Last spring attendance in classes often slipped well below what it used to be, even for excellent teachers.  Take advantage of this window early in the semester while most students are still attending to make the value of being in lecture apparent.  Think of the following dimensions and which make sense in your own course:

• Make lectures interesting and engaging
• Build connections across lectures and homework
• Value student’s effort and the learning process; build community

Make lectures interesting and engaging

• Connect learning to interesting real-world problems; your example will be a simplified version, but make the connection clear
• Let your enthusiasm for the subject show
• Engage students with each other and the content – use active learning techniques such as Think/Pair/Share, Polling, small group discussions, or worksheets to scaffold a longer problem or activity
• Build in some fun – why is this ChatGPT solution wrong or where would it fail?
• Vary your teaching methods – use demos, move around the classroom, post a pre-class video to make room for a longer in-class activity
• Vary the way students respond to questions you pose – polling software, thumbs up or down, reaching consensus in small groups

Build connections across lectures and homework

• Connect ideas across lectures by explicitly placing the day’s topic in the roadmap of the course
• Give feedback – on the last homework most of you did very well on ___________. A common mistake was______ which can be avoided by __________.
• Share how the current unit fits in the overall course learning objectives
• Use student’s curiosity – pose a challenge for the next lecture to address
• Keep your lectures well organized so students can find and use the content

Value student’s effort and the learning process

• Value the students who are there and how they make teaching fun/rewarding
• Make class a safe space to ask and answer questions
• Make explicit that homework is practice for what they are learning in lecture. Normalize homework being considerably harder without lecture attendance.
• Let students know of any workload peaks so they can plan ahead and not miss your class or any other classes.
• Have students write a few sentences about a specific topic (or how the course is going, or how they are doing, or what is most confusing so far). Collect their work.  Respond next lecture with a summary or answer to a question or a few key points brought up (even if you only read a sample in very large classes)

For further reading see Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis, ©1993 Wiley and Sons.  Chapter 23 Motivating Students