Top 4 Effective Teaching Techniques to Transform Your Classroom

Incorporating the right teaching techniques as educators can be challenging, along with pairing the right topic with the right technique. Experimenting with various methods, while keeping your students' needs in mind is a great way to figure out what method suits you best.

With a multitude of techniques? to choose from, the entire process can be quite overwhelming to say the least! In this blog we’ve simplified it for you by adding a few approaches that we always turn to, to ensure we make the most of our classes.

1: The ESA Method:

Used widely for language teaching, the ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) method has proved to be useful in facilitating an inductive classroom.

1.??? As suggested, the ‘engage’ stage sets to capture the interest of the student. This stage is used in the beginning of the lesson, while setting the context, and while it might be tricky to get your class participative and involved, the engage stage brings about a personalization of the context in order to ensure students relate to it well. This is done through stories, visualization, discussions etc.

2.??? The study stage involves activities that relate to the topic being taught. Starting with controlled and semi- controlled practice activities such as fill in the blanks and match the following to simplify the concept of what is being taught, leaving little to no room to make errors, paired with regular teacher facilitation.

3.??? The activate stage suggests how much a learner has comprehended throughout the course of the lesson. The learner is given more autonomy over the topic taught during the lesson and demonstrates this through freer practices such as role plays, debates, creation of content in relation to the topic covered etc. Towards the end of this stage, it is important for the educator to set aside some time for feedback and reflection.

2: Task Based Learning:

TBL is an interesting approach wherein, students are given a task that requires a lot of interaction and communication. It is an excellent approach to incorporate in your classrooms for language teaching, as TBL introduces students to real life scenarios and expects them to work around the target language.The key priority lies in finishing a task assigned to the students, and works on vital skills such as communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration.

TBL includes the following steps:

1.??? Pre-task: The teacher introduces the students to the topic and gives them a clear understanding of the expectations.

2.??? Task: During this phase the? students prepare to work on their task and are provided with the materials required to complete the task. The work of the teacher is limited to encouraging and guiding them where necessary.

3.??? Plan: The students strategise how they would like to present their project and designate roles to each of their team members in this phase. Rehearsing presentations is an important part during this time, as it gets them prepared for the final presentation. It is important for teachers to actively adhere to any changes that are required during the rehearsals.

4.??? Report/ Present: The students present their projects in class while the rest of the class is tasked with writing feedback and are encouraged to ask questions to the presenting team. Ultimately, the students vote for the winning team of the best presented project.

5.??? Feedback: This is a vital part to include in the TBL approach, as the class can weigh in on offering feedback to each other through written or verbal modes.

3: Content Based Instruction:

This is an approach that is widely used while teaching language through meaningful content. It has been proved to increase motivation and engagement of students within the classroom. Students learn the language through a subject or topic that interests them, and this could range from a complex topic in science to? reading their favourite book. The learner takes ownership of their learning based on their interests and develops knowledge and communicative ability through the target language introduced to them through the content.

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4: Story-telling:

The story-telling method is one of the oldest techniques used to communicate with people. It’s a method that gets learners to actively listen while promoting other skills such as creative thinking, visualization and memorizing new words to mention a few which results in the building blocks of learning a language. Regardless of whether you are dealing with a young learner or an adult learner, this method works well for both.? Creating context and personal connections is made much easier through this method, which also eases the process of tackling more complex concepts like grammar and the rules of language which can be intimidating for new learners.

Being in the line of education requires us to constantly work on ensuring our classes are engaging and focused towards the formative growth of our students. Breaking the monotony of a daily class schedule does not necessarily? involve only a focus on the teaching techniques, but also requires as much energy into the kind of content and materials we use in our classes.