3 Tips for Keeping your students lively during classes

The image of the bored, half-asleep, daydreaming teen sitting in a high school classroom is all too familiar for teachers. Most teenagers seem to treat school days like a prison sentence. A recent poll found that the top two words teenagers most associate with school are “bored” and “tired,” and this probably isn’t all that surprising. With schedules that are often packed with difficult classes, homework, and extracurriculum activities, teenagers likely find sitting in a desk for hours a day to be pretty low on the excitement scale.

Here are some tips on how to liven up your class:

Make Relevant Connections

One of the best ways to get teenagers interested is by talking about the things they know and care about, whether that’s pop culture, music, or television shows. For example, creating an English lesson around crafting tweets from the characters in the class novel could be a fun, new way to approach looking at the text. Making references to pop culture within the lesson, or even opening up the floor for student input and feedback about how the class material relates to their birthday lives, could make way for lively conversation.

Play Games

Teenagers like playing games, even if they might roll their eyes at first. There are tons of easy, classroom-friendly games that teachers can implement into just about any lesson in any subject to help keep students on their toes and interacting with one another. One go-to game is throwing a beach ball around the room to choose who will answer the next question. Or, write question on the colored sections of the ball, and whichever section the catcher’s thumb lands on they have to answer.

Work in Groups

Group work is an easy, fail-safe way to get students moving around and talking. Students can be broken into groups to work on any number of assignments, from answering complex discussion questions, to creating a presentation on a textbook chapter to teach to their classmates. If students are particularly disengaged when it comes to class discussion, try putting them into small groups of 3-5 and giving them a set of questions on index cards. Challenge them to spend 5 minutes discussing each question, and ask them to be prepared to share their thoughts with the class.