Hooking your Students!

From this Quora Question: What strategies do teachers use to keep students engaged in the classroom?

START with your hook!

#1-HOOK your students into the topic before you start teaching.

a. Start each lesson or unit with an intriguing, curiosity-stimulating question, video, demonstration or hands-on activity to engage your audience and open their minds to WANT to learn what you are teaching.

b. Set up your closure for the lesson or unit ahead of time with the students ultimately arriving at the answer to your initial question.

Here are a few examples from some of my lessons:

Lesson for Environmental Science and from my chemistry class:

Q. Some thought that Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) was a heroine and some thought she was a villain. What do you think? Back up your response with evidence from the articles and book that I provided for you. (Socratic Seminar followed). I had a short video about Rachel Carson to get students interested.

Q. Is an Ionic Foot Bath a legitimate way to remove toxins from your body? Do toxins really come out of the bottoms of your feet? (I started this lesson with short “promo” videos for ionic foot baths from Youtube ensuring that my students did not have access to WiFi yet. I did not want them to find out early on what a scam this is). They were totally hooked on the question after seeing the videos and learned WAY more about ions than I would have expected because they were motivated.

#2-Allow your students to “do” most of the work and research balancing this with your supportive coaching. There is a fine balance of helping too much or too little. That is part of the “art” of teaching. If you help too much students don’t learn enough and get bored. If you help too little they get lost. This is an ongoing “work in progress” and can even change from class to class.

#3-Ensure that you have solid closure on the lesson. This means that the students will have answered the question that you posed at the beginning. In this way they will see the purpose in the lesson, will have satisfaction and will look forward to your next lesson. This is a good pattern to continue. Hook (intriguing question)-Related activity-Closure that answers the initial question.

Final Thought: Any audience for any lesson, public school or elsewhere, will be much more interested and engaged if you stimulate their curiosity from the beginning. Then they will want to know the rest of the story!

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