Foundations of Effective Teaching...Managing the Classroom and Engaging Students

How can teachers engage their students in class? How do we prevent students from being uninterested, unfocused, even unruly in classrooms? Because the truth is, if we have students that are exhibiting those kinds of behaviors, you can be sure of one thing that isn't happening for them: learning. They aren't retaining the information you're presenting them with, much less thinking independently and critically about it, and more than likely they don't respect you as a teacher.

Those are a few seriously important questions we teachers need to ask ourselves. After all, it is our job to pull students in and give them a reason to want to learn what we want them to learn. The answer is, this comes largely from effective classroom management. Think about it; if you are successfully managing your classroom and you have a room full of students that respect you and want to listen to what you have to say, how much more likely are those students going to be to learn something while they're in your class?

In addition to classroom management, we need to take on the responsibility of researching and finding new ways of presenting information to pique students' interest in the topic, to inspire them to think and make them form their own opinions about it, rather than just listing facts and throwing information at them and having no idea if it is resonating with them or not. In class we took a little survey that asked each of us to think back to previous teachers and remember when their teaching was least effective. Everyone in the class agreed that it was a time when the teacher was lecturing the entire time with no other interaction involved. This speaks volumes to me because I can remember so many times throughout my career as a student when that exact thing happened; as teachers we must reach for something more than that for our students. It's simply not enough to give information and have that be the end of that. Someone in class brought up an excellent point that it's easy to sit on the teacher's side of the desk and forget what it's like to not know how to complete whatever task it is you're asking your students to do. If our students aren't understanding something, it is 100% our responsibility to fix that by adapting to what they need by getting creative and trying new strategies to get that information across to them--whatever it takes to make it "click" for them, and so that beyond that, they can think about and discuss even more in depth!