How to Improve Student Learning Ideas

Alma Elliott
2023-08-25 21:06:27 • Filed to: Teacher Skills

Classrooms are dynamic environment that bring together learners with different personalities, different abilities and different backgrounds. In order to be effective as a teacher, you should implement innovative and creative teaching strategies for you to meet each student individual need. The ability of the students to grow, innovate and connect freely with each other, class content and the environment around them, including their teacher, is a culture that should be encouraged in every learning institution. Culture is one of the key strategies to improve student learning in inviting innovation and making sure that the classroom is the safest place for creating, asking questions and failing to learn.

A teacher creates the tone and the mood of the classroom. Adopting positive classrooms cultures that encourage authentic learning leads to increased chance for learners to connect positively with their peers, content and the teachers. Whether one has been practicing teaching for over a decade or a few months, it is always difficult to identify the most effective teaching strategy for each of your students. It is imperative to know that there is none of the strategies that can work alone. The following are some of the teaching strategies that can be used to inspire learners to improve their understanding and overall performance. 

Visualization

Visualization is one of the best tactics to improve student learning strategies. It involves bring out the dull classroom concepts to real life through practical and visual learning. This is important since it helps the student understand and relate what they learn in class to the real-world. The students should be encouraged to do practical through the academic tours or practical in the classrooms and use what is within their environment. There are also platforms like Wondershare DemoCreator that the teacher can use display videos, audio clips and even display photos. The software helps in recording audio and visual displays that can be easily edited and saved for future reference. Using the Wondershare DemoCreator, the teacher is able to create a video from a section of the screen and edit it with the ability to add annotations such as Banners, arrows, overlays and captions that enrich the quality of your video. The DemoCreator also allow the teacher an option of adding colorful stickers to make sure the point is understood.

Interactive learning

The students should mix the students to work together as either a class or small discussion groups. Ensure that you have mixed abilities working together. The students will gain self confidence through verbally expressing themselves and responding to the questions posed my group members or the class. The aspect of critical thinking is also inculcated in the group discussion. Through the group discussions, students learn to relate with others and accept the reasoning of others. These are key critical skills of life that the students are expected to learn in class beside their academic excellence. Acting short sketches of drama, solving simple mathematical puzzles and conducting class experiments together are some of the good example that can be used to enhance interactive lessons.

Inquiry-Based Instructions

The teacher should learn to pose questions that are provoking and require brainstorming to solve. This will create the culture of students thinking for themselves and being independent learners. Encourage the learners to ask and investigate their own questions and answers to improve on their problem-solving skills and understanding of the academic concepts taught in class. Science and mathematics based inquiries like ‘why the length of shadow changes with the position of the sun?’ The questions could be subjective where the students are encouraged to express their views, such as ‘should all learners wear uniforms?’

Differentiation

The teacher should differentiate their teaching in class by allocating assignments to students based on their abilities. This ensures that none of the student is left behind when accomplishing a given topic. Assigning the activities based on the unique abilities means that those students with a higher capability get stretched while those struggling are offered the necessary support to catch-up with the others. Differentiation can be achieved by giving worksheet with varying complexity to students or even setting up work stations in class with varying tasks and requesting the students to choose.

Introduce Technology

With the digital media surrounding young people in the twenty first century, use technology of technology in teaching is one of the best methods to engage and improve student learning ideas. Use of mobile phones and tablets can be used to help in displaying videos and images for students to visualize new concepts. More so, there are other platforms like Wondershare DemoCreator which offer creative way of displaying videos. The DemoCreator has an easy to understand tutorial that guide you on how you can use the software to perform its numerous functions. Using the Wondershare DemoCreator, the teacher can copy a video playing on the screen either in full or a section of it. the video can then be edited to improve in quality. Annotations such as banners and captions can be added to the video to emphasize on a point to the students. The teacher can save the video in the format of MOV, GIF, MP4 or MP3 which can easily be shared. Learning is more interactive when technology is used since students engage physically during the lesson and are able to research new ideas creating autonomy.

Behavior Management

In order to ensure that learners reach their optimal potential and get respect from the students, the teacher should implement an effectual behavior management strategy. A disruptive and noisy classroom is not a conducive learning environment. The teacher should develop an environment with mutual respect through rewarding and discipline. The teacher can use the tested methods of rewarding like the interactive and fun charts, where students move either up or down on the chart based on their behavior and the top student gets a reward. The Golden time is also another strategy that can be used for students across all ages, where no homework or games is rewarded to a learner for improvement in their academics.

Professional Development

In order to develop professionally, a teacher should try as much as possible to advance in their teaching methodology as possible. You should attend seminars and workshops organized by education experts to learn about the current trends in teaching and how to enhance innovation and creative in class. Some of the sessions that you should never fail to attend include the use digital education like the Wondershare DemoCreator, online safety and using the assistant teachers.

Expand the Comprehensive Assessment

Assessment of the student should be stretched out beyond the test scores and offer a detail progressive report of the student's strengths, capabilities and weaknesses. The teachers, students, parents and guardians can closely follow the assessments and identify areas of weaknesses and take the corrective measures to improve on them. Tests are best when they are used to test the ability of the student and improve on the areas of weaknesses. 

Involving Parents

Involving parents and guardians is one of the surest ways to help students learn more. Parents and guardians are normally the first teachers at home and they can help to instill values to the learner. It is important for the teacher to welcome the parent into the classroom activities and assist in class work. The parents can assist the learner in doing homework and provide any other materials that the learner may require when at home. The parents should be well informed of the goals of the school, the expected performance for their child and importance of progressive performance and discipline in school.

Involving the Community Partners

It is important for the school to involve the community in their activities. Some of the partnering communities include businesses, museums, higher education institutions and government agencies. They are important as they offer critical resources to the school like books, construction of building, equipping laboratories and offer scholarships to the needy and performing students. It is also important for the school to involve the community partners to act as guidance and counselors as well as mentors to the students. This will help the students learn the best practices in the market and offer a smooth transition to institution of higher education or their careers. 

Being effective as a teacher is sometimes challenging given that you will be dealing with unique abilities. This calls for the strategies on how to improve student learning outcomes as discussed above. In order to get the best out the teaching ideas, you should combine them depending on the situation and the abilities of the students. This can help in creating a motivational and dynamic environment for the learners with mutual respect and discipline. Digital learning should highly be encouraged in school and teachers to use the available platforms like Wondershare DemoCreator for making video presentations and lectures also for synchronous and asynchronous remote classes. The technology comes with the feature of palying videos displaying images and videos which can be paused during a class session when explaining with clear annotations to emphasize on key points.