Every successful educator will need a roadmap to determine the level of student engagement during class time. The more efficient and transparent the plan is, the more the learning experience for students will be taken to its full potential and the more prepared the teacher will look. Any successful planning should have three components, which may be sketchy at first but will incrementally improve as time goes by.
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Plan short/long-term goals for students
What is meant by that is having a proper learning objective for the lesson that is being taught the entire week or even perhaps a month in advance. Clearly describe the main objective to the students, what they’re going to gain out of learning this class and where this can be used down the line in their career path. A table of content sort of to speak, broken down to the detailed tasks. The more transparent teachers are, the easier students will relate to the topics.
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Add learning activities to lessons
That’s one sure way of getting students engaged. Tag an illustration while you’re explaining. Real examples, analogies or scenarios. It’s a guaranteed solace, they will be hooked. Whatever it takes to tell the story clearly. Potent visuals will always promote richness in academia for students regardless of the topic.
Use detailed activities to invite the students to contribute in discussions. This will help you as a teacher to design a better approach for each individual student and it will aid in identifying their weak and strong points to work on.
Use pop quizzes and presentations to make students interact with the content you want them to learn. During lectures, students will most likely retain information if the concepts are conveyed with visual aids and encouraged to participate. You can also try to start a brain teaser or a simulation session (in a controlled classroom), things that will explain real-world relationships very well to them yet maintains that 20/20 focus.
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Breaking-down the plan
It’s not enough to just plan the objectives for the lesson, you need to have assessments assigned as this will provide a greater opportunity for students to reiterate the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired. Offering a consolidated feedback to students will further reinforce the methodologies and how adept they are.
Capturing attention: instructors should present a story (with a challenge) to be solved. Introduce breaker actives and materials to spike the interest. Youtube for instance, anything that will capture their senses will definitely work like a charm.
Recall previous knowledge: it’s not enough to spew out what was learned, instructors should ask students information about current topics to test their general knowledge of previous events.
Be there to guide: assess the performance, ask the students to reiterate the information that was learned in a more elaborative manner as this will increase the rate of information becoming ingrained in their minds. The key concepts and processes of the discipline should be clearly identified, explicated, and organized in a coherent manner for any good curriculum.
Rinse and repeat: tie loose ends if there were any by resolving queries or any misunderstood concepts. Summarizing, reviewing and demonstrating what students understood in class will help map out correctly the upcoming topics while providing a clear framework to use in developing and setting goals for the next lesson.
