Nowadays, schools are trying different and new techniques of teaching to give better learning experience to students.
Other than quality of the teaching you give, keeping them engaged throughout a classroom session is always challenging. The attention span of kids is very low than you can expect and so it is important to put in some serious effort to grab their attention. The classroom sessions can be made interactive and interesting with a mix of learning and some gamification.
Getting all your students focused, eager, and on task at the beginning of class is challenging enough. Equally difficult is, once you locked them in to the lesson, is watching them zone out. There is nothing unusual about that. After all, anyone who has to sit through a long routine including a teacher’s presentation is bound to drift off at some point.
Following are the tips you can try to keep your students engaged in class :
1 : Warm them up
An interesting start can give a good impact to your students. A good starting of lessons can impact the way students grasp the lessons. It would be good to start it off with a warm up session. One of the commonly followed activities is writing some points related to what was taught in the previous class on the board. Students can actively find out the mistakes in it in a collaborative way.
Second is ask questions related to lessons between your lectures. In this way they will be curious to know answer and feel some pressure to answer.
When you finish a particular topic, you can ask them to give a quick write of what you taught them. It can include important points covered in the topic and their judgement or conclusion regarding some tricky areas. This is a good way to keep students engaged with the lessons. This makes them focus more during the next classes.
2 : Organize a collaboration or debate
By doing debate or collaboration they build a team feeling and start competition with each other and result of this will be favourable for you.Doing project learning and other team-based work without prior training can lead to lots of dead time. You can nip much of it in the bud by teaching collaboration skills before projects get started. You don’t need to use an activity related to your subject area to teach teamwork.
3 : Videos may help you
Video sessions are a good option to grab student’s attention and focus on lessons. The visual elements are processed faster by brain and this can make remarkable impact on their understanding of the topic. Variety can be made in this strategy too by including video presentations with beautiful slides or giving them video tutorials. Considering its importance, smart board options are gaining more importance in today’s classrooms.
4 : Real life example
Students would find it interesting if teachers can connect the subject that is being taught to incidents in real life. This also helps them to relate the subject better and gain a better knowledge.
Including students in the learning process is really important to gain their interest for the subject. Students should be given a platform to express their ideas or opinions during the activity. They should be given free time to understand a particular subject and don’t rush to the next lesson.
5: Tell them story
Everyone loves stories atleast kids loves stories they find it intersting to imagine the situations of story. So if you tell them story regarding lessons ,it will be a interesting way to introduce a new subject to students and start it. Some teachers also bring stories in middle of lessons helping students to relate some facts in a better way. Kids would always love to hear stories and they crave for more. This is another way to engage them when handling tough subjects.
6 : Mix the teaching styles
To keep students involved and on their toes, try to move from teacher-centered learning to student-centered active learning, and vice versa.
Here’s how it works : Introduce a presentation by having students pair up, talk to each other about their prior knowledge of the presentation, and generate a list of four questions for which they’ll want to know the answers. Make quick rounds to remind all students to stay on task.