5 Ways You Can Affect Your Students’ Learning Process

As a teacher, you have a lot of influence over your students and one of your biggest responsibilities is to make sure that everyone is learning what they need to in order to pass the class.  Structuring your lesson plan, or even designing your school furniture a certain way, can affect what each student gets out of your class.  The trick is to find a balance so that no child is left behind.

Differentiated Instruction
As a teacher, you will come to recognize that no student is the same.  While some students may excel in one area of learning, others may find it difficult to grasp that same concept.  The philosophy of differentiated instruction looks to meet students on their level.  To students, reading from a boring textbook can get stale after a short period of time, and while the standard textbook is not without its merits, adding other forms of media to educate students can do wonders for the learning process.  Excerpts from books, magazines, even film clips can help reinforce the points made in textbooks and can help along the students that learn in different ways.

Balanced Literacy
Similar in philosophy to differentiated instruction, balanced literacy works to meet students at their reading skills by differentiating how text is presented and absorbed in class.  If you think back to your elementary school days, you’ll recognize that the class structure was not like a college lecture.  Texts were read aloud as a class, in groups, and even silently.  Balanced literacy recognizes that students can excel at a number of different reading processes and tries to encompass all of that.

The Design of Your Classroom
It may not be apparent to you, but the arrangement of your school furniture can affect the flow of your classroom as well as the ways in which your children learn.  For example, if you decide to arrange the students’ desks in rows, this leans to a more lecture-based form of learning.  In contrast, if you want a classroom that encourages group discussion, bunching the students into small groups may be the best course of action.  You may have to put up with more off-topic conversation, especially in younger students, but it has a huge advantage in the ability to stimulate conversation between students and for the sharing of ideas.

Teacher-Centric vs. Student-Centric
If you were to look at your lesson plan as an overview, would it revolve around instruction or discussion?  This is essentially the difference between a teacher-centric classroom and a student-centric classroom.  While neither philosophy is inherently good or bad, it can determine whether or not your students are getting exactly what you had hoped they’d get at the beginning of the year.  As there is a place for both lecture and discussion, it is always a good idea to balance out both philosophies.

Sticking to a Routine
While it may sound monotonous and boring, sticking to a routine is one of the best ways to assure that time in your classroom is not wasted and the students are sticking to their lessons.  Many teachers buy themselves time to do things like check homework and attendance by giving the students a task to do as soon as they get in.  Having a pre-planned objective (often referred to as SWBAT: Students Will Be Able To) it can help you and your students stay on task and can help determine whether or not your lesson plan is effective. 

The key to being a great teacher is finding the balance to keep everyone at the same level.  If you find that some are falling behind, you may need to adjust your teaching method in order to bring the stragglers back to the group.