 After the mini-lecture comes an in-class interactive activity. It's here that we want students to show that they have met the course objectives. In a lecture-focused classroom, this portion of the lesson may be relecated to homework. But by providing students time during class to show evidence of meeting our learning objectives, we can measure how much of the course content they have understood. Building on our water cycle lesson example, you could ask the students to form groups and discuss the main water cycle concepts with their partners, focusing on critical thinking questions such as, if the second step of the water cycle condensation is missing in a certain ecosystem, what will the effect be on that ecosystem's environment? Or explain how the water cycle step of precipitation is directly related to the step of evaporation. You can collect students' answers or have them share their answers with the whole class. Be sure that students leave the class knowing the correct answers to the questions you ask. You can put the answers online in a shared space such as Google Drive or your learning management system, print the answers and give them to students, or share the answers at the end of class. So let's look at another example, this time from a different field, in order to see how to make this work. This example comes from a published paper by Chuang and is in the area of computer programming and focuses on how to make an EMI course more interactive for students. Chuang describes in detail how a course in Taiwan was revised for interactivity. The class wasn't small, it had 42 students enrolled. The lesson plan followed the model of first introducing or reviewing topics, then giving a mini lecture of about 10 minutes to introduce new concepts and then allowing time for student interaction such as through discussions or projects and concluding with a summary session and student questions. Students were allowed to choose their own groups, though Chuang notes that in future classes students might be assigned random groups so that they have more opportunities to learn from different peers. Breaking the larger group into smaller groups allowed for more interaction. Students were allowed to use some Chinese during their discussions which the researcher found helped the lower proficiency students understand the concepts and eventually learn more English. At the end of the course, students gave a presentation on a project they did in class. Chuang notes that according to Bogotsky, the importance of the interactive portion of the class design. So here's a quote. According to Bogotsky, social interaction is essential for students to develop cognition. Therefore, in these discussion sessions, the instructor asks students to use lecture slides or the textbook to search and discuss the programming concepts with their partners. Students with insufficient English proficiency can then develop cognition with their partners during the discussion sessions. In addition, allowing students to discuss previously learned information and discover the correct answers covers the first category, remember, and second category, understand, from Bloom's revised taxonomy of the cognitive domain. In addition, during the discussion sessions, the instructor walks to each group to obtain a snapshot of their current understanding of the class. If the instructor sees that none of her students can get the correct answers to the assigned questions, she adjusts accordingly, perhaps reintroducing the class concepts in the next lecture session, translating the discussion questions into Chinese to confirm that everyone can understand them, and having students redo the discussion questions. So the computer programming class used group discussions to allow students to go over programming concepts with their partners while the instructor walked around the room. A survey from this study showed that students appreciated this new way of teaching, such as in the areas of feeling that the teaching method was structured in promoted collaborative learning, that the course promoted their critical thinking, and that the instructor was enthusiastic and provided constructive feedback. These types of studies are encouraging as they show that following this model in your EMI lesson can help your students learn as well. So let's move back away from Chuang's study and discuss technology. Technology-related options to try in order to make class more interactive include asking students to log into forms or documents during class, such as in Google Docs or Google Forms, an added bonus if you ask students to complete something during class is that you can collect what they produce and use it as a formative assessment. You could look at their Google Doc after class, for example, and use it to decide if you need to cover any topics again in future classes. You can also use social media, such as Twitter, ask the class a question, and have them reply to a hashtag, such as we have here. Then show the answers on the screen and lead a discussion, or ask students to follow key leaders on Twitter, such as company CEOs, important academics, or governmental leaders. Students can read experts' tweets and bring what they learn to class for discussions.