Social media apps helped in establishing that kids now a days develop personalities and personas ever faster than before. They have way more information with them than ever before. The kids of today have opinions, speak their minds, express and are loud.
This sounds like the perfect recipe for disaster in the classroom. Being an educator it might see overwhelming and a bit intimidating. Honestly it is not so bad as you think. There are methods and exercises that you can practice in the classroom and will help in connecting with the kids.
Conventional learning practices: Effective to an extend, but let’s be honest here there are only a handful of kids who will willingly sit and read thick, dry boring books. Their number is in a great decline and will become extinct soon. A simple exercise to make this more exciting is to prepare lessons so that it requires to child to pay attention to the narrative that you have prepared. Storytelling is a powerful tool while taking classes. Concepts and theories make more sense when narrated as stories.
Practical learning: The “hands on” approach towards the scientific spectrum of subjects has been around for long. A few practical sessions in labs for extra marks are not the exact earmark for measuring a student’s performance. Since this is what we have got for now, we need to work around making sure that all the kids in the class understand the lesson taught, rather than the experiments themselves. Science and computer labs do not excite everyone, its important then to identify these kids and drive their attention away from these experiments to the concepts.
Know your class: Realize the fact that you are around kids coming from every walk of life. The mental and physical tolerance vary from one child to another. It helps to keep an open mind to everything, I for one feel that listening is one trait that every educator should have. When you listen to the noise long enough, you will start making sense of it and that’s the way to reconnect with the students. Having a fair knowledge on how those minds work will help you in formulating teaching methods that work best for the demography of students you teach.
In our own quest to help educators along this journey, we at BeTutelage has come up with a curriculum automated system that will help educators to keep track of lessons, revisions and student performances. The student performance metrics will give an educator an insight into how to efficiently manage a classroom.