Effective Techniques for Maintaining Your Learners’ Interest During Teaching and Learning.

It is absurd to expect all students to be constantly on the edge of their seats, mesmerized by masterful instruction.

Students do bring outside distractions into the classroom.

Divorces, deaths, infatuations, conflicts, and the normal growing pains can divert the attention of even the most conscientious students.

Although you cannot control these outside events, you significantly affect most students’ learning.

Some teachers have greater skill at teaching lessons that hold students’ attention and that result in higher achievement than other teachers.

All teachers have a few lessons that always excite and interest students.

Those successful attention-holding lessons likely adhere to most of the following principles.

Here are some ideas that may help gain and maintain learners’ interest:

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Learning begins before class starts.
Challenge yourself to devise creative ways to capture students’ attention and engage their minds when they enter the room.
Every day plan to have something available related to the day’s topic to arouse curiosity and stimulate thinking before the bell rings.
Examples: a quotation on the board or overhead, a word puzzle for individuals or groups to complete, a couple of thought questions, a startling statistic, or a related cartoon.
Get the class actively involved in the lesson’s first three minutes.
This might be through raising their hands in response to a question related to the day’s lesson (for example, “How many have ever visited a dairy farm?”), participating in a small-group brainstorming, or writing a response.
Strive to create an atmosphere of active involvement, not passive listening, early in the class period.

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Plan carefully and fully.
Lessons that run smoothly keep students’ attention and minimize interruptions.
This has little to do with charisma.
Lessons run smoothly because they are carefully planned and organized.
Time is invested upfront to ensure that materials are ready, the teacher knows what to do next, and the unexpected is anticipated.
This helps create a businesslike, task-oriented atmosphere.
Clarify the specific objective(s) for each lesson.
The single most important question you can ask yourself each day is “What do I want my students to learn from this class?”
Unfortunately, some teachers have no clearer notion of where they are headed.
Share your objectives with your students.
Let them know what they should get out of this lesson.
Of course, you cannot tell them if you don’t know yourself.
With purposes clear and instruction systematic, students will more readily master that lesson.

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Divide learning tasks into smaller subskills.
Present those subskills in logical and manageable lessons.
Sequence your lessons so that you aren’t trying to teach skills for which students have not yet mastered the necessary prerequisites.
Otherwise, both you and your students will be frustrated.
Design lessons that encourage students to contribute their views and knowledge.
Many have special talents or experiences they might enjoy sharing and from which other students can learn.
Make a conscious effort to connect your lesson to students’ lives beyond school.
Incorporate their interests as illustrations.
Provide opportunities for them to apply what they are learning to daily life and the problems they face.

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Employ visual aids transparencies, pictures, slides, props, demonstrations, and posters.
Overall, the visual is the most powerful learning modality.
Maximum learning is likely to occur when the instruction is both auditory and visual and, where possible, also kinesthetic (involving doing things and motor movement).
Keep moving while you talk.
An easy way to lose any group’s interest is to become the stationary talking head in front of the room.
Talking while seated is also more likely to lead to speaking in a monotone.
An additional benefit of moving while teaching is that you are better able to monitor the class, nipping in the bud any potentially disruptive misbehavior.

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Build a breath of fresh air or energizing activity into your lesson about every eight to ten minutes.
It doesn’t have to be long but inject something that changes the pace and refocuses the students’ attention.
Examples include a humorous cartoon, a prop, a personal illustration, sharing a response in pairs or small groups, a role play, demonstration, and visualization.
Anything that actively engages their brains is likely to help refocus attention.
Provide opportunities for active involvement through exercises and activities that break up long formal presentations.
When asked, most students prefer lessons in which they act out parts, build things, interview people, or carry out projects.
The least favored are those classes in which they are allowed only to listen.
Variety is the spice of life and the secret to successful lessons.
Effective teachers don’t use the same teaching techniques day after day.
They employ an assortment of instructional strategies.
Most ineffective teachers tend to use the same few techniques for every lesson usually lectures and worksheets.
Strive to develop the broadest range of teaching approaches and employ that variety.
Experiment with simulations, role-playing, videotaping, and cooperative learning.
Students generally are more excited about working in groups.

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Involve students in real-life activities that have a practical usable products.
The element of surprise works wonders in building student enthusiasm and motivation.
Some teachers dress up in costumes, have surprise guest speakers, or use drama to capture students’ attention.
Occasionally, do the unexpected.
Allow suspense to build in anticipation as the class unfolds.
Questions, storytelling, and props are especially effective in creating intrigue.
Personal illustrations of events from your and your student’s life experiences make academic content come alive.
Such stories must pertain to the topic being studied.
Irrelevant war stories add nothing to the lesson.

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Try to relate new content to things the students already know.
As much as possible, encourage the students to make those connections themselves.
Personalize as much of your content as possible.
Minimize criticism and offer praise when appropriate.
If students are too frequently criticized, they quickly learn to avoid volunteering their answers or opinions.
There is no quicker way to squelch creativity or participation than to criticize the first couple of contributors.
Use praise judiciously.
Praise specific behaviors, not general characteristics.
Be aware that public praise can backfire for many adolescents, whose peers may taunt them for being the teacher’s pet.

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Vary your speech pattern.
Use pauses or stage whispers for emphasis.
Always remember to talk to the students at the farthest corner of the room.
If students must strain to hear you, you will have trouble holding their attention.
Make your presentations clear.
Use vocabulary appropriate to your student’s developmental level.
Speak at a pace they can understand.
If your voice tends toward the monotone, work on developing more animated speech.
Periodically record or videotape your lessons.
Seeing or hearing yourself as your students do may reveal areas that need improvement.

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Remain flexible in your teaching.
Read your audience and adjust accordingly.
Furrowed brows and frowns will tell you that some students did not grasp a point.
Squirming, fidgeting, or daydreaming may cue you to pick up the pace or change your approach.
Good planning must remain flexible.
There is little sense in plowing ahead with a lesson plan that isn’t working.
Use your sense of humor.
Do not try to become a stand-up comic, but don’t be afraid to laugh or add humorous remarks to your presentation.
The guiding principle for using humor in the classroom is that it should be relevant to the topic under discussion.
Resist the temptation to entertain with jokes that don’t have an educational point.
Interesting lessons make learning fun, and a natural response to fun activities is the occasional laugh.
You need not strive for a belly laugh, but when a humorous incident or anecdote presents itself, use it to your advantage.

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Incorporate students’ names in your presentations.
For most people, their name is their favorite sound.
Use appropriate analogies, especially humorous one.
Take timely break.
Continually monitor your students’ nonverbal expression.
When nodding heads and drooping eyelids suggest you are losing their attention, insert a 30-second break.
It can be something as subtle as standing up as soon as they have figured out an answer or turning their chairs to face a different direction.
Of course, you don’t want to create chaos or disrupt the flow of your lesson.
A mini-break works best if it ties into your lesson.

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Avoid becoming too involved with one student during class discussions.
The rest of the class may assume they are not a part of the discussion and turn their attention elsewhere.
While being sensitive to individuals, teach to the whole class.
Maintain control of the discussion.
If one student is monopolizing the interaction, ask questions of others to get them involved.
Use quotations to make an emphatic point.
Sometimes the impact of this technique can be enhanced if a brief quotation is read aloud to the class directly from the source rather than merely from your notes.

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Build, in brief, one to three-minute pauses for reflection or writing.
Give students a question to consider.
For variety, you may have all students stand and share their responses with someone else.
Encourage your students to consider why this content is important.
Help them connect their new content with previous knowledge and with their personal lives wherever possible.
If a lesson falls flat, refine it or discard it.
Why intentionally bore your students?
Learning isn’t happening.
Spend your time on something that is working.

Most importantly, remember that you are unlikely to get students enthusiastic about a topic or activity if you are not enthusiastic about it yourself. Conversely, if you believe that what you are teaching is interesting, fun, or useful, that view might become contagious.

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Effective Techniques for Maintaining Your Learners’ Interest During Teaching and Learning.