It’s natural for a student’s attention levels to vary according to motivation, mood, perceived relevance to material, and other factors. For teachers, developing a successful class period can depend upon how effectively it is structured to fit your student’s attention span. A typical student’s attention span is about 10 to 15 minutes long, yet most classes can last for 30 minutes to an hour.
For remote teaching or video conferencing, you need to consider the reality of partial attention and device ways of ensuring your students are effectively engaged all through. When you leverage the interactive learning tools available at your disposal, you will see that there are tons of efficient ways to keep students engaged. Here is how to capture and maintain your student’s attention span.
Plan a Range of Activities
Young learners have a relatively short attention span. In the classroom, it is rare to have the whole class fully engaged in something for a significant period. This is because students have different interests and attention levels. This makes it important to plan and incorporate some activities for each lesson.
The more variety of activities and tasks you can include in your lesson plan, the easier it is to provide something engaging and relevant to your students. Choose short tasks and try to have a couple of extra activities up your sleeve in case something you organized doesn’t work effectively. For remote learners, utilize user-friendly video conferencing platforms like Pronto. Pronto is a communication hub created for everyday users, and its unique features can help boost the attention span of your students.
Shorter Classroom Sessions
It’s difficult to focus on so many students at once, especially in a virtual environment. You, therefore, need to make your classroom smaller and shorter to monitor your students better. This will allow you to speak more directly to students, offer them the help they need, and provide them with other resources to continue learning the material elsewhere.
You don’t want to overwhelm your students with a lot of information during a class and end up losing their attention completely. You can also provide multiple times when your students can sign into a class. With a platform like Pronto, you can record video lessons and students can watch them from different locations. This way, students will be more engaged and work on their own schedules.
Do the Unexpected
There is no better way of regaining your students’ attention than by doing something they totally didn’t expect. Whether you have the urge to stand at the front of the classroom and howl like a wolf or think cranking out a few jumping jacks is the last thing your students would expect of their teacher, you can give it a try.
When your students are connecting remotely via a video conferencing platform like Pronto, you may consider playing a funny but informative video to break the class monotony and recapture their attention. The surprise and shock of your actions should help ground your students so they can offer you their undivided attention. Thus, apply creative activities to do the unexpected and keep your students’ attention.
Switch It Up
As stated earlier, students have short attention spans. They usually tend to get bored more when they feel obligated to learn rather than excited to learn. Keeping up their engagement is important to ensure that they are learning the material they need to succeed in their studies. Thus, to keep them engaged, mix up your lessons with interesting switch-ups. You may speak for some time, then add in a short video to back up your points, then switch back to speaking. Using short videos will help your students to remain attentive as well as understand class concepts better. You can also add a short one-question fun quiz that doesn’t count toward the final grade. This will help to keep their minds involved and set on focusing.
Incorporate Peer Teaching
It is possible to do different aspects of the lesson by using various strategies. One way to keep students involved is by giving them more responsibility and allowing them to take a more active role in their learning. Peer teaching can be an effective way of completely changing the classroom dynamic and getting students to teach each other. This is also quite effective when conducting virtual learning, where students are allowed to share their ideas. You can allow them to give instructions, demonstrate, monitor as necessary, and finally check whether their answers are correct.
At Pronto, we help you to engage both your in-class students as well as remote learners. Pronto communication hub is designed to make students learn faster and communicate seamlessly. Try Pronto for free today to learn more and get started.