Lesson Planning Tip: How to Create an Engaging Teaching Activity

No matter what subject or grade you teach, there comes a point when the subject matter of your lesson just isn’t all that appealing. Maybe it’s a detailed, nuts-and-bolts kind of lesson that students really need to master in order to move on to the fun stuff or maybe it’s just an area of the curriculum that doesn’t float your personal boat. If you’re required to teach a book you don’t love or cover a topic you know kids aren’t wild about, it can feel impossible to create an engaging lesson plan.

Yet create it you must, because a disengaged student is one who isn’t learning. It’s also often precisely the least engaging lesson that’s also the most important: fractions, punctuation, or a list of all the bones in the body — these are all going to come back up repeatedly and if your kids don’t know them, they’re simply not prepared.

So how do you create engaging activities to round out that less-than-exciting topic? Try these tips for increasing student engagement:

Set the Stage for Success

Before you even open your curriculum guide or planbook, optimize your classroom for engagement. Arranging your room to allow students to interact freely is crucial. For elementary students, this means freedom to move about the room and use various learning centers with each other, interacting at both play and learning. For secondary students, a seating arrangement with desks in a horseshoe allows for maximum eye contact — no hiding or zoning out!

It’s also a good idea to have solid norms in place for dialog. Your students will feel more empowered and engaged when they have a say in the rules for discussion, so have the whole group come up with the most important rules early in the year (though you can always call for a “do-over” on this to kick-start a new era in your classroom). Ideally, the norms you develop will foster respectful interaction and give you a mechanism to bring attention back to the task at hand.

Tricks to Maximize Engagement in Your Lesson Plans

With a solid groundwork in place, you’re ready to think about your daily lesson plans. Each lesson should include at least one moment of engagement that hooks students and turns the work of learning and thinking over to them — if you’re talking the whole time, you’re doing all of the work for them!

Try adding one or more of these engagement strategies to your lessons each day to get your students actively involved in your classroom:

• Journal Time: Pausing in the middle or at the end of your lesson to pose a question for students to respond to in writing forces them to engage with the topic you’ve been discussing. It’s also a great way to allow introverts to shine — remember that engagement doesn’t have to involve speaking! If you take the time to read and respond to your students’ journals (a quick note will work well), you’ll also build your relationships with them, which will in turn get them even more invested in your class.
• Add Movement: Planning lessons to include multisensory learning approaches builds neural pathways and helps some of your non-traditional learners get more involved in your lessons. Kinesthetic activities that get kids up and moving are particularly helpful for students with ADHD, so plan a short break to get up and move around during your lesson. This can be as simple as partnering with someone across the room for a brief think-pair-share, but it can make a huge difference in shifting the focus to the students and away from you.
• Good Questions: It’s easy to fall into a rut in which you rely on the same six kids to answer all of your questions. Try changing up your questions so that all students must think of the answer. You could ask yes/no/maybe survey questions and have all students show their answers by the number of fingers they hold up or you could monitor participation with a token jar (students can’t leave class until they’ve answered a question and placed their token in the jar).  
• Use Humor: Never underestimate the power of a good joke — or even a groaner! Humor helps kids relax and captures their attention at the same time. If you’re not naturally witty, try using a funny Youtube clip or silly cat meme to hook disengaged students. If it’s good enough for Mark Zuckerberg, it’ll probably work on your students, too! Allowing students to share their own funny (and, of course, appropriate) anecdotes also works.

Assess Yourself

To keep track of which engagement techniques work best for your students, get in the habit of rating your lesson at the end of each day. It’s easy to note a quick 1-5 score for each activity in your planbook for future reference. When you try it again next year, you’ll be able to reuse your successful activities and replace the duds to improve your practice. Keeping track of your successes easy with Planbook Plus, which gives you the power to save and organize all of your lessons in one great program. Try it for free today!