Student Interests
Engaging student interests creates a comfortable and secure atmosphere where students feel safe and learning can take place. By getting to know each of your students you can better plan how you will instruct them.
Supporting Social Interests
Students’ social relationships appear to influence their academic engagement and success at school (Patrick, Anderman, & Ryan, 2002). Students need safe and supportive learning environments. When students feel mentally or physically uncomfortable, their brains focus on those conditions rather than on learning. Learners tend to be more comfortable, work harder, and take more risks when they feel they have a strong, positive relationship with their teacher and their classmates. Since there are so many learners in a classroom, it is essential that you establish a good relationship with your students at the beginning of the school year. Throughout the year, provide opportunities for classmates to work together in teams and small groups, so that they get to know one another and learn team work. This will help each student to grow both academically and socially.
Developing Academic Interests
It is essential to keep students academically engaged by making the learning meaningful, relevant, and enjoyable. Simply teaching to the academic standards and expecting the information to be retained, at least until an exam, does little to create academic interest and promote learning. Students are most engaged when they perceive their work to be challenging and in balance with their skills, the content is relevant, and they feel they have some control over the learning environment (Shernoff et al., 2003).
The Standards Aligned System supports all students across the Commonwealth by ensuring that the instruction they receive is aligned to the elements that support student success.
Aligned instruction comprises the following activities:
- Teaching topics that are aligned with the standards
- Ensuring the right level of challenge
- Focusing teaching based on the learning needs of each student
- Implementing instructional strategies to increase student achievement
We will be looking at these activities throughout this course.
Creating Intellectual Interests
When students see little value in what they are expected to learn, they become less motivated to engage in the learning experience (Legault et al., 2006). Conversely, a substantial body of research supports the conclusion that students expend more effort and achieve more when they view a lesson as personally relevant or important (Jang, 2008; Miller & Brickman, 2004).
A student's personal interest can provide a useful foundation from which to build interest in a subject, engage their critical thinking skills and help to grasp concepts that might otherwise be difficult for them to understand. For instance, many students are interested in video games. A math teacher could use this information to discuss how mathematical formulas are used in programming; a music teacher can design a lesson around how the music in the games adds excitement and emotion; and a history teacher can use a popular game as an introduction to an actual event. In this way a teacher can tap into a student's personal interests and then expand it with new information that the student will find useful. By doing this the teacher has enabled the student to use his or her own higher-order, critical thinking skills which are essential to launch a child on an academically successful learning trajectory towards lifelong learning.