Make Your College Students Interested In Your Subject

  By Lesley Vos

Being an educator, you understand perfectly: not all those students are bad who behave badly. When you see your student is capable of studying well, your task is to help them improve their school performance and make a right choice in order to use their potential fully.

Are you ready to give a second chance to your students?

The #1 problem you will definitely face with is your students’ motivation to go back to study. What can you do to increase it?

First of all, find out what the real reason of your students’ motivation loss is. It can be:

 

  • bad relations with fellow students;
  • a student’s little faith in his abilities;
  • mismatching of a student’s learning speed with a speed everyone expects from him;
  • no interest in your subject;
  • no satisfaction with the process of learning (it can happen when a student does not notice his progress and he pays attention to failures only).

Depending on reasons your students are not motivated to perform good at school, you may try several methods to change that: help a student and his fellows understand each other; develop an individual learning schedule for him; diversify your trainings to increase interest in learning (games, movies, video lessons); use different reward systems, etc.

What else you can do to increase your students’ interest in learning:

 

  1. Develop their intellectual curiosity. A student should be interested in acquiring new knowledge. Encourage active issues, try to respond to them as informative as possible. Expand students’ horizons with new interesting facts about the area of the subject you are teaching.

 

  1. Encourage the emergence of your students’ new ideas. Encourage them to participate in all kinds of intra-school and urban public events.

 

  1. Praise students for their efforts. Encourage the most conscientious of them by any means.

 

  1. Adjust the students’ parents to ensure that they have contributed to their kids positive motivation for school, helped them organize time for homework.

 

  1.  Prove the relevance of the studied concepts, processes and phenomena. Establish their relation to the practical human activity on specific examples.

 

  1.  Use a variety of learning tools. Prefer a modern technical equipment, such as: computers, interactive white boards, DVD players, etc.

 

  1. Use a variety of the educational process organizing forms, diversify them. In addition to traditional lessons, let your students take part in competitions, travels, intellectual games, etc.

 

  1. Add a problematic method of teaching to main methodological apparatus. Do not seek to present ready-made knowledge, let your students master the ways of self-preparation. At the beginning of the lesson you can set the task and give students time for self-study of a new phenomenon, arming them with means and methods to resolve it.

 

  1. Involve students in the collection and registration of visual material for your classes. This could include anything: let them collect herbarium or draw tables; the most important moment is to let them exhibit independent creative work.

 

  1. Organize competitions between classes: which of them will have more honors or better grades, or who will produce better visual aids, etc.

A student’s attitude to your subject depends not only on his interest in the studied materials. General atmosphere, relations with a teacher, and the collective form of presentation play a very important role too. Give your students a second chance and try to make them motivated and interested in your subject: this is you who can help them make a right choice and change their school performance for better.

By Lesley Vos, a private educator of French language. She works as a career specialist for college students and writes for blogs, sharing her teaching experience and writing tips with others. Find her on Google+ or check some of her writings at this blog.

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