At the end of my first semester teaching economics at Notre Dame, I realized I had a problem:
I was boring.
In my student evaluations, 18.2 percent of respondents reported that they did not feel engaged in class, and 20.5 percent of students’ open-ended responses negatively mentioned classroom engagement. As one student so eloquently put it, being in my lectures was “kind of like talking to a wall for an hour some days.”
My immediate reaction to this feedback was defensive grumbling. After all, I was already spending 10 to 15 minutes of each 75-minute lecture on a worksheet or group activity, and I frequently called on students to answer questions in class. That was way more interactivity than I experienced in introductory economics classes as an undergraduate!
But as my defensiveness faded, I began to recall bits of information from the Kaneb Center Course Design Academy (KCCDA). At KCCDA, I learned that active learning strategies generate stronger retention of information than lectures (Deslauriers et al. 2019) and that students’ attention begins to wane after only around 10 minutes of lecturing (Kim et al. 2014). Just taking a brief pause every 12 to 15 minutes during lectures can increase learning (Bachhel and Thaman 2014).
These were insights that I wanted to apply to benefit my students.
The “Turn to Your Neighbors” Experiment
As an experiment, I started to invite students to periodically turn to their peers for quick discussions during class, which I (creatively) called “turn to your neighbors.” This involved splitting lectures into segments lasting 20 minutes at most and pausing between segments for a “turn to your neighbor.” Sometimes, students would talk only in their small groups, and then we would move on, in which case I budgeted five to seven minutes for their discussion. Other times, I facilitated a classroom-wide conversation after they chatted in small groups, taking a total of 10 to 15 minutes.
These “turn to your neighbors” became a convenient way to incorporate other learning goals and practices into class, allowing me to:
- Engage students in retrieval practice by asking them to recall information from prior lectures,
- Build connections to lived experiences by asking students to provide examples of economic concepts from their own lives or prior coursework, and
- Strengthen students’ confidence in their own critical reasoning by inviting them to think through economic arguments before I formally presented them.
Student Feedback
If my course evaluations are to be believed,1 this experiment was a success. In the spring of 2026, just 4.5 percent of students reported feeling unengaged in class, as compared to 18.2 percent in the prior semester. Only 3 percent of open-ended responses mentioned classroom engagement negatively versus 20.5 percent the semester before. Additionally, 13.4 percent of open-ended responses mentioned classroom engagement positively, as compared to 2.5 percent the semester before. And, only one student called me boring!
As a junior faculty member building a new academic program, I still have a long list of problems to solve, but I am happy to report that thanks to the knowledge and support KCCDA provided, being boring is no longer top of my list.
Adrienne Judson is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Economics and the director of the Evidence-Based Poverty Alleviation Concentration. She participated in the 2025–26 Kaneb Center Course Design Academy.
1 I’m an economist, so I am compelled to point out that this evidence is just suggestive. In the fall of 2025, I taught a required, introductory course with mostly students who were early in their college careers. In the spring of 2026, I taught an intermediate-level elective with many juniors and seniors, who may have different expectations for engagement due to longer exposure to traditional college-style lecturing. Students may also be more engaged in elective courses due to higher levels of interest in the subject matter.