6 Research-Backed Ways to Break Up Your Lectures

If you’re talking in front of the class for a long stretch of time, don’t be surprised if students drop like flies. “It is not uncommon for a third to well over half of the students attending a lecture to mind wander and with increasing frequency as the lecture progresses,” according to a 2020 study.

Yet lectures are often necessary. Teachers have a lot of material to cover, and explicit instruction remains one of the most efficient ways for students to learn foundational skills and concepts. In a sprawling 2023 review, researchers concluded that kids transfer knowledge to new domains more effectively “when instruction in which students are explicitly taught the necessary prior knowledge precedes active learning methods.”

The problem with long lectures isn’t limited to students who are easily distracted. Even the most focused students have limits to the cognitive resources at their disposal, and they can sustain deep focus for periods that might be as brief as 10 minutes. “Once cognitive capacity has been reached, the ability to maintain attention and process new information is hindered,” researchers explain in a 2021 study. To counter this, teachers should design and deliver lectures “in smaller, more manageable chunks,” which has the “benefit of reducing cognitive load and facilitating sustained attention.”

It’s also beneficial to mix modalities. In a 2024 study, researchers compared a long lecture block followed by active learning activities—small group work and pop quizzes, for example—with an approach that interspersed the two approaches. They found that students learned the most when short lectures were punctuated by three-minute active learning activities. While important for building foundational knowledge, listening to a lecture is also passive and “leads to low cognitive activity,” the researchers explain.

Here are six research-based activities—typically taking no longer than a few minutes—to break up your lectures and promote better learning.

1. COLLABORATIVE NOTE-TAKING

Kids typically take notes during lectures without a lot of oversight or revision, an approach that’s easy to leave on autopilot.

But according to a 2023 study, students’ notes are “often low quality and incomplete,” capturing about 46 percent of the main ideas and supporting details in a lecture. Incomplete notes can severely undercut student performance on later tests, the researchers point out.

You can kill two birds with one stone—shifting gears and improving note-taking skills at the same time—by building collaborative note-taking breaks into your lecture. In a 2016 study, lectures that contained several short pauses—opportunities for students to catch up, review their notes, and add any information they missed—were more effective than continuous lectures, leading to a 6 percentage point increase in factual recall and a 17-point boost in higher-level, associative learning. Crucially, students who were paired with a partner also extended their learning, recording “more original notes than those revising alone,” the researchers concluded.

Joshua LaFleur, a literacy instruction coach, doesn’t want his students to write notes during a lecture—“traditional note-taking leads to a lesson that washes over students as they transcribe lectures without processing information,” he explains. Instead, he creates a learning parking lot on the whiteboard and adds key themes and big ideas during the lesson. He’ll then periodically ask students to form small groups and “discuss, draw, and write key concepts, moving from superficial to deep understanding.”

Special education teacher Rachel Jorgensen uses tools like Google Docs, Explain Everything, and Lucidchart to enable real-time collaborative note-taking, which can “increase ownership and empower students to take part in meaning-making in the classroom.”

2. MOVEMENT BREAKS

Getting kids moving isn’t just about burning calories—there are cognitive benefits as well, research suggests.

“Cardiovascular fitness is associated with increases in cerebral blood flow, neurotransmitter levels, basal ganglia and hippocampus volume, and transportation of oxygen and glucose to the brain, some or all of which may contribute to better cognitive performance and learning outcomes,” researchers explain in a 2024 study. 

Simple activities can be performed at all grade levels. Elementary school students who participated in short exercise breaks—squats, jumping jacks, and running in place—were 10 percent more likely to be on-task for the rest of the school day, with students being more “attentive, following instructions, and inhibiting inappropriate actions,” according to a 2023 study. 

Older students benefit as well, especially for long lectures: When university students spent five to 10 minutes during a two-hour lecture doing brief exercises, they experienced “improvements in concentration and alertness as well as enhanced rapport between students and tutors and increased camaraderie between students,” a 2021 study found. The students also experienced psychological benefits—they spoke up more and felt “less worried about making mistakes.” You don’t need to deploy an exercise program; simple activities like walking around the room, stretching arms and legs, and jumping jacks will get cerebral blood flowing.

3. POP QUIZZES

Punctuating a lecture with brief, low-stakes pop quizzes not only encodes material more deeply but also provides “incentives for students to attend more closely to material discussed in class,” according to a 2023 study—making pop quizzes highly effective “engagement activities that can be seamlessly integrated during class with minimal disruption to class flow.” 

In the study, students who took frequent pop quizzes scored 13 percent higher—nearly a full letter grade—and performed well even on material that didn’t show up on previous tests. That’s because taking quizzes involves “a search of long-term memory that activates related information,” sweeping up nearby knowledge and forming “an elaborated trace that affords multiple pathways to facilitate later access to that information,” according to a seminal review by John Dunlosky, a professor of psychology at Kent State University, and his colleagues.

A 2023 study confirmed that a wide range of formats fit the bill: Multiple-choice, cued-recall, clickers, fill-in-the-blank, and short-answer tests, as well as contests of knowledge, are all useful methods of recapping recently learned material. You can gamify your pop quizzes using technology like Kahoot and Quizizz.

4. RAPID REVIEWS

A short recap can “provide opportunities to clarify and correct misunderstandings, increase retention of knowledge, and ensure better links between content, which can promote scaffolded learning and teaching,” researchers explain in a 2022 study.

To keep ideas fresh in students’ minds, high school humanities teacher Henry Seton uses rapid review, a quick and energetic activity that begins with a short review question from material they’ve recently covered—”What are Locke’s views on private property in government?” for example. Students discuss the answer with a partner and then are called on. “Students feel like the content is sticking,” says Seton. “They’re getting a lot of cold-call questions, but it’s in a safe, supportive atmosphere and helps students feel confident with the material.”

5. DRAWING TO LEARN

When the lecture material lends itself to visualization, ask students to take 10 minutes to draw, sketch, or map what they’re learning. By reconstructing the material in different ways—visually, kinesthetically, and semantically—students create more durable memory traces.

Simple representational drawings, sketching historical figures, types of birds, or a diagram of Earth’s layers, for example, can boost factual recall by nearly double, a 2018 study found. Surprisingly, the drawings didn’t have to be museum-worthy to aid students; even crude sketches were effective.

To demonstrate knowledge of more conceptual terrain, like the soil erosion cycle, students can look for ways to visually connect ideas, using arrows, boxes, and other relational markings. In a 2022 study, fifth-grade students who created concept maps scored 23 percent higher on tests of higher-order thinking than their peers who simply studied the material. Instead of students’ seeing learning as a simple “process of extracting facts,” techniques like concept mapping and sketchnoting help students to see the connections between related ideas, the researchers discovered.

6. PEER-TO-PEER TEACHING

While covering challenging material in a lecture, ask students to break, find a partner, and teach what they learned to each other. It’s a practical activity that not only “bolsters student engagement,” but yields “a consistent improvement in accuracy from pre-discussion to post-discussion across all levels of initial difficulty,” according to a 2020 study.

When explaining concepts with a partner, students develop a “common representation of the problem and answer,” which helps them “identify gaps in their existing knowledge and construct new knowledge,” the researchers explain. 
To put peer explanations into action, try activities like turn and talk, think-pair-share, and quick draw, suggests Daniel Casebeer, a professor of education at Seton Hill University and former high school English teacher. Reconvene the class and continue the lecture after a five- or 10-minute interval.