Boredom in the Classroom: 5 Ways to Defeat It

Although much of classroom time will involve students getting their heads down and working, sometimes it’s hard to completely engage throughout the whole school day.

That’s why we’ve come up with some hopefully inspiring suggestions you may find handy to help you combat any boredom in your lessons.

Change Up Your Lessons

You probably do this one already but if you’ve been talking for a long time and using a teacher-centred learning style, then why not give your students something more individual to do? Not only will mixing up the teaching style help those with different learning styles but it will also help with holding students’ attention.

Implement Active Learning

Getting your students involved with what you’re teaching is another way of combatting boredom. In English, you can have students take up roles from books or plays, in science, you can have students actually growing plants and in French or Spanish, you can regularly have students talking more together in that language. By getting students involved with the lesson topic and making it hands-on, their engagement should increase and they should be more interested in the material they’re learning.

Link Class Material to Real Life

Another way to increase engagement and combat boredom is to link up class material to the real world. Not only will this give students a greater understanding of why we learn certain things, but it will encourage them to see that these are skills that apply to the real world that could help them in the future. In maths, you could explore how money or measurements help and in science, you could show what NASA astronauts do in their day-to-day jobs when exploring space.

Use Classroom Games

So who doesn’t love to play games once in a while? There’s not many of us who don’t! Fantastic for increasing engagement, games are fun and get everyone involved. Games can also mean students don’t even know they’re learning, just because it’s so much fun. If you’ve certain dates to remember, why not use a memory game? Or you could do team quizzes for remembering facts or features in a book you’re looking at. Most kinds of game are highly engaging, so it’s bound to energise the class.

Incorporate Technology

As children live and breathe technology every single day, it’s a good idea to add some kind of technology to lessons. Get students to come up to the interactive whiteboard instead of just listening, or using computers to learn. By using technology, your students’ interest in what they’re learning may increase even more.

Are there any other ways you keep your class interested and engaged? Do you use any of the points we’ve listed above in your teaching currently? We’d like to hear from you! Get in touch with us by tweeting to @EducationCity.