4 tips for keeping students engaged and focused

Have you ever been in a situation when students were not paying too much attention in class? Doodling? Staring out the window? Wandering around their mind palaces?

It is a challenge to keep students focused during the whole class; even more challenging it is to get them back on task once they zone out. High engagement levels will increase the learning experience and leave teachers and students feeling great about participating in class. This guide is designed to serve as a toolkit of strategies that a teacher can use and perfect on their journey to a highly engaged classroom.

Every teacher envisions a classroom brimming with excited energy and filled with curious students deeply engaged in learning. It’s a common goal, but too often students are still distracted or bored in class. Specific strategies are needed to transform the average classroom into a highly engaged learning space.

Small strategies are also a great starting point since they allow a teacher to increase engagement and learning without overhauling their lesson plans or materials. By implementing small strategies every day, teachers can plan for and create an engaging learning environment.

Here are four ways to encourage student engagement in any classroom.

1. Help students collaborate

Students can be brought to excellence by the power of teamwork, so help them collaborate and discuss their work with each other. Make learning social by setting up a discussion on Facebook or Edmodo, ask students to share their animations or other projects and encourage them to leave feedback on each other’s work, thus making them active participants and owners of the learning process. 2. Use new technology

Making students active learners is one of the best ways to keep them engaged in class. While reading the textbook out loud or working on a hand-out worksheet might still be inevitable, these activities are hardly engaging and motivating. Instead, be that awesome teacher who thinks out-of-the-box and uses new approaches to education.

According to the Visual Teaching Alliance, 90% of secondary students are visual learners, which means that using visual aids in class can dramatically improve learning and ultimately help students retain more from what they hear. At the same time, allow students to personalize the process and foster ownership of the material rather than just making them learn lessons by rote. 3. Make the classroom student-based

Experts emphasize the necessity of using students’ interests in learning. Oftentimes students do not feel like many academic topics are relevant to them, so connecting what you are teaching to real life might tremendously improve their engagement. While we might find it difficult to keep up with all new trends and spirits of the time, we can still apply some examples from modern life to make classes lively. Try putting yourself in your students’ shoes and use their interests and fascinations: for instance, how about explaining the India's role in WWII through Star Wars characters? Stick to something familiar that students can associate themselves with, and you bet even those kids in the back of the class will stay tuned.

4.Keep students’ motivation high

As Larry Ferlazzo mentions in his book “Classroom Q & As: Expert Strategies For Teaching,” one of the strategies teachers should employ in an effort to keep students engaged is to help them move forward and reinforce motivation by highlighting small victories. It is important for students to feel they are making progress. For instance, try using achievement badges in class: when students finish working on a project or paper, they receive a badge that they can place on a special table and show off to their parents or fellow students.

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