With a lot of learning going around, it is hard to engage the learner and get them excited about the hard work associated with the knowledge goal. It can be challenging to keep students motivated and engaged during tutoring sessions and this leads to poor results. According to a study by College Teaching, students could recall a statistics lecture better when the lecturer added jokes and real-life examples about relevant topics. This article will help you know about 5 such methods that can help you make tutoring sessions more interesting:
1. Selecting Interesting Topics
Tutors should take a feedback from students about their interest in topics and should make them read or learn about them. If the tutor selects the right reading passages, students will be more interested, confident and knowledgeable because they get to read and learn something they love or are curious about. When students are forced to learn concepts they are disinterested in, they tend to zone out quickly. So making the topic sound interesting with some fun examples and have the student develop an inherent interest in a topic is essential.
2. Encourage Interactive Sessions
Communication between teacher-student plays a key role in learning. Instead of asking your student whether they understood the concept or not, try to ask them to “Teach you” the topic in their own words. Such interactive activities will help you engage your student and give you an opportunity to evaluate their understanding and accordingly plan their future learning path. Hence, you can reinforce concepts that students know and correct their understanding of concepts they might have got wrong or understood incompletely.
3. Taking Adequate Breaks
Students get exhausted and lose interest if not given proper breaks. So, taking adequate breaks is necessary. Nothing seems interesting to students when they’re overly tired. Before beginning with any tutoring session, students should make sure they give a bit of time to run around and get their extra work done like having a snack if they’re hungry or anything else. If younger students are given learning sessions for more than an hour, there can be a break of at least five minutes to replenish their energy and refocus.
4. Using Technology
Nowadays technology interests students of all age groups. Focus on using interesting technology features like sharing presentations with animation, webpages and also play a game so students love your teaching style. Merely lecturing and having students take notes doesn’t help much. Instead, use the whiteboard and have students write on the board and interact. This will help every student to focus. Giving students a quiz on paper can make students frown while answering questions on a computer or a tablet will help them get the best out of technology. If possible, make students work on a project in a group and include them in a video conference with students from another country and work with them on the project. This will give them a new dimension and vision to their knowledge. Utilize various creative tools like Canva for making educational posters and display them in the class. Overall, talk less and involve students more. This will help every student to be expressive and interactive.
5. Introducing Games as Teaching Strategies
Age doesn’t matter when it comes to games. Whether your students are 8 years old or 18 years old, everybody loves playing a game. Keeping students fruitfully engaged in your tutoring session is the ultimate goal and games are a fun way to do so. Often, students don’t even realize they are learning anything along with the activity because they get so involved in the game. Example if a student needs to learn important vocabulary words related to science, play a virtual laboratory game! Some students find remembering specific dates in history difficult – memory games will help here.
The above are direct inputs from expert eTutorWorld tutors in Math, Science, English and Test Prep. They make sure that learning is fun and interesting so that every student learns well and learns for life!
