Single Easiest Way To Improve Your Teaching
October 30th, 2009 Filed under: Rants | Tags: praise, students, teaching
Pick me! Pick me!
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.
What a brilliant tip
For the kind of teaching I do the rewards and team thing won’t work, but I will be aware of how I respond to the wrong answers in the future. Thanks for posting
Thanks Marissa! Yeah the games side work more for the younger kids.
[...] bits are the important ones?I recently wrote about the importance of rewarding participation over knowledge within a classroom. I discussed how by doing this it helps everyone in the class learn [...]