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Keeping students engaged can be a difficult task for any teacher, but it becomes especially hard to maintain engaging teaching strategies as school breaks approach or during holiday seasons.

As a teacher, you may get a group of students that you just can’t seem to keep interested. No matter what you do, it seems like all of the students are bored out of their minds. If students aren’t paying attention, and their minds are wandering, then they are not absorbing any of the information that you are giving them to pass your class.

One study of student boredom suggested that almost 65% of students find at least half their lectures boring, with about 35% claiming to find most or all of their lectures boring.

Here are 10 teaching strategies that you can do to keep your class interested and engaged.
  1. Discover new things together – It’s much more fun for both parties when students and teachers learn new things together.
  2. Make it interactive – If you want your students to be interested in what you are teaching them, you must make it interactive.
  3. Incorporate mystery into your lessons – Learning is the most fun when it’s surprising. Don’t just tell them information; cloak it in to mystery.
  4. Be crazy, but show you care – Let loose; laugh; make fun of yourself. Don’t worry about sacrificing your authority.
  5. Participate in projects – I had a creative science professor at my school who would bring his own material to class for the students to workshop. It was great fun for all of us, and enjoyable for him as well.
  6. Avoid “going through the motions” – Make an effort to be fresh, try new things, take risks, make mistakes, and enjoy the moment.
  7. Share your passion with students – Show students how you have fun. Passion is contagious. If you’re having a good time, chances are your students will too.
  8. Laugh at your students’ jokes – It’s one of the best ways to ensure teachers and students have fun: enjoy one another.
  9. Replace lectures with conversations – Why should teaching be so passive? Forget the sage on the stage and engage your students in a casual conversation like you would a good friend.
  10. Enjoy yourself – We pay a lot of attention to those people, who enjoy themselves.
Additionally,
  1. Relate your content with their lives – When you create a real-world connection to what students are learning, it will give them a greater understanding of why they need to learn it.
  2. Use technology in the classroom – In this world today, technology is what students live and breathe every day. If you want to make your class the most interesting class that everyone loves to go to, then you must incorporate some kind of technology.

Allowing your students creative freedom in their learning is essential. Learning off set phrases is useful up until a point. After that, they need to be able to understand why a particular word is said in a particular way, and how they can manipulate it to suit the current situations.

Overall, talk less and involve with students more. The more you make your class interactive and the more that you utilize technology, the more your students will enjoy what they are learning.

How do you keep your class interesting? Do you use any of the teaching strategies mentioned in this post? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, we would love to hear your ideas.

For more teaching strategies, check out SmileTutor’s website.

About The Author

Kelly Robinson shares tips for teachers through SmileTutor.

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