These approaches help engage students because they have something they can relate to and everyone, including you, can learn from the results of each approach. Students’ lives outside of school vary greatly, finding the commonality and understanding why they are learning can impact how well they do on assignments and their approach to education in general.
We all hear we need to “Engage our students in learning,” but what does that really mean?
It means making sure that they are engaged in what they are doing and that they have opportunities to be involved in the classroom experience.
The best way to engage your students is by using a variety of teaching techniques and delivering content in multiple ways that appeal to different learning styles.
Use stories to illustrate the concepts you are teaching:
- Use these stories or real-world applications when teaching psychology concepts. For example, if you’re going to cover child developmental stages, have the students choose age-based children’s puzzles and games to help them conceptualize the cognitive abilities at the different stages of child development. Depending on your class you may want to ask for volunteers to demonstrate some games in front of the class.
- Stories about historical figures can inspire your students through their research paper topic(s). This will help connect classroom work back into real life so it makes sense for them when they read about these people later or in other classes where they may need additional context around why certain things happened during certain periods throughout human history.
Use technology to help students develop:
- Provide students with more opportunities for critical thinking. Have them put the phone, which they often can’t put down, to good use. Ask students to find specific information. Students no longer need to remember everything, but it is essential that they know how to find the right information and how to analyze it.
- Provide students with more opportunities for collaboration. Students often have to work in pairs or groups, but technology allows them to collaborate on projects and assignments online. For instance, they can use a virtual whiteboard or collaborate through video conferencing such as Google Hangouts, Google Meet, or Zoom.
Use real-world examples:
You might have students perform an activity in which they have to find a job or volunteer in their community, then write about it. Then you can ask them to connect what they learned in class with the actual requirements for a particular job (e.g., if someone is applying for the position of “Customer Service Representative,” then he or she must be able to answer phones, etc.).
- Create a list of potential job titles that you want students to research (for example, “How would you like to become a Biologist?”). Then ask them how each job title might apply to their lives in general (e.g., “What does being a Biologist mean?”).
- Have students discuss how they use social media and how they believe it could be used to learn more about a subject. Show them examples of learning a task or networking on these sites. While these sites can be great resources, you can also take advantage of the opportunity to explain that you need to use critical thinking to find out for yourself what the true information is.
These approaches help engage students because they have something they can relate to and everyone, including you, can learn from the results of each approach. Students’ lives outside of school vary greatly, finding the commonality and understanding why they are learning can impact how well they do on assignments and their approach to education in general.