Being a new teacher can be a nerve-wracking experience, especially when you just started in a school surrounded by veteran teachers, and behaviorally challenged students. How do you captivate the students’ attention? How do you evaluate and assess their different learning styles and abilities? How do you ensure your lessons are compact and impactful for your students? These are all questions you need to unravel over time and we will assist you in providing 5 effective strategies in your classroom.
1. Use visual aids and make it colourful
Most common mistakes teachers make are expecting students to stay focused while reading texts without any graphics or visual aid to help with their imagination or creativity. Children are surprisingly more capable of developing their skills rapidly if you use the right techniques, so prepare some visual aids to foster their understanding of the subject matter.
For instance, if you are teaching Science, it would be helpful to play a short video related to the experiment, bring your students out on a field trip or even display photos of the experiment on an interactive whiteboard. Possibilities are endless!
Even our beloved Prophet ﷺ used this strategy to teach his fellow companions on Islam.
Jabir bin ‘Abdullah said that:
We were with the Prophet (ﷺ), and he drew a line (in the sand), then he drew two lines to its right and two to its left. Then he put his hand on the middle line and said : ‘This is the path of Allah. Then he recited the Verse: And verily, this (i.e. Allah’s Commandments) is My straight path, so follow it and follow not (other) paths, for they will separate you from His path…” [Sunan Ibn Majah]
2. Foster teamwork through cooperative learning
Individual assessments are great to evaluate students’ individual progress, but in the long run, you have to remember that children will grow up to work with others and live in a balanced system in the workforce to achieve great outcomes. Hence, you need to start planning your lessons and include cooperative learning strategies to teach them from young. Through this strategy, it will enhance students’ confidence to communicate with one another and encourage them to brainstorm their ideas.
Some of the activities involved in cooperative learning include debates, solving mathematical problems and puzzles, acting out in short drama sketches, conducting experiments and more.
3. Inquiry-based instruction
This might be a simple teaching strategy, but unfortunately teachers don’t use this enough to ask thought-provoking questions due to time constraints and strict rules of following what’s in the syllabus. However, you need to make time to provide inquiry-based instruction to encourage students to think critically.
By asking questions, students will investigate their own ideas to help improve their problem-solving skills and become better decision makers. Both of which are important life skills.
The Prophet ﷺ at times would readdress a question to a subject that is more significant and instructive. Once a Bedouin asked the Prophet (ﷺ): “When is the hour?” [The Day of Judgment]. The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “What have you prepared for that final hour?” The Bedouin said, “I haven’t prepared a lot of salah (good deeds) and I haven’t prepared a lot of zakah (charity) but I am preparing one thing which is my love for Allah Almighty and His Messenger.” The Prophet (ﷺ) replied: “You will be with who you love.”
Inquiry-based instruction can be applied to all STEAM subjects, with just a twist according to different topics. For instance, if you’re teaching Mathematics, you can ask ‘If my weight on Earth is 50kg, then what is my weight on Mars?’ You can also ask more subjective questions like ‘The capital punishment of theft should be death sentence. Do you agree?’ or ‘Do we really need 7 hours of school everyday? Why?’ The list goes on and on. Give them a question that could pique their curiosity and interest!
4. Adopt Differentiation
To give standardised questions to all students is fine, but make sure to adopt differentiation in your teaching by allocating tasks based on students’ abilities, to ensure no one gets left behind.
It is without question that different students have different capabilities and learning styles, so you have to come up with a lesson plan that fits all levels of your students. Activities include worksheets that vary in complexity to different groups of students, or setting up a range of work stations around the classroom which contain an assortment of tasks for students to choose from. When you diversify the levels of difficulty in your lesson plan, you can gauge which students perform better and which needs improvement.
5. Use technology wisely
Above all, in the 21st century, most teachers need to already be tech-savvy enough to use technology in their classrooms. Considering we are faced with gen Z, in which students have smartphones at a very young age and know technology better than the elders do, we need to find time to incorporate technology and engage in interactive activities.
There are many useful online applications out there you can utilise in your teaching such as Kahoot!, Quizziz, Socrative, PlayBrighter, ClassCraft, Goose Chase and more. Not only will it enhance their participation in the classroom, but it would foster a healthy competition between peers, so it can be quite chaotic! Make sure to manage the class well when you conduct online activities.
In retrospect, teaching as a new teacher is definitely a lot of hit or miss, so take your time, discover what floats your boat, and experiment to see what works for your students. Once you have the experience, you’ll be able to teach without challenges, InshaAllah. Do you have any other learning strategies you’ve tried and worked like a charm? Leave your thoughts and share it with us!
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