You didn’t become an educator to see your students fail their tests and leave high school/college with bad grades. You got into the teaching profession because you wanted to help each and every one of your students reach their full academic potential.
To ensure this to be the case, you can’t just be an expert in your specific subject. You also need to go above and beyond to make sure that your students remain engaged with your lessons whenever they spend time in your classroom.
For advice on how to better engage your students, be sure to read on.
Start Each Class with a Warm-up
You might not be blessed with a lot of time in your lessons, but you should still try to sneak in a warm-up task right at the beginning of each task. Getting your students’ minds into gear in this sense will help them to hit the ground running with their curricular tasks as soon as you set them.
Encourage Collaboration
The more your students collaborate and communicate with one another, the less gaps they will have in their knowledge. This is because they will be able to fill in the gaps that their classmates have, and vice versa.
To facilitate collaborative learning in your classroom, you must:
- Establish group goals
- Keep the size of your groups to four students at the most
- Make sure each of your students have a specific role in the groups that you put them in
- Ensure that your groups are diverse with regards to academic achievement and cultural background
Minimize Distractions
One of the biggest challenges you face as an educator is distraction. Whether it’s something happening outside in the school grounds or whether it’s a fellow classmate playing up, as soon as something other than your teaching catches their attention, your students will find it difficult to become re-engaged with your lesson.
To avoid this plight, you have to seek to minimize distractions within your classroom. To do this, you must:
- Ban the use of smartphones (operate a no-chance policy in this instance — if you see a phone, confiscate it)
- Reduce visual distractions such as posters on the walls
- Provide your students with one task at a time
- Set up a seating plan to ensure that particularly disruptive students are separated from one another
Embrace Concept Mapping
Concept mapping has taken the world of teaching by storm in recent times, and for good reason too. This high-impact teaching strategy involves representing interrelated knowledge via visual stimulation — basically, it forces students to remain engaged in the classroom because they have to make an active effort to concentrate on what they are being taught.
For advice on how to create a concept map, be sure to head to Evidence-Based Teaching. Once you do, you’ll learn all about what shapes, colors, and styles prove most effective when it comes to student engagement. What’s more, you’ll cultivate an understanding of how to effectively link your various teaching topics together.
Take the above advice, and you’ll be better engaging your students in no time.
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