At the dawn of my career in Instructional Design, I was made
aware of the learner’s attention span limit. Thus, I had got the logic behind
limiting the lectures in schools and colleges to 35 to 45 minutes. This awareness
happened more than a decade ago. Today, when I look back, this fact seems
irrelevant.
Today the students are more aware with exposure to information
through various mediums. They want more than just information. They want a
great learning experience as well. And what has happened to the attention span? It has
almost reduced to one third of the earlier span. Hence, practically, a teacher
has only 15 minutes to capture a student's attention. This is the age of smart
kids, who will listen to the 1st sentence, evaluate the 2nd
one and by the time the 3rd sentence reaches their ears, they will
make their decision to avoid or listen. How to deal with such students?
Forcibly teach them? You can’t. They will find ways to outwit you. A simple
solution is to become SMARTER than them.
Apart from exploring the learning mediums beyond the
confinements of classroom and syllabus, include few
checklist items in your daily teaching task.
Quick checklist for making your classroom a SMART CLASS:
□
Encourage students’ curiosity to know more; go beyond
textbook.
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Allow the students to explore new things.
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Use cognitive association to enhance learning.
□
Focus on active learning rather than passive
listening.
□
Keep lecture sessions short and blend it with
activity and demonstrations.
□
Give each of the students a challenge and ask them to find a solution.
□
Make your classroom SMART by blending
traditional teaching with technology-based learning.
The topic of evolving to SMART CLASS is a subject of indepth
research. But, even before we deep dive and make stupendous discovery, a step
towards renovating our approach to teaching is a good start. My attempt in this
post is to list those starting points. Happy Teaching!
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