How do you engage students in their learning?

What makes good practice? Clips from lessons to get you thinking. 

Watching other teachers teach whilst focusing on particular aspects of teaching can be a really useful way of developing one’s own teaching.

Here is the fourth in our series of weekly videos of teaching along with some questions to get you thinking. As usual, now a week has passed, we’ve added our own thoughts to the questions too. 

How does the teacher engage the students from the start of the lesson?

The teacher does pose a couple of questions to the class when he starts and directs their attention to certain passages on the resource. However, there’s little to engage them right from the start and the lesson may benefit from a quick, attention grabbing starter to contextualise the issues (see third question below).

How does he explain the concepts to the students?

He attempts to link it to the class and what we would tend to ‘expect’. However, as he hasn’t established what the class’ expectations of the ‘the unmarried’ are, it’s difficult for him to explain some of the concepts without assuming certain viewpoints and understanding from them.

What strategies would you suggest to develop whole class participation?

Initially, it would be helpful if he asked students to discuss their views of who in society is typically not married (recognising that there will be stereotypes here), getting them to feed their ideas back to the class. It could be that they used mini whiteboards to draw and label and picture for 2 minutes – these could then be returned to at the end of the lesson to demonstrate how much their views have been challenged and progressed throughout the remainder of the lesson.

We’d love to hear what you think about these questions. Either add a comment at the bottom of this page or tweet #MyLesson. 

If you’d like to send in a video of you in action or just describing something you’ve done recently in class then upload it to YouTube and email the link to [email protected] or tweet @LKMco#MyLesson (if it includes pupils then make sure you have consent!)

This video is a clip from a series of full lesson observations produced by MediaMerge. Full videos are available here and make a great addition to CPD.