IF YOU WANT TO:
Exaggerating everything about your presentation in a large auditorium class.
A professor of economics believes that physical exaggeration and even a bit of hyperbole are the keys to success in lecturing in a large auditorium. "You have to remember that 800 students constitutes an audience, not a class in the normal sense," he points out. "When you are in front of a large audience, everything you would normally do in lecturing to a class of 30 or even 100 tends to look small, stiff and formal. You have to exaggerate everything, make it all `larger than life,' IF YOU WANT TO capture and hold the audience.
"In the large introductory course, I stride the stage with long steps, I make sweeping gestures, I ask broad rhetorical questions and make ridiculous puns, I pound the lectern and raise and lower my voice, and I make frequent use of simple graph on a movie-size screen.
"In my smaller classes, of course, I do none of these things. A teacher can get away with gross generalizations in a large lecture setting; in fact exaggerations can even enhance student learning in that environment. Students know the difference, and they appreciate a teacher's adaptation of pedagogical style to different settings."
Limitations on Use of Suggestion
Copyright 1983 by the Regents of the University of California