4 Top Ways to Up Your Teaching Starting Today: Now Grasp the Fastest Secret of Getting Immediate Attention in Class Everyday & Head High in Your Career Tomorrow

4 Top Ways to Up Your Teaching Starting Today:  Now Grasp the Fastest Secret of Getting Immediate Attention in Class Everyday & Head High in Your Career Tomorrow

Just knowing the subject is not enough. You should also know how to teach it.

LONG TIME AGO I came across RYTHM. The acronym stands for – ‘Raise Yourself To Help Mankind’. 

When I took up teaching I realized how relevant RYTHM is in this noble profession. Unless and until I raise myself high, I will not be able to bring that transformation in my students. For example, I teach personal productivity and communication. If I don’t understand and practice communication better than my students, how will I be able to teach them?

Once I started my career as a trainer and started taking classes, I was hit by a big challenge. The students were not willing to listen. All they wanted to do was chit chat in the class. Half of my energy went in making them keep quiet. I could see them constantly chatting. I never came to know what they were chatting about. Sometimes the entire class became like a big fish market.

Every teacher, professor, and trainer faces this challenge –

How do I make my students sit through my class with concentration and create an impact on their minds?

Over the five years that I have been training, I have come up with three fundamental steps that one needs to follow to ensure that your audience get wowed by your presentation or teaching.

Here are the four steps that you can follow to make your class time an hour that you will be proud of.

4 Top Ways to Up Your Teaching Starting Today

1. Make It Interesting : 

Even though students have paid money to attend college, they might not attend your class just because it’s boring. Even if they are attending they might sleep in your class with eyes wide open.

How do you overcome this challenge?

You have to make your class interesting.

Grabbing student’s attention and maintaining it till the end of class is possible only if we make our class interesting.

As a communication trainer, I have the opportunity to share some real life stories from my life and from what I have seen and experienced around. This helps me make my class interesting.

2. Make It Interactive : 

If you don’t want your students to sleep in class then you need it make your students participate in whatever you are teaching.

You need to ask them relevant questions.

You need to make their mind think on the topic.

You need to make them stand up and speak in class.

Say, I am teaching about courage. I ask the students what they understand by courage.

I make them think and give them time to answer. I tell them, even if they are not sure of the answer, they can speak up. This way we all can learn from each other.

3. Make It Relevant : 

Whatever topic you are teaching, connect it with their day to day life.

Whatever topic they are studying, they will remember it and do something about it if they know how it will be of value to them in their day to day life.

While I was teaching about ‘Values’, I told them how having values will help them succeed in life. This got the students excited. Then I made them look deep into themselves and come up with their values.

In another instance, I asked my MBA students what they understood by management. The students gave me a beautiful textbook definition. Over the course I saw them struggling to get things done in a group project. They were taught the definition of management, but they never came to know how it will be relevant to them in their professional life.

4. Make Use of Movie Clips to Send Across Your Message: 

Whenever I tell in class that today I am going to show them few clips from a movie, the students get excited. I am able to capture their attention instantly.

I think it is a great idea to include and integrate relevant movie clips in our teaching. The movie clips should also be interesting and easy to understand by the students.

After the students have seen the movie don’t stop there. Discuss about the characters behavior, the scene setting or whatever is relevant to the topic you are teaching. Ask questions and give them time to answer.

Next step here can be role play. Create a situation and ask for students who would like to volunteer for the role play.

As the students role play they learn how to use the concepts in real life.

I am happy to say that by using these effective steps I was able to get more and more students interested in my subject. They have started understanding the concept and doing well in exams.

I have gained a good number of students as my fan following.

Teaching is a skill. Just because you are a PhD in a subject doesn’t mean that you can teach that subject. You have to develop your teaching skills.

In Conclusion

Even after following these steps, there is no guarantee that all students of all the classes that you handle will be hooked to your class. I have also not got 100% results.

There will be some students who will never be interested.

In others you will find that you have touched a chord in their mind and they have started to respond.

That is why I believe in RYTHM. As professors and teachers it is important for us to keep on experimenting with our teaching methodology. What is interesting today might become boring tomorrow. Before the students get used to your methodology of teaching and start getting bored, you need to break that pattern and come up with something new and exciting.

By innovation in our teaching methodologies, we not only impact young minds, we also reinvent ourselves as an individual.

If you can make your students live the lesson, then you have done a great job as a teacher.

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