What strategy do you use to keep students or clients engaged during a lesson?
Student engagement strategies during lessons simply mean those things a teacher does to keep the students focused and glue their interest to what is being taught during the lesson. One thing every teacher must have is student engagement strategies during lessons. This not only makes work easier for the teacher, it indeed makes the students understand what is being taught and love the teacher such that they will always want him/her in the classroom with them.
To perfectly align with this topic, you need to understand and at least have one good teaching philosophy as discussed in the previous post. Here are the 3 life-saving strategies used by smart teachers, 3rd one will shock you.
Meanwhile, from years of experience as a teacher, I have learnt that some students may feel bored, overworked or just disinterested during a lesson sometimes. However, I have always tried to assess whether the student is ready for a session and to find a way to keep them focused. This makes work very interesting and easier for me. A teacher that develops strategies to make his/her lessons fun, interesting or challenging for each student always has the interest and the support of the students.
In one of my questions to teachers on, a platform that connects teachers with educational institutions and provides access to loans, health support and opportunities to make teaching life easier; I asked him to describe his approach to engagement-focused lesson planning and provide an example, if applicable, of a previous experience where he changed plans to meet a student’s needs. Teaching stress you must avoid as a teacher.
His answer was marvellous as quoted below;
“Working with high school students can be a challenge, especially if we’re meeting to help them bring up low grades. One thing I do when I meet the student for the very first time is to ask them questions about their interests, like sports, school subjects, music and movies. In the math problems that I create, I incorporate references to these interests.
For example, a question may be to find out how many points they need to score in a basketball game to win or feature their favourite celebrity buying too many groceries. It gets their attention and makes them laugh, helping me build a good rapport with them and keep them interested in the material.”
Does this give you an idea of what a student engagement strategy during a lesson is?
Common student engagement strategies include but are not limited to;
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- Connect the lesson to the real world: It is not new even if you are new to teaching that students always want to know or see the real-world application of what is being taught. Simply connect the lesson to it and you have the students’ interest.
- Plan the lesson with the student’s interests: Students pay attention more to what interests them. Make your lesson plans to align with their interest without deviating from the objective of the lesson.
- Let your students participate in the lesson. Every lesson should be learner-centred.
- Make sure you don’t leave the students idle or make the lesson boring. Just keep the students engaged with anything that is worth doing that doesn’t go beyond the objective of the lesson or classroom management principles.
- Allow your students to move their bodies. Sitting all through the entire might hinder progress. Let them exercise themselves without distracting the session. You could just simply ask them to stand up for seconds or ask them to stretch their body.
- Be funny without stupidity.
There is one thing to bear in mind, there is no one magic strategy. Also note that the strategies differ depending on students’ level, environment and status. Another minor factor is gender (Certain things favour females over males and vice-versa). Therefore, you are in the best position to choose what works for you. You may wish to join passbuttons and keep the movement alive.
Teacher help teacher. What is your student engagement strategy? Please answer through the comment box below.
The strategy i use during teaching is, i introduce the lesson in a play way method that has to do with the topic involving the learners, provide learning materials that are relevant to the topic that group can use during teaching.
Very interesting.