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Design your classroom around these 5 tips to boost student engagement this year.

• Create community rules

Like social media community guidelines, creating your classroom or community guidelines lets you share your expectations for proper classroom behavior. Doing so will help foster a safe environment where students can share their experiences and input. Create accountability for students by having students sign an agreement to uphold community rules.

• Encourage sharing and collaboration

Finding out what students know about a topic already before diving into your lesson provides you with the foundation for effectively scaffolding a lesson. Scaffolding lets you create lessons that make harder topics attainable for all students.

Bringing content up close for demonstrations with tools like document cameras makes lessons more engaging for students and can be especially helpful in capturing special education students’ attention. Read more about how assistive technology eliminates unnecessary hurdles for students with disabilities in our blog post “K-12 Assistive Tech Highlight: IPEVO Document Cameras.” Or consider incorporating digital storytelling into your classroom with tools like Wacom tablets. Get digital story lesson tips by reading “EdTech Highlight: Creating a Modern Classroom with Wacom.”

• Build lessons around real-life connections

Esoteric ideas are harder to grasp. Give students a lead-in to a chapter, task, or project with a relatable story to create a real-life connection. Many edtech companies are building cross-curricular activities that offer a bridge between concepts and real-world applications to take the work out of developing hands-on learning.

Learning math through coding is one way to make math hands-on and relatable. Explore more about making math relevant through project-based learning in our post “Rethinking Math Education to Boost STEM Equity.”

• Personalized learning pathways

Are you giving students a voice and choice over what and how they learn? Differentiated lessons let students progress faster if they are absorbing content. Or give them the chance to reinforce concepts.

Are you considering breaking into teaching your students coding? Many STEM coding robots provide scaffolding with block-editors that simplify coding with graphical coding and transition students to advanced coding editors.

Coding robots with specialized coding platforms:

• iRobot Education
• MakeBlock
• pi-top
• WonderWorkshop

• Incorporate movement and hands-on Learning

Getting kids moving can enhance their learning. STEM tools like Makey Makey are great at combining learning and doing and have great lesson plans that get kids active, check out some examples of active STEM lessons in this blog post: “STEM in the Gym Makey Makey and Scratch Challenge.”

What are some of your tips for engaging students? Share with us in the comments below.

Sources:

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/scaffolding-lessons-six-strategies-rebecca-alber

https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-to-engage-students-the-moment-they-enter-the-classroom

https://www.edutopia.org/article/research-backed-tools-what-works-in-education