How often have you noticed that some of your students aren’t paying attention in your class? It’s some that very few teachers haven’t experienced, but it’s something they’d all like to avoid. Knowing how to make your students more engaged in class helps you avoid this.

As simple as that sounds, it’s more complicated to put into practice. It doesn’t need to be overly complex, however. With a few particular steps, you shouldn’t have a problem engaging your students’ attention more and more.

Doing so offers multiple benefits, including:

  • Encouraging students to pay more attention in class
  • Improving your students’ overall grades
  • Making sure students turn up to class on time
  • Avoiding missed or undone homework

With the benefits that knowing how to make your students more engaged in class offers, figuring it out is practically mandatory. If you don’t, students could get left behind and their grades could suffer.

By taking a few particular steps, however, you can avoid that completely. While you could need to adjust depending on your students’ specific needs, the steps are more than worth taking.

How To Make Your Students More Engaged In Class: 5 Steps To Take

1. Move Around

Your students need to be in class for most of the day. For much of that time, they’ll be sitting down listening to their lessons. That wears down their interest more than you’d think. They need to move around, and their gym classes mightn’t be enough to provide this.

Letting students get up and move can be an effective way to keep them engaged in your class. By incorporating movement into your classes, even for two or three minutes, you can maintain your students’ interest more than you’d expect.

You can do this in more than a few ways without interrupting the class’ flow, including:

  • Having silent discussion boards that students can walk up to and write down their questions
  • Dividing the class into sections that students walk between to get their work done
  • Letting students partner up and walk around the room while discussing a particular topic

While these can take a little time to perfect, they’ll make your students more engaged in class better than you’d think.

2. Use The Right Materials

Without the right materials and supplies for your classes, you can’t teach effectively. This goes beyond simply having an outline of what you want to teach and a few relevant books. You’ll need to have lesson plans, teaching aids, and much more.

Thankfully, developing or getting these doesn’t need to be difficult. You can even get free lesson plans online that you can base your classes around. The trick to this is making sure they’re appropriate for your specific class.

Your students will have particular learning styles and needs, which means adapting your materials and lesson plans. Once you do, you’ll draw in their interest and keep them engaged during class.

You might need to take time to adjust and readjust your teaching materials in time, but this will increase your students’ engagement more and more.

3. Create Group Time

By letting students work together on projects, you encourage them to participate in class much more. They’ll communicate with each other and work together to overcome a problem and complete a project. Group activities also help to break up the monotony of typical classes while helping students improve their communication skills.

By breaking up the routine, you make things more enjoyable, which increases student engagement. It’s worth following a few tips when you’re implementing group time, including:

  • Keeping It Short – This encourages students to stay focused on the task at hand and complete the project they’re working on. Once time runs out, you can discuss key takeaways and address any of your students’ questions.
  • Assign Roles – Each student needs to have a particular task to get a project done during group time. If nobody knows what they’re supposed to be doing, then it’ll waste time. By assigning roles, you overcome this issue.
  • Provide Conversation Starters – When students first start working together on a group project, they mightn’t know how to start, especially if it’s their first time in a group. By providing conversation starts, you make this much easier.

While group activities could take time and effort to implement effectively, they’re a tried-and-tested way of making students more engaged in class. Make sure to provide some oversight with these groups, however.

You wouldn’t want one or two students doing all of the group’s work.

4. Break Up Lessons

When most people teach, it’s with the standard lectures while students take notes. It’s been how teaching has been done for quite some time. While it’s effective for some students, it’s far from effective for all of them. The longer these lectures go on, the less interested these students will be.

The monotony associated with such a teaching technique is why many students find it difficult to stay engaged. You can avoid this by breaking up your lessons in various ways. Try introducing the topic and expanding on it before adding a related activity to the lesson plan.

Once the activities are done, you can go back to lecturing about the topic itself. Adding group time, as mentioned above, can also be an effective way of breaking up these lessons.

You’ll not only make your students more engaged in class, but you’ll get a better idea of how much of the information they’re taking in. At a minimum, it’ll keep them more interested as they learn the material.

5. Use Hands-On Learning

Hands-on learning can be applied to almost any subject and is an effective way of making sure your students are engaged during class. No matter what age your students are, you can develop and use various activities to take advantage of this.

Also known as active learning, this gives much more control to students without sacrificing learning potential. In contrast, your students could learn much more by taking this approach, especially when integrated with various other strategies.

Hands-on learning encourages students to produce original insight, which forces them to think more and for longer. They’ll need to be engaged with the activities to perform well in them.

You’ll also need to incorporate feedback and constructive criticism to properly take advantage of this. By working with your students, you encourage them to try harder while properly acknowledging the efforts they’re making.

In time, they’ll put increasingly more effort in and you’ll start seeing increasingly more results.

Top Tip To Make Students More Engaged In Class

The steps to making your students more engaged in class should be more than effective in achieving this. Sometimes, you’ll need a little more help, especially with students who seem firmly set against paying attention. With a few particular tips, however, you can make it much easier.

Some of the more practical tips to make students more engaged in class include:

  • Relate Lessons To Real-Life If students don’t think the lessons you’re teaching them are practical, they’re less likely to pay attention. They mightn’t understand why they should care about the lessons. By showing them why they should care, it makes them more likely to pay attention. You can do this by relating your lessons to real-life. Once you do, the lessons seem much more practical for your students and they should pay more attention.
  • Take Things Outside – If possible, taking your lessons outside can be an effective way to make students more interested in the class. That’s especially true if you’re teaching them about nature and the outdoors. Doing this regularly gives your students a new environment to learn in while including more practical elements in the lesson. The change in environment could be more than enough to make them more interested in the class, especially when it’s seen as a reward.
  • Make Things Interactive – Most classes take the form of the teacher talking and students sitting there listening and (hopefully) making notes. While that’s the traditional way of teaching, it mightn’t be the most effective. In today’s world, you can make classes much more interactive by implementing technology into the classroom. By taking an interactive and collaborative approach, you bring students into the lesson more, which increases they’re engagement, interest, and productivity.

By implementing these with each of the steps mentioned above, you’ll make your students much more engaged in class. While this could take time, you’ll see it more and more with each class. Grades should improve and they’ll be more likely to take part in your classes.

How To Make Your Students More Engaged In Class: Wrapping Up

Not knowing how to make your students more engaged in class comes with a host of negatives. Your students won’t be as productive as they should be, and they mightn’t learn the materials they need to.

With a few particular steps – and each of the tips mentioned above – you shouldn’t have a problem accomplishing this. Once you have the right materials, know how to break up your lessons, and take a hands-on approach, you can get there quickly and easily.

In time, your students will pay more attention, be more productive, and achieve better grades because of your work.