Student Participation/Active Learning Here are a few simple strategies to get students to respond to questions or participate more: One way to get the students to participate more in class is to give them an assignment that they have to come prepared to speak about.
Class notes are, to borrow from a colleague of mine, "epistemologically weird." On the one hand, they are an individual account of what you learned during a class. On the other hand, if your notes are too individualized or idiosyncratic it means you will have likely missed what was most important.