Are you properly connecting with your students? As the new school year approaches, it’s important to figure out the most effective ways to connect and engage your students as they come off their long vacation. A lot of their minds will be wandering for many weeks after coming back, and we thought that it would be useful to share a few of the more effective ways to enhance learning in your classroom.
Below you’ll find a list of nearly three dozen awesome and simple ways to connect with students. From simply getting to know them, to listening to a student’s body language, to actually connecting with the world, there’s a lot of new ways that you can effectively mold young minds.
One of my favorite options below is the assignment of roles for the classroom. (You can see that one towards the bottom in the middle column.) In my mind, assigning roles for the classroom means that everybody has a specific job, a specific task, or specific project that they have to manage in their classroom. For older students, this will be a great preview of what it’s like to be the professional workforce.
Just like this post, there’s also an idea to add visuals to everything you do. You’re encouraged to ask the question “can you find a picture, draw a picture, mold of what we are doing?” By adding visuals to everything that you do, it will keep students engaged and working all the different parts of their brain so they can effectively learn and become modern students.
This is a useful visual aide and you can find several other awesome ones over at Mia MacMeekin’s blog. She’s a teacher and has been assembling some fabulous visual guides that will hopefully help you transition into the modern classroom. Good luck!