One of the most important things that an educator does is to help students excel. However, helping every student under your care to do their very best can be something of a challenge. The good news is that you can discover some of the best approaches for boosting attainment below.
- Differentiate
One way to help your students excel when you’re their teacher is to make sure you differentiate the work you provide them. Differentiation is about understanding the ability of all the students in your class and making sure you provide them with work that is both challenging and realistically completable.
In a class of 30, this might mean providing extension tasks for the highest-level students, something that will stop them from getting bored once they have completed the initial work. Then, for less able students, providing things like writing frames for answering questions or personalised exercise books can help them by setting out a clear structure of the kind of thing they will need to write. In turn, this can help them build confidence and get them started on a task even if you are helping another student in the class.
2. Structure
Structure is also very important if you want your students to excel. One way of providing structure is to have very clear expectations of what is and is not acceptable in the classroom. It’s important to educate the kids on these expectations at the beginning of each term, as well as the consequences of not following them. Indeed, it is being consistent with these consequences in a fair and non-personal way that will help them understand the kind of behavior that is expected and will allow them to learn.
2. Offer choice
Autonomy and choice are very important to most people, not least students. What this means is that you can harness this to help boost educational attainment. It’s pretty simple to do as well, as all you need to do is offer students a choice of the way they present their work. For example, some students may prefer to present their work by standing up in front of the class and doing a speech.
Others may prefer to present their work visually, so allowing them to create a poster, booklet, or video could work. Of course, by providing a range of choices, you can help them from becoming bored and build skills across a range of forms which will serve them well not only in their education now but also in their life as an adult as well.
3. Provide feedback
Feedback and assessment are also incredibly important as a teacher if you want all of your students to excel. Assessment can be of two types: formative and summative.
A formative assessment is an assessment that is carried out during or just after a task or lesson. The purpose of formative assessment is to ascertain how well students understand a particular subject or topic, something that allows teachers to tweak and customize the way that they are teaching and go over specific areas again where necessary.
Summative assessment, on the other hand, is the type of assessment that is done once the topic or module is complete. The purpose of summative assessment is to ascertain how well students understand the topic in terms of a grade, so this can be compared to others in their class, as well as measure their progress compared to their last assessment. Examples of summative assessment include quizzes, essays and tests.
Overall, it’s best to include a mixture of both formative and summative assessment as this will give the most rounded feedback to your students, as well as allow you to go over subjects where they’re understanding is missing before it gets to summative assessment time.
4. Keep it short and sweet.
Short tasks, especially at the beginning of the lesson, can be very useful in helping your students to achieve their full potential. This is because short tasks help students to focus quickly at the beginning of lessons and provide them with a quick win, which can help them to stay motivated through longer and more challenging tasks later on.
Additionally, it’s important to note that science has shown humans struggle to focus for long periods without regular breaks for task changes. What this means is that by providing a range of shorter tasks within the lesson, you can much better capture the attention of the students, making it easier for them to learn and succeed.
5. Make it interactive
Another smart way of helping your students excel is to make at least some of the tasks you give them interactive. What this means is instead of just copying information from the board or a textbook, your students will need to do something with that information.
For example, in history class, copying a timeline is much less effective than being given a stack of cards with a range of events and dates and putting these in the proper order. Another option would be, instead of writing an essay on how medieval castles worked, creating a 3D model of a castle showing all the important features.
6. Encourage peer learning and assessment.
Peer learning and assessment is another way you can help all of your students excel. Peer learning is when they take on the responsibility of teaching each other certain things. However, this is never done in place of a particular teaching but under teacher supervision.
Peer learning can work like this: imagine you have an entire chapter on the Industrial Revolution to go through with your class. Instead of asking each child to read the whole chapter quietly, you can assign sections to smaller groups or pairs, who then have to present what they’ve learned to the class.
Peer assessment follows a similar pattern, but it means getting the kids to assess their classmates. The main benefit of Peer assessment is that it teaches students in a very practical way what a good piece of work looks like. Once they have this knowledge, they will then be able to apply it to their work, increasing their achievement.
7. Embrace tech
Technology is a hugely important part of everyday li, and it can certainly, when used in the right way, help you to help your students excel. From the most simple ways to use tech, such as starting a lesson with a YouTube video relevant to the topic, to using virtual reality to demonstrate what it was really like to be in the trenches of World War Two, can enhance learning experiences in a way, never before seen.