Do you struggle to engage your students in your lessons? Here you will find a variety of teaching strategies that you can use to help increase students' engagement. Check it out.
There is no “one-size fits all” approach you can take to teaching. That is why it is essential that you have a variety of teaching strategies to go along with your arsenal of assignments and visual presentations.
Most teachers use a variety of teaching strategies to reach their classrooms. Whether you have been teaching for two years or twenty, the need to keep being innovative in the classroom increases, it’s not enough to simply have a laptop for teachers that lets you do visual presentations; you need more to engage your students.
Effective Teaching Strategies for the Classroom
To be an effective teacher requires the need for creative and innovative teaching strategies to be implemented in the classroom so that you can meet the needs of each individual student. Have a look at these seven teaching strategies that may help you the next time you are before your class.
1. Visualization
Many students are visual learners. If you are allowed, have your students bring in theirstudent laptops so that they can have the lesson emailed to them and can follow along while you speak. Have other props like pictures, videos, and items that can be physically seen to help bring a lesson home. Many students are visual learners, and speaking to them isn’t going to get the point across as effectively as a visual prop will.
2. Teaching Models
To go along with visuals, have models where possible. If you are teaching a science concept, conduct an experiment to show the students what you are talking about. Furthermore, you can use drawings or objects around the classroom to bring home a math concept. There are many ways you can demonstrate the concepts you are trying to teach.
3. Inquiry-Based Learning
Inquiry-based learning allows you to appeal to your student's innate human behavior of curiosity. By implementing inquiry-based learning, you are allowing the students to identify questions on what interests them and allowing them to explore those questions in an educational setting.
Once your students identify what interests them, they need to research their chosen subject. This type of teaching works excellent for most subjects, and it teaches skills of independent learning and time management.
Ask your students to present what they have learned, either to you personally or to the classroom. You will know who well your students grasp the concept by allowing them to “teach” it to you and the other students in the class.
4. Swap Teaching
Instead of teaching a lesson or parts of a lesson, break your class into groups and let them teach the lesson. Making your students teach a part of a lesson to the rest of the class in groups or individually allows them the ability to learn the lesson thoroughly.
The goal of this strategy is to have the students display their understanding of concepts by sharing the knowledge they have gained with the class. Your students will need some class time and perhaps some direction to accomplish this task. Help them by teaching them how to sequence a lesson properly.
5. Differentiated Instructions
What this teaching strategy allows you to do is diversify your teaching style. Instead of standing up in front of the class and teaching a lesson, have stations or various sections of the classroom set up to teach the lesson.
You can have one where the students need to listen to an audio recording, another where they watch a short video, and another where a hands-on assignment must be completed. This type of teaching strategy touches each type of learning style.
6. Gamification
Everyone loves to get prizes and play games. Therefore, if you turn your lesson into a game, the students will be more engaged and more likely to grasp concepts. You can teach concepts through games like 20 questions, riddles, or even physical games using the students as pawns.
Each game style is a way for students to interact and experience the reward for getting the right answer or achieving a goal. Rewards can be a simple piece of candy or fruit, and it doesn’t matter, its bragging rights and students love that.
7. Project-Based Learning
If you want your students to gain real-life applications of the concepts you are teaching in class, you can use the project-based learning strategy. By assigning a project to your students, you are going to have to allow your students to be responsible for their own learning of the concepts. This type of learning allows students to be fully immersed in an authentic situation that can be applied to real life.
You can assign projects in groups or individually. Whichever you decide, make sure the project instructions include the real-world application of the instruction you are teaching. That way, the students are responsible for finding out how the concept applies to day to day life instead of just theoretical.
Conclusion
Teaching is never an easy job. From one year or semester to the next, you never know what types of students you are going to have in your classroom. That is why it is essential that you have an extensive repertoire of teaching strategies at your disposal.
Engaging students is never easy, especially if they are unmotivated to learn. By using various teaching strategies, you will be able to reach your students and ensure that by the time they leave your classroom, they learned something.
