Single Easiest Way To Improve Your Teaching

October 30th, 2009 Filed under: Rants | Tags: praise, students, teaching

Praise your students for answering questions incorrectly! You heard me right, shower your students with praise when they don’t know the right answer, but try to answer anyway. This may sound completely backwards when you first hear it, but just think about it and it becomes clear.

If you only praise students that answer correctly then no one learns anything. Why? Simple the students that can answer already know the answer, and the kids that can’t don’t want to answer because there is no motivation for them to. If they aren’t answering then you can bet your ass that they probably aren’t listening either. On the other hand, if someone answers and gets it wrong, then they naturally want to know what the right answer is, and so will others. You learn more from a wrong answer than you do from a right one. So instead, encourage participation over knowledge. Praise everyone that raises their hand or even shouts out! Count yourself lucky, if you have a classroom full of students so eager to participate that they can’t even wait to put up their hands.

So, how do you get them participating? I like to play games and award points for answering whether right or wrong. Make sure to make teams and have a rule that states each member must answer before another team mate can answer again. This will cause students to encourage each other to participate. Remember give verbal praise and points for all answers, if it happens to be wrong encourage other students to help come up with the answer and explain it. Once you’ve played a couple of times, students will just get use to participating, trying to answering questions and helping others who answer incorrectly. Your classroom will transform from a teacher lead Q&A session with only a few students joining in to a classroom full of students participating and discussing ideas and reasoning behind those ideas with each other.

If your students feel comfortable and safe enough to answer a question even if they are most likely going to get the answer wrong, then you my friend are in the top 10% of teachers. Once you have them participating, you’ve got them listening and thinking. With participation knowledge will follow, it’s inevitable! It really is that simple.

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