Eighty (well – ten) ways to leave your class behind – proven methods of losing your class’s attention

 

I do know something about teaching. With more than 30 years of experience teaching mainly in college but also at junior and senior high school, I can sense when the lesson was successful and when it was not. I would like to say that all my lessons were diamonds but the truth is that quite a few, admittedly less in recent years, had a closer resemblance to mud. I would like to share with you ten proven, personally tested, ways of how to lose the attention of your students.

1.   Put hard text in front of the students and proceed to read it out loud. Why should they listen to you?

2.   Talk too long (45 minutes or more) without giving the students a chance to practice the skill. You try keeping alert for that long without doing anything.

3.   For that matter, try to teach too much in a given lesson. Beyond the saturation point, students retain absolutely nothing regarding anything you said during the entire lecture.

4.   Talk to the front row or two and avoid eye contact with the back rows. For those distant students, it is now time to dream, text or pass messages.

5.   Lecture from behind a podium. it is as about engaging as listening to a radio lecture on an irrelevant subject. Get up and engage!

6.   Sit down –A proven Soviet torture technique, teachers that sit and lecture are far less effective than those that move around. No dynamics is somnabulent.

7.   Read your notes. Parents put their children to sleep by reading them a story. It has the same effect in class.

8.  Maintain a monotone speech – no ups or downs in tone. Anything is boring without some variation. For inspiration on voice modulation, listen to Christian preachers.

9.  Fail to relate to current student knowledge. Understanding the abstract demands close attention, a capacity most students lack. Practical, relevant, especially amusing, stories can make the irrational rational.

10. Fail to confirm understanding by not actually checking it in real-time. The fact that the teacher explained something has no correlation with the result of a student understanding it at any level. A teacher physically going around the room while the students do a short class exercise will identify which percentage of the material, if any, actually made it to their brains.

If any teachers take this personally and believe that I am mocking them in any manner, rest assured that I still fall into a few of these traps from time to time. As I wrote, I have personally committed each of these pedagogical sins. Live and learn.