I laugh and joke and have fun in my classes, but I also ask questions and call on people throughout my lectures. I work under the expectation that students are participants in their education and not just information receptacles. At the start of each of my Invertebrate Biology classes, I facilitate student preparation by administering 5-point quizzes on the material from the previous lecture. However, they do require a familiarity with what we talked about last. That means they need to spend some time with the material between classes.
Quizzes also do wonders for attendance.
Being in class is one of the most essential elements to learning. While I do not take attendance, I feel that lectures are the primary point of feedback between students and instructor. Consequently, I make it my responsibility to do everything I can to cultivate the habit of attending class. Since my time at DePauw it has always been my hope to return to a small school environment. By comparing my experiences as an undergraduate with those from my graduate and postdoctoral work at larger institutions, it is clear to me that instructors at small schools have a unique opportunity to have a more direct impact on the intellectual development of their students.