6 Tips For Keeping Your Students Engaged in Class
The image of the bored, half-asleep, daydreaming teen sitting in
a high school classroom is all too familiar for teachers. Most teenagers seem
to treat school days like a prison sentence. A recent poll found
that the top two words teenagers most associate with school are “bored” and
“tired,” and this probably isn’t all that surprising. With schedules that are
often packed with difficult classes, homework, and extracurricular activities,
teenagers likely find sitting in a desk for hours a day to be pretty low on the
excitement scale.
As
teachers, the task of keeping students interested and engaged can often feel
like a steep challenge. Teachers are competing with endless distractions,
sleepiness, and a general lack of motivation. It may be a challenge to find new
and inventive ways to help form a more positive view of the school experience
for students, but it is a worthy challenge nonetheless. By implementing a few
new engagement techniques, teachers may be able to encourage students to be
more engaged in class and to put an end to that prison sentence.
Make
Relevant Connections
One of the best ways to get teenagers interested is by talking
about the things they know and care about, whether that’s pop culture, music,
or television shows. For example, creating an English lesson around crafting
tweets from the characters in the class novel could be a fun, new way to
approach looking at the text. Making references to pop culture within the
lesson, or even opening up the floor for student input and feedback about how
the class material relates to their everyday lives, could make way for
lively conversation.
Some
teachers who use Power Point put related memes or GIFs in their presentations
to break up the information and maybe get a laugh or two from the otherwise
weary students. By tying in things the students enjoy engaging with outside the
classroom, teachers may be able to foster more interest in the classroom.
Play
Games
Teenagers
like playing games, even if they might roll their eyes at first. There are tons
of easy, classroom-friendly games that teachers can implement into just about
any lesson in any subject to help keep students on their toes and interacting
with one another. One go-to game is throwing a beach ball around the room to
choose who will answer the next question. Or, write questions on the colored
sections of the ball, and whichever section the catcher’s thumb lands on, they
have to answer. Create a game of Jeopardy made out of questions from the study guide for an upcoming test and split the class into teams to play. Since many
students are grade-driven, consider offering an extra point or two on an
assignment to the winner(s).
Work
in Groups
Group
work is an easy, fail-safe way to get students moving around and talking.
Students can be broken into groups to work on any number of assignments, from
answering complex discussion questions, to creating a presentation on a
textbook chapter to teach to their classmates. If students are particularly disengaged
when it comes to class discussion, try putting them into small groups of 3-5
and giving them a set of questions on index cards. Challenge them to spend 5
minutes discussing each question, and ask them to be prepared to share their
thoughts with the class. By giving students time to bounce ideas off of one
another in a smaller setting, they may feel more prepared to share those ideas
to the larger class afterwards.
Four
Corners
Using the
space in the room is a great way to get students on their feet, rather than
sitting stagnantly through a lesson. Four corners is an activity in which the
teacher will label each corner of the room with an answer of sorts (for
example, the corners might be “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” and
“strongly disagree,”). Then, the teacher will ask questions and/or make
statements and ask students to move to which corner of the room they identify
with. Once in their chosen corners, students can discuss why they chose that
corner. Not only will the activity get students out of their seats, it will
also require them to make a conscious and critical decision about what they
think about the material of the lesson.
UseTechnology
If there
is any kind of technology available in the classroom for students and/or
teachers to use, teachers could try implementing it into a lesson plan. With
some schools around the country moving to one-to-one technology (one device per
one student), there are more and more opportunities to incorporate these
devices in the learning process. Since most teenagers are nothing short of
glued to their tech, using it in the classroom could definitely help keep them
more interested in the material. There are many online platforms, that can be
used to create interactive quizzes and polls that students can participate in
from their own devices, giving them a bit of agency over how the lesson unfolds
and what they get out of it.
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