5 Simple Tips to Engage Students

The tips below come in the form of physical activities, individual thinking time or even student-to-student communication. By taking these ideas and building on them, your students may have what they need to refocus and continue their learning. Take a look!

Use a Competition

By fostering some friendly competition in your class, such as through games that encourage learning, you can engage your students. By grouping students and setting them goals and challenges, this should be a natural motivator for any topic you’re teaching, and whatever is being taught, there should be some way to add some friendly competition.

Top tip! On EducationCity, PlayLive Maths, English, French and Spanish are perfect for encouraging some competition in class and they’re all great for Golden Time too.

Get Moving to Focus Students

By putting a bit of physical movement into learning, you are giving your students a different, creative way to learn. You can add physical movement into teaching in many ways. If you’re learning the times tables, you can add hand-clapping and for English, you can add drama into lessons; there are lots of ways you can implement this idea into teaching and it’s great as a way of encouraging students.

Take Students’ Interests into Account

You can also use your students’ interests in lessons to encourage engagement with learning and motivate your students. Again, just as above, there are many ways we can add your students’ interests into teaching too!

In maths, you could use sports to teach measurements (by working out the area of a football pitch or median for a basketball team’s height), or for English, students could write a news report on their favourite celebrities or a film review on their favourite film.

Mix Up the Teaching Style

As there will be different preferred learning styles in your class, it may be ideal to have a variety of teaching methods. It’s also good to change the teaching style to motivate all students to learn, and provide variety to hold attention. You could use a teacher-centred learning style at one time in the lesson and then a student-centred active learning style in another part.

Link Your Teaching to Real Life

When your teaching material is adapted to real life, this acts as a natural motivator and engagement boost for students. There are various methods to add real life to your teaching too. You could teach maths by showing students how it will help manage personal finances and money, or for science, you could bring in real foods to teach nutrition. There’s also the idea that if you’re learning about plants to bring in one to demonstrate its parts or to use topical events such as World Book Day to encourage reading.

These simple tips should provide some helpful hints for engaging students in your lessons. You may already actively do them or some of them may have provided a little handy inspiration, but they should be natural motivators to help with learning.