Stop Lecturing! Try These Engaging Activities Instead

Neither of us is great at just sitting and listening. Steph has to take copious notes or load up her favorite coloring app to make it past about 15 minutes. Kate didn’t attend a single staff meeting without her cup of Starbucks and a straw, just for something else to do.

We don’t think we’re alone here, and yet as teachers, we often persist in lecturing for entire class periods. Lest you be feeling offended here, we definitely include ourselves in the “we” who often persist. Sure, we try to incorporate engaging activities when we can (we’ve all been warned not to be the “sage on the stage,” after all), but we’ve been known to stretch a lecture on college applications or the background of Pride and Prejudice over . . . cringe . . . multiple class periods. Sometimes it feels like it can’t be avoided, or the time and effort it would take to create the engaging activities is something we just don’t have.

We all know the average attention span is getting shorter every year. Trying to pin down a definitive answer about the average attention span, however, is a challenge: the most common Google results suggest it’s been placed at either 8 seconds or 10–15 minutes (with a recommended lecture time of 18–20 minutes), but there are also studies suggesting attention spans are more variable. Research also suggests that active learning, full of engaging activities, is associated with higher academic performance than pure lecturing.

And most of the sources we linked above were published pre-pandemic. It’s not hard to find articles lamenting the lack of focus many of us (adults and students) report experiencing in the last few years.

But sometimes we do need to impart information to our students. This can leave us in a bit of a quandary, wondering how best to help our students learn what they need to in order to accomplish the tasks we’ve assigned.

We’ve got some ideas, especially since the longer we taught, the less lecturing we did. Keep reading if you’re in search of engaging activities that will give your students the tools they need to be successful in your class.

First, Shift Your Mindset

We all come to the teaching profession with ideas about what teaching is supposed to be. We’ve all spent time in student desks, and whether we’re trying to recreate what we know or actively resisting strategies we hated, we can’t help but be influenced by our past experiences, which likely included lots of lecturing.

Add to that our eagerness to impart knowledge to our students, particularly when it’s about a topic we’re particularly interested in. (We know we’re not the only ones who made students sit through dozens of slides of really cool information about Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theater.)

It takes humility and experience to recognize that our students don’t actually need to know nearly as much as we think they do. Our students are probably going to survive life just fine if they can’t label a diagram of the Globe Theatre, explain Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, or correctly identify whether a piece of literature better reflects the Romantic period or the Victorian period. In ELA classes especially, our students need practice developing their reading and writing skills more than they need specific information.

It took us longer than we care to admit to recognize this, but when we did, we started to make better decisions about how to design our lessons and structure our class time.

Before you can do anything else, it’s essential to take the time to honestly consider what your students actually need to know. It’s probably far less than you think. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s a lot easier to determine the best way to deliver that information. Sometimes, it is a lecture (and we’ll come back to that), but more often than not, there are more engaging activities we can use to get that information to students.

Engaging Activities to Try Instead of Lecturing

Use videos, especially paired with a platform like Nearpod or Edpuzzle.

We love a good video in the classroom. And post-pandemic, it’s easier than ever to find what you need for free with only a few clicks.

Our students will almost always be more engaged by a video than by a teacher standing in front of a Google Slides presentation. And this makes sense! Even if our students weren’t digital natives who spend hours on TikTok, videos incorporate sound and images (and often professional actors) that enhance the material. Not only do these sounds and images hold our attention, but they help us to better understand the content.

We’ve replaced quite a few lectures with YouTube videos—the history of Julius Caesar’s assassination, an overview of the Greek gods and goddesses, and the stages of the hero’s journey—and the videos consistently engaged our students and saved us both class time and prep time. John Green will always explain US History better than we ever could. The first episode of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice miniseries more effectively gave our AP students a sense of the cultural context than our two-period lecture. We tell our students to “show, not tell,” and we’ve learned it’s wise to take our own advice.

During the pandemic, our district introduced us to Nearpod and Edpuzzle, platforms that allowed us to add “check for understanding” questions to videos (even our own screencasts) to engage students and hold them accountable for paying attention. Introductory lectures that had previously taken one or more full class periods were now engaging activities that took half a period or less.

Incorporate your teaching into your assignments.

For many years, we made our poor sophomores take notes on relevant literary devices at the beginning of each unit. We had slides on plot, characterization, point of view, symbolism, irony . . . you name it, we had it. But these weren’t particularly interesting lectures for students (or, honestly, for us) and did little to improve their performance on reading assignments or end-of-unit exams.

Over time, we moved away from these notes, instead, working the relevant information into our guided reading assignments. Do our students really need to spend an entire class period taking notes on figurative language definitions? What if, instead, we just provided a definition before asking them to identify a key simile in the text itself? Sure, we still had our students memorize definitions and dug into the nuances in discussion, but embedding the information they needed when they needed it and directly into the assignment was more effective and more efficient.

Assign background reading instead of lecturing.

Before we read Elie Wiesel’s Night with our sophomores, we knew we’d need to provide them with background information about the Holocaust. But instead of assigning them to take notes on a lecture, we assigned them a series of Actively Learn assignments in which we embedded articles and videos that provided a historical overview. They were still prepared to read Wiesel’s memoir, but the examples, quotations, photos, and anecdotes in the videos and articles stuck with them more than a page of notes likely would have.

Background reading also creates opportunities for flexibility. We were able to preview The Importance of Being Earnest in AP Lit by assigning a brief reading assignment on a day when we had a substitute. We rarely made time for an entire nonfiction unit in our sophomore classes, but we often wove nonfiction articles into novel units.

And, best of all, assigning background reading saves you time and energy. Instead of reading the articles and creating PowerPoints that summarize the information for students, just assign students the original articles, asking them a few questions to hold them accountable and help them process the information.

Use jigsaw activities to cover greater amounts of background information.

Sometimes it’s effective to assign an entire class the same article—either the one article will be all that’s needed or reading a common source allows for full-class discussion and activities. But sometimes, your students don’t all need to read all the information for an introductory activity to be effective.

There are many ways to set up a jigsaw activity, but the basic idea is that students are assigned to read different articles and then share what they learned in small groups. Each student is responsible for “teaching” key information to their classmates. 

The activity holds students accountable for their assigned reading and offers great opportunities for student engagement and interaction, and it’s an efficient way to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, especially if students need familiarity more than they need to remember every single detail.

We did this successfully for a few years before teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to introduce students to the history, time period, and author. Steph did this recently with her AP Seminar class for a unit about youth voter turnout. Different students read each of the twelve sources, and it allowed us to engage in a nuanced discussion of a complex issue and provide everyone with a list of resources they could reference as needed while keeping students’ individual assignments manageable.

Have students complete an escape room that requires them to interact with the information they need.

When students have to use the information you want them to learn to solve a puzzle, especially if there are stakes like prizes involved, their interest in the material dramatically increases. We recently looked back at an old Shakespeare introduction PowerPoint we used to deliver that was 31 slides long, and decided to take the same information and turn it into an escape room instead. 

Students use a pamphlet with information about Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre to complete a wordfall and reveal a numeric code, use a Globe Theatre “employee handbook” to complete statements that reveal a code word, fold their own octavo, differentiate between real Shakespearean insults and those created by an AI bot, and complete a crisscross puzzle using words Shakespeare invented. When they put all the clues together, they discover a code that helps them free Shakespeare, who has been taken hostage by a rival theater company (Christopher Marlowe’s, obvi).

We had so much fun creating the activity and felt really bad that we made so many past students sit through that lengthy PowerPoint when we could have watched them have fun solving puzzles together instead.

What If I Do Need to Lecture?

Sometimes you’ll decide that the best way to convey the information you need to your students is a traditional lecture. Maybe you can’t find a video. Maybe you know they’ll have lots of questions. Maybe a lecture is the most efficient way to do it. Maybe you want students to learn how to take notes

Cult of Pedagogy has some great strategies for improving your lectures, largely involving using lectures intentionally. We’ve also found a few strategies helpful in keeping students engaged when we couldn’t avoid lecturing.

Our instincts tell us engaging activities are more likely to hold our students’ attention and ultimately result in better learning. Yet we so often resort back to lecturing, often because it’s easier. But we’re challenging you today: what’s one lecture you can let go of and replace with something we’ve suggested here? Tell us about it at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.

But we also know that creating engaging activities takes work, sometimes a lot of work. And you don’t have time for that! We’ve got you. Download our Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room, which also comes with an activity in which students engage with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets to get used to his language. Get all the advantages of introducing Shakespeare in a more engaging way without the headache of working out the details yourself. It’s a win-win!