Are you struggling to keep students engaged in your subject? Or do you have a class filled with students who are not interested in what you’re teaching?
Even if your subject or topic is perfect, creating an engaging learning environment can be very challenging as a teacher. However, keeping students engaged is not impossible. In this article, I shared 5 best tips to help you out.
I’ve discovered that students are better listeners and react more quickly to instructions when they are focused and interested. Additionally, students appear to be both learning and having fun when they’re engaged.
Here are 5 best proven ways to keep students engaged and make the classroom more engaging, fascinating, and educational.
5 Ways to Keep Students Engaged
1. Use Real-life Scenarios and Natural Examples
One of the major reasons why students don’t seem engaged in what they are learning is because there are no practicals. Use Real-life scenarios and examples to emphasize the value of the subject you’re teaching to avoid having pupils feel that it is unimportant to their life.
Just as you know that the world is changing everyday and students are frequently bombarded by the volume of information they are exposed to on a daily basis.
Make your topics sound important to your students by relating them to their perception of the outside world if you really want your course to hold their interest.
How do you use Real-life Scenarios to keep students engaged in the Classroom?
Making your subject/topic more applicable to your students’ daily lives is an easy process. The ideal approach is to consider the lives of your students and what they see as a priority. Take into account their values or how they use their free time. After knowing these, apply those ideas to your teachings.
When your students are able to connect the dots between your subject and their individual lives and goals, they will engage more with the subject and grow more interest in learning it.
2. Encourage more Active Learning Rather than Passive Learning
Passive learning is a learning method where students listen, read and watch a course or lecture without further reviews.
While Active learning is a learning method in which the students are actively involved in the learning process.
Active learning engages your students in the subject immediately, which inevitably increases their interest in the subject.
How can you encourage more active learning in the classroom?
There are various types of teaching styles and learning methods you can adopt to encourage active learning in the classroom. Some are;
- Group discussions: Encouraging talks or discussions in the class is a good way to involve all of your students and get their opinions on a certain subject. Make a circle out of the desks in your classroom so that everyone can see one another and feel as if they are equally contributing to a dialogue. This way every student is able to share knowledge together on the topic.
- Logical thinking and Reflective practice: Exercises that encourage logical thinking and reflective practice can also be useful tools for encouraging active learning. In order to urge your students to think logically or act decisively, try asking them more difficult, intelligent questions. Students are more likely to be interested in a subject when they are required to think intellectually about it.
- Cooperative group learning: To encourage your pupils to collaborate and share their ideas together in order to respond to a question or solve a problem, look for opportunities for group learning and cooperation. By encouraging your students to work together and share their knowledge, they may find that they end up hearing from one of their classmates directly about an important opinion on a certain subject or topic.
3. Use Different Learning Methods in the Classroom
One of the pillars of teacher education is the use of various methods for teaching.
Even while we may believe we cater to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, there is a good likelihood that at least one of those primary types of learners is being let down.
For example, if you’re a kinesthetic learner, you require more hands-on practice than the occasional weekly assignment. They require ongoing motivation to remain interested in the courses.
A minimum of one activity should be included for each learning style in every class. These might be
• Drawing analogies, jotting down, watching videos, and taking exams – (Visual)
• Take part in debates, read aloud, make music, and listen to podcasts. (Audio)
• Play roles, do experiments, make something physical, and walk around the room. (Kinesthetic)
Keep in mind that while it may be stressful, the effort will be worthwhile. Your students pay attention for longer periods of time as your subjects become more engaging.
4. Add Project-Based Learning
For pupils to think carefully about the fundamentals of a given topic or subject, class projects must be included.
You can also assist pupils in developing experience in abilities like teamwork, planning, or imaginative design, depending on the project’s nature.
Students’ creativity and critical thinking are developed and their interest in the subject is increased when you make them come up with great ideas and carry out projects.
The addition of Project based learning as a teaching method is the process of moving a project from the idea stage to full-fledged execution. This challenges the student’s intellect and requires them to think critically and creatively about how to reach their objective.
Projects encourage students to think creatively and to inject their personalities into their curriculum.
You also encourage students to build communication and cooperation skills that will be useful to them in the working world if the project is a team-based one.
The finest projects challenge students to think critically about the course subject while also letting them express themselves freely, exercise their creativity, and have fun.
5. Incorporate Blended Learning
Blended learning is a teaching strategy that combines both online, electronic and traditional teaching techniques to keep students engaged.
It blends traditional teaching methods, such as lectures or presentations, with cutting-edge educational technology, such as digital syllabus/curriculum, to create a blended experience that maximizes the best of both learning methods.
How can you Incorporate Blended Learning to keep students engaged in your Classroom?
Some of the ways you can incorporate blended learning into the classroom are;
1. Make use of different instructional materials including textbooks, free internet resources, and study guides. Some subjects may be better taught using a textbook, whilst other subjects may be better taught using a video from a digital curriculum.
You’ll be getting the benefits of blended learning and keeping things interesting for your students to keep them focused through the use of the greatest resource for a subject and updating it as you progress.
2. Combining new and traditional teaching methods to strike the right balance between them. Before moving into an online lesson to help students develop their skills and learning abilities, start with a traditional teaching method to explain concepts to the class. Doing this, you will be able to combine both new and traditional teaching methods to make learning easy. In the end, implementing new teaching methods is what blended learning is all about, not necessarily throwing out the old ones!
3. Using different assessments to more accurately evaluate students’ success. If they are aware that there is only one test or examination due at the end of the term, many students will feel less interested in the subject. Instead, you may sprinkle your course with peer-assessed assignments, presentations, or digital tests to add variety and also avoid the common stress-inducing tests and exams.
Conclusion
As you keep teaching, it’s important to continue learning effective strategies that keep students engaged. If you truly want to improve your students overall performance then you should think of grabbing their interest in your subject. With these 5 Best Proven ways you would be able to make your subject more engaging.