Lecturing

Most of my teaching is small group, vaguely practical work done in 30 minute sessions and repeated to cover the entire group of students. This is usually pretty interactive, and you can guage how much the students a) already know and b) are taking in. Besides this, there’s a lot of interactivity with body language, and response to what you say and do.
The remainder of my teaching is by more formal, didactic lecture. In a medium-sized lecture theatre, with the same students, even when not many of them are there and they form only a medium-sized group, almost all of that interactivity is lost. They do ask questions, often at the end, and they occasionally respond to something that’s entertaining, but for most of the time they just sit there, blank faced. This is normal. But swapping to this type of teaching is tricky for the lecturer. Asking questions of the students is no use, because with the anonimity of the group someone else is always expected to answer. It’s very difficult to tell if what you say is making an impression, if it’s sinking in, or whether you might as well be speaking Latin.
Or maybe that’s just embryology lectures…