Creating a Culture of Care: Engaging Students in Large Lecture Classes

Originally published in March 2025

In this week’s email, Teaching Excellence and Innovation has collected resources to support instructors, especially in large lecture courses, in creating a culture of care through intentional teaching approaches, supporting attendance, and building community in the classroom. Watch our new faculty spotlight below to explore practical ways to create meaningful learning experiences and check out the resource below for more tips and tricks on engaging students in large classes.

Faculty Spotlight: An Authentic Care Teaching Approach featuring Frank Kachanoff

Frank Kachanoff from the Department of Psychology shares how he brings Authentic Care into his teaching approach, emphasizing the importance of genuine care, vulnerability, and student-centered learning. By openly discussing challenges and framing difficulty as a normal part of learning, Frank encourages students to develop a growth mindset to help them reduce anxiety and foster resilience, particularly in students who lack confidence at the beginning of his statistics or quantitative methods courses. While advocating for deep care in teaching, Frank also highlights the necessity of self-care for educators to ensure their own sustainable and meaningful engagement. He stresses the importance of humanizing education, breaking down barriers, and creating an inclusive classroom environment. Watch the faculty spotlight >>

Creating a Culture of Care in Large Lecture Classes

Large lecture classes are a common experience for many first-year university students. Though large classes are broadly defined (ranging between 60 – 1000+ students) both throughout pedagogical literature and at Laurier, in some ways, this large, communal experience marks the transition from high school to university. This widely shared student experience underscores the value and opportunity for Laurier’s large lecture first-year instructors to build foundational knowledge and skills, foster engagement and community, and establish professionalism, expectations, and habits that will support student success in university and beyond.

Instructors of large lecture classes often have similar questions about best practices for approaching challenges of individualized student attention, engagement in meaningful discussions, and guiding students through active learning opportunities (Exeter et al., 2010; McDonald, 2013; Mulryan-Kyne, 2010). Further, today’s students have been through unprecedented educational upheavals, which have left them without a clear understanding of the purpose of attending class.

Through intentionally crafted teaching plans that foster purposeful learning and classroom connections, large lecture class instructors can reinforce the foundational importance of attendance and engagement for developing students’ knowledge and skills, and ultimately, shape their pathway to success at Laurier.

Evaluate or refresh your teaching practice with the following ideas to build a sense of community and promote engagement in your large lecture class:

Supporting Attendance

Class attendance and engagement are some of the best indicators for high-level achievement in lecture-style classes (Credé, Roch, & Kieszcynka, 2010; Lewohl, 2023). Talking to your students from day one, linking the value of attending and engaging in lecture classes, can normalize the behaviour, and foster habits that promote professionalism and instil expectations moving forward.

Communicate (and repeat!) the links between the class and learning outcomes as this communicates the course compass and clarifies the connections between attendance, in-class activities, lectures and assessments, and their success in the course.
Consider taking class attendance with technology, which will help to identify any students who are struggling to be in class. Potential strategies include:
- iClickers for either low-stakes check-in questions or formative feedback purposes can provide you with a list of students who participated by answering questions. iClickers that are used for attendance-only purposes do not require a subscription.
- Exit tickets focus on low-stakes answers to course-related content and give instructor’s feedback on common errors or misunderstandings. Exit tickets can be written on cue cards or via a shared link to a Word document; they can also be integrated into MyLS as survey or quiz questions. These can be used as an alternative to class participation grades, providing students with other ways to engage with course content.
- Use Zoom attendance reports for virtual synchronous classes.

Explore the section on supporting student attendance in this Guide for more ideas.

Fostering Community

Fostering a sense of community in your class promotes attendance and engagement through connectivity and a sense of belonging. Instructors can begin this process on day one by showing your personality, being present and enthusiastic, and demonstrating that you, too, want to be there.

Sharing your own stories with students can be difficult for some instructors, so start small, using selective vulnerability to balance professional and personal identities in the classroom. Consider how you would answer questions like:
- What do you love about your discipline?
- What’s your favourite section of the course?
- What was your educational journey?
- What was your experience in this course as an undergraduate?
- What’s your favourite food?
Leverage MyLS by posting an opening welcome and update messages throughout the term to develop your instructor presence and provide students with information about the course, your pedagogical approach and your interest in students’ success.
Learn your students’ names – yes, even in large classes! Successful strategies include:
- Learning 5-10 names per class.
- Asking students to introduce themselves when answering questions.
- Use MyLS Discussion Boards, collaborative group OneDrive folders or shared PPT slides, where students can upload photos and content about themselves. Model the introduction using the first post or slide to introduce yourself and share interests. Students can be organized in groups by alphabetical last names, or by lab or tutorial sections of the class.

Planning for lectures, learning materials, and activities

Intentionally plan opportunities for students to apply or practice what they are learning in a controlled and supportive environment, especially before high-stakes assessments. Active Learning promotes deeper learning through the application of knowledge learned in lectures.
Learn how lesson planning, using models like BOPPPS, supports you in finding opportunities for participatory learning that can aid in and assess learning progress in each class.
By incorporating discussions of real-world examples, poll questions, creative interactions (like games or game-based learning or correcting a GenAI image or creating a virtual poster), and opportunities for peer learning like think-pair shares, instructors can make the learning relevant and demonstrate the value added of attending lectures.
Consider which technologies can aid your activity design. iClickers can be used for problem-solving in class, to see quick responses or to check for understanding. MyLS can coordinate groups, share materials, initiate surveys, and post discussion responses. Office365 collaborative documents allow many students to work online together to manipulate data in an Excel file, identify characteristics of an effective essay, or add images to a virtual whiteboard or PPT slide.
Consider using Universal Design for Learning principles in the approach to your lesson:
- Represent the learning in a variety of formats (e.g., employing lecture slides, charts, audio, videos, articles, images, subtitles/captioning in your learning materials etc.)
- Provide students with options to participate or express their learning in different formats (orally sharing or written responses) in a single activity or throughout the term.
- Invite students to link material to current events or relevant personal contexts to enhance motivation and investment in learning.
Carefully plan the time it will take for your in-class activities to be completed. Share the timeframe expectations, the task students are expected to engage in, and the post-activity debrief. Consider the time it will take to:
- provide instructions,
- answer any questions your students might have,
- time for your students to get into the activity,
- time for them to settle back into their seats,
- denoted time for discussions and/or debriefs at the end.

Engaging students in large lectures can feel like a big undertaking, especially if you are teaching a first-year class. The isolation students can feel, especially in their first year of university, can be compounded by the anonymity that larger class sizes can produce. Through intentional connections between you and the students, and among students themselves, you can provide opportunities to shape their university experience and academic progress for the better.