Building Connection and Participation in Large Classes

A 45-minute interactive webinar

Large classes are often treated as a problem to be managed rather than a community to be built. Yet the research is consistent: students who feel they belong to their academic community attend more, participate more, and take greater ownership of their own learning, and this matters most for first-generation students.

This session works from a single shift in framing: in a large class, your job is not to build a relationship with every student, but to design the conditions in which students build community with one another. We'll use the Community of Inquiry framework to think about the three "presences" any class needs — social, cognitive, and teaching — and consider what each one looks like when the room is full.

In 45 active minutes, we will:

  • Locate engagement precisely, at the level of specific interactions rather than as a vague property of "the class"
  • Diagnose which presence your own large-class teaching currently under-serves
  • Trial a small number of low-cost, high-yield strategies for norm-setting, structured peer interaction and visible participation (for both venue-based and online modes)


Leave with two or three practices you can use in your very next lecture.

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