How to Make Your Teaching More Interactive
one way is to use handheld whiteboards
When you come face to face with a classroom of children ranging from eager to bored, it’s challenging to know exactly how to keep them all engaged in your lesson. Interactive teaching is one of the best methods for promoting a positive learning environment and can go a long way to helping the children to remember what it is your teaching.Brainstorm as a group
Group interaction is an excellent way to engage your class. It also gives you chance to find out how much they’ve understood and also develop other skills as well. Brainstorming as a group – whether that’s altogether as a class or in smaller groups – allows room for group discussion and the development of other social skills.When some children are less forthcoming with answers, you can gently encourage them to submit ideas and be creative without putting them under too much pressure.
Get them moving around
Children are more likely to retain information when physical movement is involved in the learning process. Some common techniques to encourage movement often involve asking questions and requiring the class to move to different parts of the room dependent on their answers.When working with questions that have a single correct answer, this can help you to assess which children have understood the topic thoroughly, whilst questions with no single correct answers allow you a better insight into individual personalities.
Incorporate handheld whiteboards
Handheld whiteboards are another great interaction technique and can help you to see which children are paying attention. A good method is to ask questions as you teach and require answers to be written on the individual whiteboards. This takes away the pressure of getting it right the first time and allows the class to express themselves more freely.Working as pairs
Dividing the class into pairs and assigning work this way not only makes the lesson more interesting but also develops important social skills such as teamwork and collaboration. Although this method means it’s harder to monitor individual progress, you can see how individual children interact with their peers.Use games
Games will always be a number one technique for interactive learning as they create a fun and engaging atmosphere. If you’re dealing with a particularly tiresome topic, creating games around the learning will help to make it more interesting and therefore allow the children to understand it more readily.Q&A
Q&A sessions are also good for interactive teaching and can be used to engage directly with the class. Combining this technique with asking the class to work in pairs can help to develop numerous skills at once as well as allowing you to gauge how well they understand the topic at hand.There’s more to interactive teaching than simply engaging the class to determine whether they understood the subject matter as these methods can often help to develop very important social skills. Creating a variety of methods for interactive teaching will also prevent your teaching from becoming stagnant and will help the children to remain engaged for longer periods of time.
