I learned in a sales course that the first minutes are vital and will mark the difference when attracting a client into your product or service.
It is not only the quality of it but how you present it, how you show it, how you sell it. Well, just like in sales the first minutes when introducing a study unit, will set the mood for the rest of it and even for the whole year.
Do I have to study sales, Elda? No! I’m not asking you to learn about sales or anything like that!
All I want if for you to TRUST ME on this, because I know from years of experience that when we catch our students’ attention in an unexpected way, learning occurs differently, willingly. It is 100% better when they know what they are about to learn but don’t know HOW it is going to happen and in these 3 letters, my teacher friend, lie the whole point of this article, the essential key to increase their motivation.
“The first thing we need to do when organizing something is to get students involved, engaged and ready. In most cases, this means making it clear that something “new” is going to happen and that the activity will be enjoyable, interesting, beneficial and will offer a rationale. The idea is the are prepared, hopefully with some enthusiasm, for an activity whose purpose they understand.”
I learnt it the hard way and maybe this is not your case:
- having more than 20 students in a classroom with different language levels of English,
- not knowing how to get their attention or simply just watching them yawning clearly bored,
- the ones who followed me were the ones with higher english level,
- some students were shy or didn’t want to participate making it harder for me not knowing how to help them.
Does it sound somehow familiar to you?
This kept happening until I figured out that having the best resources or books weren’t enough. The following unit I changed my strategy and took some time to sell it to my students, I introduced that one epically and BOOM! Something in their brains just clicked and in a few minutes I had the whole class eagerly involved in the activity. I can only remember that what I had in mind at that time was that it had to:
- engage,
- light sparkles &
- hook their interest
Since that glorious revelation, I changed my old teaching ways. Having researched a lot and collected some other ideas that might help me captivate my students, I came up with a list of “my 7 magic unit introductions techniques”
- A song or sounds: ask them to guess or brainstorm ideas that comes from sounds like: nature songs if the next unit will be in the woods or camping. It could be a marching band if you’re introducing something historical or fill-in a song that contains clues to what the unit is about.
- A gallery-walk: ask them to walk with you though a hall or gallery of pictures, poster or objects that are related to the topic. They silently have to observe and write notes to compare and discuss.
- A challenge: ask them to solve a mystery or problem like riddles (math riddles work well), puzzles (crosswords, wordsearch, sudoku, etc.), analogy, perform in front of a class and if your students are old enough, I’ve seen Escape rooms are very trendy.
- A debate: ask your students to divide into two big teams, present a topic and each must write one sentence oppose or in favor. This one light sparkles they didn’t know they had.
- A story: this is a classic mostly with younger students. They love picture books or even a made-up story about something that happens to you.
- A picture: a good picture worth a thousand words, ask them to guess the topic by associating the picture, describing it. Another thing I’ve done, is the picture has speech bubbles they must complete.
- Coffepotting: give them a short text where the target word is missing, and has been replaced with the word ‘Coffeepot’. Students guess the correct word hence the topic of the unit.
After changing my mindset and applying new ways of introducing units or lessons, I’m 100% convinced that your students (like mine) will be buying “learning experiences” from you and they’ll be so thrilled and excited that they won’t notice they are learning.
