Creatively "Tweaking" Your Teaching to Engage Students

Dr. Wendy Ghiora – Posting #16 – June 20, 2009

Students are naturally engaged when they participate in learning which requires them to manipulate information physically and mentally. Think of creating “active” rather than “passive” learning activities. Reading along, taking notes, listening to a lecture, or copying vocabulary words are all passive learning activities. To the contrary, you want to get your students actively thinking and moving. How can you accomplish this? You just need to start thinking “out of the box.”

Here are a few simple techniques to attain your goal, involving some minor adjustments to typical classroom activities:

1.-Do you tend to use a lot of worksheets? How could they best be used to gain student engagement? Break students into groups and give each group different questions from the worksheet. Each group must answer their questions, create a half-poster that illustrates the answers, and then present the information to the class. Other options include: students using graphic organizers such as a web, Venn Diagram, or T-chart to present the information. Your students can even create a rhyme, poem, or song to help other students remember the information.

2.-Are students expected to remember chronological information? Produce the information and cut it up into strips. Give each group an envelope with the strips. Have them work as a team to put the events in order. This can also be applied to steps of a math problem or science experiment or story plot. Let students paste the strips onto bright construction paper.

3.-Do you want your students to learn concepts or main events? After students have read a novel or a section in the textbook, have them draw pictures to illustrate the concept or events and hang it on a mobile. Another activity is to have each student write one fact on a strip of construction paper. Each student reads their strip, and then folds it in a circle, which you staple. Together, you have created a class paper chain of information.

These are just a few ideas to get you going. These kinds of activities get students moving mentally and physically. It isn’t always easy to create these activities and plan out the details. You will have to provide the structure and constantly monitor and guide students as they work. Your hard work will pay off. Soon you will be hearing “complaints” like, “Is it time to go already?” and “Can we do this again?”



More to come next weekend.