Creating an Engaging Secondary Math Classroom

We’ve all heard the saying “You’ll never get a second chance to make a great first impression”.  That’s one of the reasons teachers put so much time and effort into organizing, arranging, and decorating their classrooms.  We have a lot of people to impress – students, parents, coworkers, administrators, and we want to get it right.  Doing it over when you have not done it right in the first place?  Nobody’s got time for that, plus an opportunity wasted.  But even a really great first impression can’t save you in the day to day battle to teach math to teens and tweens.  To put that into perspective, use the movie Fifty First Dates as your variable with a coefficient of 3.6.   

 

In some ways, the daily challenge to engage students is much better than the first impression challenge.  If we mess up engaging students one day there is always the next.  The downside is that we always have to be on, we always have to be fresh, and we always have to be trying different things.  For engagement, it is the first five minutes of class that will make or break you.  If we fail to engage students at the beginning of class, we may never get them back.  Preparing classes and activities that actively engage students requires a lot of planning.  However, it is essential that we move students from passive learning (listening to the teacher, reading from a textbook, looking at slides) in order to increase their retention and understanding of the material. 

Here are some tips for designing engaging lessons that have worked for me:

1.   The 10-15 Rule.  Students have a short attention span.  By switching things up every ten to fifteen minutes, you have a better chance to keep and maintain their attention.  Break your lessons into small chunks that allow you to switch back and forth between you teaching and their doing.  Make sure each class contains opportunities for students to actively participate in their learning.

2.   Remember, the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.  Yes, direct instruction is very much needed in mathematics, but give the kids a chance to talk too.  Let them paraphrase to a partner, create and solve a problem to exchange, have small group discussion and presentations, etc.  For review days consider having small groups give 5-7 minute “mini lessons” to the class.  Listening to my kids talk math is the highlight of each and every day. 

3.   Movement.  It’s hard to sit all day.  Think about how you feel during those endless faculty meetings and training sessions.  Use activities and resources that get kids out of their seats and moving.  It’s much harder for them to fall asleep or zone out when they are moving around.  Scavenger hunts, walk-abouts, relay games, and learning stations are all great options.

4.   Choice Menus.  Experiment with them for classwork, homework, and assessments.  Student Choice = Student Buy-in.  It’s a beautiful thing!

5.   Provide students with meaningful, relevant feedback.  We’re not talking grades here.  Students want to hear what we think about their work, ideas, and effort.  Try to provide specific, targeted feedback to students rather than the generic “good job”.

6.   Make it meaningful.  Math is all around us in the real world.  Show your students where it is and what it means.  Use technology like virtual field trips and webquests to help students see the connections to what they are learning and the world around them. 

As you transition to a more engaging classroom, remember you can’t do it overnight.  Set reasonable goals for yourself.  Maybe plan to include one activity per week or use choice menus once a month.  Try new things to find what works best for you and your students.  Get feedback from students to get an idea of what they like and don’t like.  Give yourself permission to fail.  There will be truly excellent experiences and truly horrible experiences when we move outside our comfort zones.  If you start each class in a way that sets a positive tone for learning, give students meaningful choices, set high expectations and teach our kids how to meet them, your classroom will become an engaging math community for you and your students.

Finally, I’d like to share some of my favorite words of wisdom for educators:

 

 

Happy teaching!