Do you want to know how to make your classes more interesting? If you’ve found that students aren’t paying attention, or even not turning up to classes, then you might need to do so. Students only do this when they’re not interested or engaged in a particular lesson.
While that’s occasionally to do with the lesson itself – not everybody is interested in every subject – it could be down to how you teach. By making a few small changes, however, you can develop more interest among your students, which provides a host of benefits.
The key to helping students learn effectively is to make them as interested as possible in what you’re teaching. You can do that by implementing five particular strategies.
How To Make Your Classes More Interesting: 5 Top Strategies
1. Discover New Things Together
While the main job of a teacher is to make sure students learn, it doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing you should focus on. You could discover new things in the classroom by being open to shared learning.
Your students will have different perspectives to lessons than you. By being open and accepting of your students sharing these perspectives, you’re better able to learn alongside them.
Once your students see that you’re open to this, they should be more interested in your classes. It’ll make them more likely to open up and engage in class. It also encourages critical thinking among students.
2. Have The Right Supplies
If you don’t have the right supplies, you’re not able to teach effectively, so your students won’t learn properly. By taking the time to make sure you have everything you need to teach in a fun and engaging way, you’ll have a solid foundation to build from.
Doing this can be as simple as having the right worksheets for your students. When many teachers get these, they only focus on making sure the worksheets teach the lesson effectively. As important as that is, it’s not the only factor to consider.
You’ll need to make sure lessons come across in a fun and engaging way. While that could mean spending time comparing different options, the impact it’ll have on your students’ learning ability is more than worth it.
While that could mean swapping out the supplies you currently have for ones that are more effective, you shouldn’t have a problem achieving this.
3. Take Part In Projects
When most teachers hand out projects, they simply detail the project and step back to let their students do their thing. While that’s effective for some students, it won’t be effective for everyone. Some students may need extra help and support when getting the project done.
By being involved in the projects you hand out, you make students more interested in the work. If they feel as though they can’t understand the project or complete it in the right way, then it’ll be off putting to them. They’ll be increasingly less likely to complete it.
Once you’ve made yourself as available as possible for this, your students will be more likely to complete the project to an appropriate standard.
When you’re taking this approach, aim to make the projects themselves as interesting as possible. Don’t focus solely on getting the lessons themselves across. Make sure students can complete the work in a fun and engaging way.
In doing so, you increase your students’ interest levels and let them complete the project in a way that encourages them to proceed further. Making these creative while ensuring the project tests their abilities can take time to balance, but it’s more than worth the effort.
4. Don’t Go Through The Motions
After a while, it’s not uncommon for teachers to start going through the motions. Once you’ve been teaching for a few years, you could see yourself teaching in a way because that’s how you’re supposed to teach.
To your students, that could come across as apathy and boredom. They’ll think you’re not interested in the class or helping them learn. In turn, that makes them less interested and engaged in the lessons, which you’ll want to avoid.
If you’ve found yourself using the same lesson plans and techniques year-on-year, then it’s worth mixing things up a bit. By implementing a few strategies, you’ll avoid this completely. The trick is to know when you’re going through the motions.
If you are, then it’s worth taking the steps to rectify the situation. The more interested and engaged in the class you are, the more interested and engaged your students will be.
5. Don’t Repeat Material
You’ll have quite a few materials you’ll need to get through when teaching. You’ll also need to make sure your students are properly taking this in and learning it. That could lead to you repeating material several times until it sets in.
That mightn’t be the most effective route. If students have heard the same material in the same way before, they’re less likely to be interested in it. They’ll need a sense of newness and freshness, no matter whether you’re going over the same basic points.
That means reviewing your material and making adjustments rather than repeating it. By doing so, students will gain a fresh perspective on old material and let students learn more effectively.
While that means putting some extra work into your materials, it’s worth the effort. You could even stick with the newer way of teaching the materials if it proves more effective than your old method.
Why Make Classes More Interesting?
With the effort that figuring out how to make your classes more interesting includes, you could wonder why you should put the effort into it. Improving your students’ overall performance is the most obvious reason why, and is something every teacher should strive for.
It offers more than a few other benefits, however. You’ll see each of them in time, with the benefits becoming increasingly more apparent in time. Some of the more notable include:
- Cater To All Your Students – No students are exactly the same. They all have different needs, and that extends to how they learn. By making lessons more engaging and interesting for them, you make it easier for them to learn.
- Make Things More Fun – Nobody wants to be bored, no matter when they’re in class or outside of it. By making your classes more interesting, you make them more fun. That drives engagement with your students and helps them learn more effectively.
- Improve Productivity – The less interested a student is in your class, the less likely they are to do their work. By making them more interested, you’ll make them more productive. They’ll care more about the class, so they’ll do more of their work.
The benefits of making your classes more interesting should be more than enough to put the effort in. As much work as this takes at the start, it’ll reap dividends with each of your classes.
Once you’ve implemented several strategies, you’ll see your students become much more engaged and productive in class. While that may take time to see, it’ll become increasingly more obvious in time.
How To Make Your Classes More Interesting: Wrapping Up
By knowing how to make your classes more interesting, you can keep your students engaged and make sure they’re learning what they need to learn. While that could mean putting in some effort at the start, it’ll reap rewards in the long-term.
You should not only see students paying more attention during class, but their grades should improve in time. There’s no reason not to implement each of the above strategies.
