I like walk the room to keep from having inattentive students and to keep them engaged in the discussion.
I agree...anyone who has sat through long lectures knows the average attention span is only 30 minutes! Breaks are key!
I try a range of things to help my students stay focused during lectures: I've taken 3 minute breaks, stopped lecturing and discussed a current event for 5 minutes before going back to the lecture, If the room temp. is a little more on the cold side it seems to keep students and myself a tad more alert. I've also tried to change my tone of voice during lectures, going from really loud to normal tone back to loud again.
Asking questions when lecturing about the subject matter to get the class involved. Moving around the classroom and tring to make eye contact with the students.
This is a strange one, but I read long ago that men's eyes are drawn towards motion. This is why it's so hard to have a meaningful conversation at a sports bar. Presently our classes are 85-90% male. So, as soon as I notice the attention of my students shifting away from the topic, I walk from one side of the whiteboard to the other briskly (not awkwardly but fast enough that there is some significant shift in location).
For me, this does two things:
1. It reinvigorates me to teach with a bit more enthusiasm now that my blood is moving again.
2. (and more prevalently) everyone's eyes are brought back towards me and the whiteboard. All I then have to do is gesture towards my last point written on the board while continuing my lecture and nearly everyone is back on point.
Hi Jered,
You have an impressive list. I use a lot of the tactics you use. Variety is key. I also like to use a lot of visual to capture students attention.
Patricia Scales
Hi Vanessa,
I agree! No one likes boredom. Part of being an effective teacher is to be creative as well.
Patricia Scales
My most important resource for the inattentive student is my internal experience of inattention--in other words, how my own moments of distraction felt? What was that context about? How did my felt sense code those times? If I can access this very deep felt understanding, I have compassion for the inattentive student; I have a relevant way to relate.
My second most important resource is my understanding of the autonomic nervous system and how reflexes work. So, I cater my presentation to that understanding. I know that every 20 minutes or so an individual cycles into and out of focus. I know to be concerned when the student spaces out for 30 minutes. I know that I can use reflexes to get the student back in the room and involved. That means I move in the room, from front to back, from still to animated. I vary my vocal tone. I make eye contact and call students by name. I resonate with body language that shows interest and invite the student to speak that interest. I access multi-media, hands-on, text, and discussion to vary format, daily.
So my compassion for the felt-state of the student provides a bridge of trust that allows me to pull more appropriate tools from my toolbox which is stocked full of coherent and time-tested brain exercises.
What other foundations of practice help you all?
Humor and changing the topic
Some things that I do to capture the students attention is break the lecture up and throw some different things in like playing a game, my students love Jeopardy or showing videos that reflect the lecture so they can see that these kind of things really happen out there. Doing the same thing over and over again gets students bored so you have to be creative every now and agian to recapture their attention.
Hi Cynthia,
We must do all we can to keep students focused! Having a variety of teaching methods is always helpful, and afterall, students love variety because they can get bored easily.
Patricia Scales
I have found that, when I'm up moving around in the class everyone pays attention. Maybe because I'm so animated then, I put more energy into the lesson. Sitting behind a desk during class seems to give inattentive students a chance to relax and lose their focus on the subject at hand.
I try a variety of techniques in my delivery and lesson. Change in voice volume and inflection helps. In addition, student involvement activities. The students must be attentive to my lesson in order to succeed in the activity.
In a way, I am keeping my students off- balance
so that the comfort of day-dreaming is not an option.
I try and walk around the room. I also will ask an open ended question and get as many students as I can to respond off of what the previous student said. I also give a quiz at the end of class.
Karen -
I've had to do that in the past with some classes that were more lecture-based. It is quite challenging to have a class in a computer lab, when it's not computer related (i.e. nutrition).
So, we implemented a policy for all monitors being off during the majority of the lecture, or they would lose their "professionalism" points for the day.
When we have labs (culinary), the phone policy kicks in, and it's similar. All phones should be put away. If they are texting, etc., and not producing, they can lose points.
I generally go quiet if they are chatting. I can't compete with several voices all at once, so I become silent and wait for them to notice, or for one of their classmates to let them know we are waiting for them to join us.
Short interval with question and answer is the good way to get the students involved. Teacher should not lecture any way more than 20 to 30 minutes at a time.
During lecture I have students form questions from what I just covered in lecture. Then I go around the room randomly asking them what questions they have formed. By doing this we have a great review and by chance a student had left the room for a personal break or just checked out mentally they get the opportunity to catch up and be part of the class.
Hi Dr. Linda,
Variety is key when you have a class that is longer than an hour. The more creative you are, the better.
Patricia Scales
Ask students what is going on in their lives and create a relevant illustration using the situation. When teaching Time Management, I illustrate how a student's situation of being habitually late can be dealt with by using Time Management.I have found that students buy into and learn from their own "real world" situations they have shared in class.
