A Guide to Maximising Student Engagement
As teachers, we’ve probably all been there before. You’ve spent countless hours researching, planning and preparing your lessons, ensuring you’ve made provisions for different scenarios, every learning style and even created some back-up extension activities. You start your lesson and you’re greeted with a classroom full of blank faces - is there anything worse? Your job as a teacher becomes so much harder when you have to teach to a disengaged group of students. Well, worry no more! We’ll take you through some of our most used engagement strategies that help to produce successful and positive learning.
Create links and use context
It can be overwhelming for an EFL student when learning new vocabulary, and when a student becomes overwhelmed, they can quite quickly become disengaged. When introducing new concepts of vocabulary, create links with previous language learnt. Making connections with prior knowledge can be beneficial for learners, it means not everything is new and they can feel empowered by knowing something already. Context is key with new vocabulary. When you introduce an unfamiliar word, provide clues or hints around the word that can help the student to understand the meaning without having to reach for a dictionary. Use visuals, familiar words and phrases or anything else that might help the student to understand. This develops comprehension skills, so when students come across unfamiliar words in the future they can still get a gist of what’s being said.
Warmers
Warmers are a type of engagement activity that can be really useful at the beginning of your lesson, they help to break the ice with your students and get them motivated. You want to grab the attention of your students and make them want to engage with you. Some of our favourite warmers include:
Swap Seats If _____: Place all the chairs in a circle in the middle of the classroom. Have all your students sit down. One at a time, students will stand in the middle of the circle and say something like “swap seats if you have a sister.” Those students who have a sister all stand up and swap seats with one another. The next person then swaps with the person standing in the middle, and they then say their “swap seats if _____” statement. Repeat this until each person has had a turn in the middle. You can keep the warmer as it is, but it’s great to add a competitive element to it. To do this, once the person in the middle has said their statement, they have to race with all those who have stood up for a seat. There will always be one seat short, so somebody will always end up in the middle and the game continues.
What’s The Question?: Write 5 answers on the board. The answers can be anything, they could be about you, your students, or about a topic you’re teaching. Ask students to write down what they think the questions are. You could play it so those who guess the correct questions win, or you might want to have students create the silliest questions to win.
Gamification
In an education environment, gamification means applying game design elements to an educational setting. Gamification is a great strategy to implement into your teaching to get your students excited about their learning and encourage engagement. It’s an effective way to create a positive learning environment - it promotes positive behaviours and attitudes, and builds the confidence of your students. There are lots of ways to introduce game-based learning into your own lessons. You might want to create themes to connect with your lesson content and provide a context for your students. Most students are motivated by a sense of competition, so consider using deadlines and rewards to encourage active participation from your students, and encourage teamwork and communication.
Higher Order Thinking Skills
Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) are an approach in education that separates critical thinking techniques from low-order learning approaches. Those with HOTS can analyse and evaluate complex information, they can manipulate and connect facts, and they can offer insightful reasoning. Constructive learning strategies are a great way to encourage the use of HOTS in the classroom. Use open ended questions, problem-based learning, scaffolding and modelled instruction. We really recommend using concept maps to develop HOTS and increase student engagement. Concept maps done either before or after (or both) the presentation of a topic help students to analyse the content and their understanding of it, while focussing on the connections between several concepts and topics.
Looking for more engagement tips?
We’ve been working hard to create a specialist course all about Teaching with a Focus on Engagement and Motivation as part of our Specialist Module Bundle, which will ensure you never have to face those dreaded blank faces again! In our course, we talk you through some tried and true strategies that you can implement in your own classroom to create successful, engaged, and motivated students.
We’ll look at how to encourage engagement and motivation in the classroom, using Bloom’s Taxonomy, how to use music to increase engagement, how to maintain engagement and motivation in skills sessions, and gamification as an engagement strategy.
