Don’t Teach the Same Way as You Did Yesterday. Students Are Bored. Try Something Different.

This question can be answered with one word: Creativity.

For any education, if you teach in a different manner than traditional teaching — you will receive smiles. Smiles in your lessons will make you as a teacher be remembered, and students will learn exponentially. Let’s make teaching a little less conventional. Try giving one lesson a bit different than normal and watch how your students have fun.

Break out of the normal “you sit down, and I will read this presentation.”

Unconventional Teaching

The objective is to make students view the material differently and make them process it.

If they go to class and receive the material the same way they have been for the last semester, no joy is going to be demonstrated. Having a class that has fun and learns in a creative manner is a success for any school.

As a teacher, make an extra effort to change your lecture slides for one lesson. Perhaps don’t even make a presentation; figure out how to teach the material without it. There are some schools which teach through application; they don’t even have a place to project a presentation. This leads to curiosity and engagement in the student due to the mystery. Students are too used to staying in a cycle; if we break that cycle, you are giving the best minds (kids) a possibility for creativeness, one of our most important skills. As a teacher, make an effort to show these minds a different perspective on your material. This results in joy from students who are now getting gifted with an unconventional lesson, perhaps more fun than the traditional ones.

For one lesson, give it a try. Anything that is different is going to spark curiosity in the student, you break their normality. We like it when we see something that is unconventional; we wonder, and in a class, this can be interactive, which makes it even better to interact with others about the material. Break out and allow the students to formulate crazy ideas and questions.

For one lesson, don’t teach it the same way as all of the others, make it different.

The lessons which have something different in them are the ones students remember.

Ideas

1. 7 Out: Teach a student something, and then tell them to explain it but without using 7 KEY words about the topic.

See how they get creative to explain their new knowledge.

1. Museum: Only teach with pictures, drawings, and sketches.

Even if it is hard to visualize, give it a try — it’s unconventional to think this way.

1. In The Lab: Before the lesson, give the student small sneak peeks of the new module/topic. Show them relevant information but not everything.

Example: A formula, an image, a graph, an icon. A couple of related things to the new chapter. Now let the students come up with an idea of what their topic could be, how does it connect to the previous one, what could it be used for?

Make them wonder = Different → Fun