Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve observed an
effective technique of engagement. I teach a cooking class that meets
once a week. This class, and about 9 other extracurricular classes,
need to present a project for a project fair in a month or so. They are
in the process of planning, and they actually presented what they had
planned so far last week to another extracurricular class project
group. During the presentation, one of the students started out with a
story of how we were in the kitchen cooking fried rice when a teacher
walked in and told us we need to start planning for the project fair.
Starting out the presentation like this kept me engaged; I really wanted
to know what he was going to say next in his story.
Then, last Friday we had a teacher meeting.
During this meeting, a few videos of our teachers giving ‘hooks’ was
played. As I was watching these clips, I saw that these teachers were
starting their lesson with some type of engaging story, just as my
cooking class student had. Starting out with a story is a very simple,
yet very engaging technique to begin a lesson.
This coming week, I have created a few stories to
keep students engaged. For example, on Tuesday, I am teaching students
how chromosomes, genes, DNA, nucleotides, and the nucleus are all
connected. I am going to start this lesson by talking about The Human
Genome Project. I am going to explain the purpose of this project, a
little background of how long it took and how much money it cost, and
hopefully by the end of this explanation, students will have an idea of
how these terms connect together.
My lessons should go beyond rote memorization of facts because 1st, rote memorization is not very effective in actually understanding how something works, and 2nd,
rote memorization may just cause students to dread science rather than
seeing how fun and interesting it can truly be. I have been trying to
keep students engaged by having them teach the class because they seem
to really love this activity. For example, I had a worksheet that had a
certain number of questions on it. I divided the students into groups
and told them to focus on specific questions that they were then going
to explain to the class. Usually, when students need to answer
questions on worksheets, they don’t look very enthused. However, when I
set students up to work as a group and teach the class, I can see
students get into groups and lively discuss what the correct answer is
and how they should explain it. For the sake of student’s interest and
motivation, class should be engaging and reflective rather than just
focused on memorization of facts.
