Teachers – How to keep your students engaged in class.
No teacher no nation. There is no gainsaying in the foregoing as it is an irrefutable fact.
From time immemorial, teaching has been one of the earliest professions known to man and even today there is a much larger need for qualified and competent teachers to help build posterity of man into a ‘nation’.
Granted, the task of imparting or inculcating knowledge can be a huge and daunting one. Here are some tips to help teachers, tutors and lecturers keep their students engaged in class.
Advance Preparation:
It is often said that proper preparation prevents poor performance. This applies to teachers too. Never underestimate any class, rather prepare well ahead of your classes and you will captivate the minds of your students. What more, if you have students who are swots I mean students who read and study wide hence may want to play on your intelligence by asking cunning but valid questions, you will definitely have an answer for such ones because of your advance preparation.
Make Your Class Lively :
When a teacher is boring, the students end up sleeping in his class or skipping the class altogether. In view of this, it’s not out of place for a teacher at regular intervals to crack a joke, chip in a funny real life experience or engage the students in a quiz so as to carry the students along. A note of caution though, when a class is overly excited because the teacher is all about jokes the students will not take such teacher seriously or worse, end up learning nothing at all. As such defeating the purpose of making his class lively. Hence a teacher should strike a balance in this regard.
Use Of Visual Aids.
The eyes are the window to the soul or so they say, and what is seen may be remembered for a lifetime. Visual aids like pictures, motion pictures, slides, power point presentations and the likes dutifully engage students in a class, assist them in remembering what is learnt and more importantly makes them look forward to future classes ending in a win-win situation for both the teacher and the students.
View Point Questions.
Questions are like the cup used in scooping water from a drum, they draw out the thoughts of the one from whom the question(s) is being asked, in this case the students. A teacher would have been talking into the thin air if after the end of his class his students do not understand what he has taught. To avoid such painful outcome, a teacher should at regular intervals ask his students questions to determine if his students are following with the class.
Remember Rome wasn’t built in a day, patiently incorporate the above tips in your teaching and be sure to see conspicuous results in your students
