For my next guest lecture, I had 80 minutes in the class on Urbanization in the Global South and I got to talk about an issue of great personal interest to me – gentrification of slums in China.

As I has more time, I wanted to further develop interactive learning activity in the lecture, this one had around 70-80 students attending. I decided to split the lecture into two parts: more traditional lecture with a few shorter questions to the audience and the discussion activity.

I was a little worried about how the discussion would work out in such this large classroom, but it went quite well. Having learned from the experience of the first guest lecture, I made sure that the discussion starts on time, so that there’s enough time left for the summary part after the activity. With a lot of interactive learning techniques, I find that students are sometimes confused as to what they had learned or were supposed to learn from a discussion or a debate, and having a wrap up with a few key summary points at the end is a very easy and useful way to enhance the students’ learning and clarify the expectations.

After 50 min of lecturing, which my mentor found to be engaging and gave me “two thumbs up”, and he said “sitting at the back of the class, I could also see that student computers in view were tuned in to course content, not other activities”. Then we got into the discussion activity with the students broken up into groups of 4-5 people talking to their neighbors about the potential outcomes of gentrification for residents of those neighborhoods, for the neighborhood overall and for the city as a whole. This activity was meant to engage the students’ critical thinking as they go through potential positive and negative outcomes in their discussion. After about 10-15 minutes, I opened the floor for the small groups to share one or two points they have discussed, asking each group to contribute at least something. At the end, we still had 10 minutes to go through the summary / review slides I have prepared with the potential outcomes outlined and we went through them with me commenting on how the points on the slides relate to the discussion they have had. Interestingly and not unexpectedly, the students came up with more potential outcomes some of which I have not thought of when preparing the slides. I think the discussion activity worked out very well jugding from the students’ engagement, contributions and questions after the lecture, so I was very pleased with that.

My mentor also thought it was a good disctribution of time, not just lecturing the students for the entire 80 minutes. The only criticism he had for me was that he thought sometimes I spoke too fast for the students to take notes, and this acts as a reminder to me to keep my pace at a good level and not overload the lecture with the details. I am planning to work on that as I might be giving a similar lecture on this topin in the next academic year.