A prevailing sentiment among students is that learning is boring. The sentiment is simple, but the reasoning behind it is very layered and complicated. Does learning have to be fun to be effective? Who is responsible for a student’s lack of engagement, the adult or the student? One thing is for certain though: parents and teachers can use many strategies to make learning enjoyable and engaging for students. In this article, we discuss four tips on how to make learning enjoyable and engaging for students to maximize learning. Foster a Community of Positive Relationships Parents and teachers can not only help students develop positive relationships with their classmates, but also positive relationships with you. An expert on academic mindsets, Camille Farrington emphasizes a key mindset necessary to maximize a student’s learning: “I belong in this academic community”. If a student does not feel like they belong in the community, they might associate learning with alienation, which harms their capacity to learn. How can we expect students to engage with the material if they don’t even feel like they don’t have good relationships with those around them? As adults, we can foster a community of positive relationships built upon respect and compassion. One way we can foster a community conducive to learning is by allowing students to generate community norms, which segues into our next tip… Give Students Agency Giving the students agency when learning makes the student feel included and heard. When we allow the students to be the ones who create the norms in the classroom, the students feel more inclined to follow them; this is likely because of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory. The theory maintains that people are most intrinsically motivated when they experience autonomy (control of their own behaviors), competence (mastery of skills), and relatedness (sense of belonging). By creating community norms or agreements, students both [1] generate a sense of belonging or relatedness and [2] experience autonomy or agency. Students feel more engaged because they feel like the classroom is not just the teacher’s, but also their own. We can also give the students agency by asking them about their interests, which is a large part of our next tip… Use Multiple (and Fun) Ways to Teach Azul Terronez, an experienced educator and best-selling author, accumulated 26,000 student responses to investigate the question: What makes a good teacher great? One of the most profound responses he received was “A great teacher thinks like a kid, but acts like an adult.” Teachers often communicate knowledge without considering how their students learn best. Students want their teachers to be on their wavelength, so why not integrate that into our teaching?
In order to best understand different methods to help students learn, we should understand our students’ intelligence, or perhaps we should say, intelligences. Howard Gardner is the father of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which posits that humans do not possess one evaluable intelligence, but rather eight intellectual capacities: spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Each person has a unique configuration of intelligences that should be taken into consideration when teaching. Furthermore, ideas and concepts should be taught in multiple ways to accommodate multiple intelligences.
To cater to our students’ interests through the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, we can appeal to their multiple intelligences through fun activities. If the goal of the reading is to help students identify themes, have them watch a movie adaptation of the reading. To memorize the quadratic formula, teach them the quadratic formula song. To get them to understand different types of clouds or animal species, take the students outdoors or organize a field trip to the nearest zoo. By using different modes of teaching, we let the students know that we see their unique configurations of intelligences. Challenge your creativity as the student’s educator to make learning fun for your students; there are almost always more ways to get the students engaged! Relate Concepts to Real Life Teachers often teach a concept without driving home how it relates to the student’s understanding of the world. If a student doesn’t understand why the things they learn matter to them, then of course they’re bored! By understanding how concepts connect with real life, students can become much more engaged. John Dewey, one of the most prolific and revered philosophers in the world of education, writes about the importance of relating knowledge with the world in his book Experience and Education:
“As an individual passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue.” Dewey explains how knowledge in one setting can inform how people react to other settings; in our case, knowledge gained from the classroom informs how students react to real life. Dewey continues by highlighting what happens if a student does not relate learning with their world:
“Otherwise the course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into making an experience is split… A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed.”
Dewey believes that if students do not apply their learning to their real world, then their learning doesn’t help them become more informed individuals. Students only care about learning if they see the value in it. If we can help students understand how concepts affect their world, students become more engaged and feel more fulfilled.
But how can we get them to think about concepts in that way? For subjects like Math, we can help students understand how it is involved in their daily lives, like calculating physical mechanics in popular games they play during recess. For subjects like History or Social Studies, we can help them understand how the laws made in the past relate to events that the students see on the news today, or even how they affect their hobbies or interests. Give your students the necessary tools to understand how in-class concepts relate to their external lives, and they will care more about their education.
About the Author:
Allan Han, MA is a writer and educator with over six years of teaching experience in teaching K-12 students fundamental English, fundamental Math, SAT writing, and high school literature. He received his Master's Degree in English Instruction at NYU and formerly taught in LaGuardia High School in the city of New York.