restless because you’ve done a lot of PowerPoint. “You also …

Asking questions of students in lectures

Video >> Liz Sockett: “Your average class, I would probably break it about 4 times with a straightforward question. In many of the subjects I teach it is easier to ask a question than in prions because I know that the chances of someone out here having had a relative with a prion disease is …

Explaining complex concepts

Video >> Liz Sockett: “One of the things that is very important when you lecture a subject like this is that you have drawn models that keep repeating. If you see the visual aids that I use, a lot of time was spent creating some simple models that I kept coming back to. “Although it …

Student roles in small groups

Video >> There is the sound of many conversations in the room as students work in small groups. Interviewer: “You did, on this occasion, ask for representatives to come out and share and that went very smoothly, and very well. Does it always?” Do Coyle: “Well, it’s partly dependent on the briefing, so we come …

Real life examples give context to learning in the lecture

Video >> Liz Sockett: “A lot of the diseases earlier in the course, bacterial diseases, we would stop and talk, for a couple of minutes, about. For example, ‘Who has had a sore throat?’ We actually monitor symptoms on the registers. So as the students are sitting in the lecture they are filling in a …

How “small” is a “small group”?

Michael Humphreys:”I don’t think there is a critical size for a small group. We have tutorials with 20 to 25 per tutorial but I don’t see that as a small group. “For me a group of between 4 and 10 is about right for small group teaching, depending on the nature of the task.”   …

If lecturing is a performance, how do you prepare?

Video >> Christopher Barnatt: “A lot of people tend to think that you prepare a lecture by looking at the content and looking at the actual slides etc. When you think about a large group in particular, you have to think that there’s the content and there’s actually the delivery, or the performance of it. …