A teachers goal is to engage his/her students so they can fully grasp what they are learning. All teachers want their students to focus on the task at hand and understand what the teacher is explaining. Teachers sometimes find it difficult to keep their students aware of the task. Messy assignments, or poor grades on a topic that a teacher thoroughly explained can be frustrating.
Rebecca Abler, a former teacher states five practices to help keep kids involved in the classroom in her research article.
1. Teacher Clarity
Provide the purpose, clarity, criteria, and goals when introducing a new topic to the classroom. Show examples of the end result so the students have clear understanding of what they are doing.
2. Classroom Discussion
Teachers should step away from lecturing the whole class period and ask questions. Allowing discussion among the kids helps them to learn from each other. It also gives the teacher an opportunity to observe how well the kids are grasping the content.
3. Feedback
Teachers should have students provide feedback so he/she knows what they are doing well and not well. This allows teachers to adjust their teaching habits and styles to best fit their students.
4. Formative Assessments
To be able to give students proper feedback, teachers should frequently assign end product assessments in relation to what they were learning about. This will not only give feedback to teachers but students also so they know how well they understood the content.
5. Metacognitive Strategies
Research proves that metacognition can be taught. Student's should be able to plan, organize, and think about their own thoughts to self reflect while doing a task. Student ownership will increase when teachers give time to their students to think.
Learning is better understood when the teacher uses helpful tips to get their students involved in understanding the topic. All of these tips given by Rebecca Alber should work for teachers wanting to better their students. From personal experience, class discussion greatly helps me to focus and get advice from other peers to have knowledge on what we are working on. Being told exactly what we are doing and see examples is another way for me to understand more clearly as well. I think these teaching tasks works well for all ages as most of them have helped engage me. I learned this information through research, and noticing a teachers frustration when dealing with students listening. Through this learning, I think student's should be more respectful and pay attention because it can be annoying for a teacher to have to repeat things over and over.
Alber, Rebecca. "5 Highly Effective Teaching Practices." www.edutopia.org 27 Feb. 2015. Web 15 Sep.2017
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| Image Credit: districtadministration.com |
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