Engaging your students on their first day back from a break is one thing, but keeping them engaged throughout the whole of the term that follows is a completely different task altogether. Keeping them concentrated on their work at all times, on all days of the week, is, however, an incredibly important task if you want to see your students reach their academic potential, as there is something to be learned in every single lesson. So, no matter how hard it might be, you have to resolve to it. To see how to retain student engagement throughout a whole term of study, check out the advice below.
Make your lessons mean something
To remain engaged with what you teach them, your students need your lessons to mean something to them. If the lessons aren’t meaningful, and your students subsequently don’t feel as if what you are asking them to do is worth either their time or their effort, quite simply, they won’t do what you ask of them. So, make sure you’re putting extra effort into your lesson plans by injecting a healthy dose of meaningfulness into each of them.
To do this, you have to be incorporating activities into your teachings that reach your students on a personal level — if you are teaching a physical education lesson to a class of students that have chosen it as one of their subjects, for instance, then you should tap into the fact that they obviously have a previous liking for sport by revolving your teachings around a number of your students’ favourite sports teams. Teaching in this way will engage your students right from the off, and, if continued, will see them remain engaged all the way through — in fact, they may even start looking forward to your lessons!
Allow for collaborative learning to take place
If you’re the type of teacher that doesn’t allow for any sort of collaboration to take place in your classroom, then you’ll soon make yourself enemy number one and you will in no way engage your students. So, quite simply, allow for collaborative learning to take place.
In order to achieve this, you must be allowing your students the chance to chat with each other and dissect what they are being taught together while they are being taught it — this means no ‘talking bans’! If you don’t trust your students to behave in such a collaborative setting, then try teacher modelling, a form of teaching where you show your students what is expected of them.
Use a software to monitor engagement
If you want to keep your students engaged from the moment they step into your class at the beginning of the academic year to the second that they leave it come the next summer break, then you need be monitoring their engagement at all times. To help you do this, you need to be embracing and using software that offers student retention solutions. What such software will do to help you specifically is keep a tab on your students’ performance, and then alert you should a single individual deviate from their expected academic pathway.
With the various distractions that students generally suffer, from their fellow classmates playing up to anything that might be happening to them outside of school, as a teacher or lecturer, you’re always going to be fighting an uphill battle when you seek to keep your students engaged. By taking the advice above, however, you will make this battle a little easier to manage.