Our education system has constantly evolved through the ages to make education more accessible, understandable, and effective. Through every change, teachers have tried to incorporate newer ways to teach students more efficiently.
The focus of the education system is to make students understand the topics and concepts more easily and make them remember them for a long span of time. And to reach that goal, teachers often try different ways of teaching their students.
How did Teaching Evolve through the Years?
In ancient times, the Gurus used to teach their students in Gurukuls surrounded by forests and natural landscapes. It was a great setting to teach skills like archery, horse-riding, and sword-fighting. Whereas the theories were taught in the shadow of a tree, in the form of a story, or by making the students perform a task to understand the concept behind any topic.
As the times changed, the modern education system developed and teachers now taught using a blackboard and chalk.
With technology innovation, teachers were then able to integrate audio-visual learning materials. Do you remember the days when teachers would show short videos or movies with a lesson? As students, most of the children used to love the movie session. The teachers then used to discuss the video or movie with the children and what lesson they learned from it.
Sessions like these were the most interesting for students and many of them agreed that they would retain the lesson that followed for longer as compared to lectures that were taught normally in the class.
And so in today’s blog, we are going to discuss some innovative methods that will make teaching more effective.
Proper Class Management and the Teacher’s Mindset
A teacher’s mindset affects the students’ ability and speed at which they grasp knowledge. When you as a teacher are enthusiastic about the topic, you will see that enthusiasm reflected in your students as well. As a teacher, you need to structure your lecture so that you are completely prepared for the class.
The class management feature of the school management system allows you to organize your topics in a way that helps you to conduct a class more systematically. Here the technology saves your time and allows you to put more effort into your teaching.
When you get interested in teaching the subject, the students will automatically be interested in learning the subject from you.
Flexible Learning
A lot of times, when a student misses the class or lecture for any reason they often procrastinate to catch up to it because the process of getting notes from their classmates is exhausting. Each student has a different way of taking notes that they understand the best. And when they borrow notes from someone else, it may happen that they did not understand them.
So giving flexibility to such cases can improve a student’s learning and understanding capabilities. Features like video tutorials and smart classes from the school management system allow students to access the pre-recorded video lecture of any topic or join the class digitally so that they would never miss any important topic or concept.
This flexibility of time and place allows students to understand the lecture more easily as the student who did not understand the lecture for the first time can go back and watch the video tutorial to better understand it.
Flipped Classroom Model
This model is slowly becoming more popular in schools and other educational institutes. To make students participate and indulge more in the subject, teachers can give the topic and resources to the students and ask them to gather all the information they can find on the topic whether only from the resources provided or from other resources as well.
This model will induce researching and reading skills in the students. As the students read more on the topic, they will be able to understand it better. Later, the teacher can discuss the students the topic to evaluate how much the students have understood on their own.
When students discuss the topic in the class, other students will also learn something new about it that they may have missed during their research.
However, class discussions are not always helpful for every student, which brings us to our next method.
Include Every Student
Human beings have different personalities that respond differently to various situations. Some are extroverts who perform better within a social setting with a large group of people. Whereas, introverts perform their best while working alone but feel their energy drain while with a group of people.
If you feel that your teaching pattern is tilted towards benefitting one of these personalities, then you can adjust it to balance it out. At the same time allowing them to grow in both the environment is also important.
So, keep a balance of group projects as well as individual projects which can allow both personalities to work in their preferred environment while making them habituated to the other.
Out-of-school Learning
You may agree with the fact that learning does not happen only at school. According to your course, you can take students to different places where they can learn more about what you teach at school.
For example, as a history teacher, you can take your students to a museum, or a biology teacher would take their students to the zoo or a botanical garden.
Students engage more in practical learning than theoretical studying, so incorporating both especially during the school years can increase student understanding of the subject better.
A different approach to this might be taking the classroom outside. Instead of teaching in the classroom, you can try teaching somewhere close to nature.
Use of VR and AR Technology
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is yet another technological innovation that can help you make teaching more interactive, fun, and easier to understand.
The new National Education Policy of India (NEP-2020) also promotes the use of VR and AR in the teaching techniques to make it more engaging for students and teachers.
With the use of VR and AR, you can bring your subject to life by simply using smart devices.
These are some of the methods that you can use to make your teaching more effective with students. As you may have noticed, technology plays a vital role in improving the quality of education and raising the level of teaching to a whole new level.
An educational institute that uses a school management system is already a step ahead in making education easier and better for the students. It allows the teacher to manage their regular classes and provides flexibility to the students.
Conclusion
Teaching students is a very responsible job. Teachers need to innovate and learn new ways of making education easily understandable, more engaging, and fun to learn.
For that, we discussed different ways that you can make your teaching more effective. To list them down shortly, these techniques are:
- Proper class management and the teacher’s mindset
- Flexible learning
- Flipped classroom model
- Include every student
- Out-of-school learning
- Use of VR and AR technologies
If your school uses a school management system, then you are already a step ahead. If not, then you can try the one-year free demo today.
What techniques do you use to make your teaching more effective? Tell us in the comments below.