A school is an organized space where students learn. Schools usually have classrooms where teachers teach and students learn, cafeterias or dining halls where students eat lunch, and all-purpose playfields called schoolyards.
Attending school teaches you how to solve problems, which will help you in all areas of life. It also helps you form relationships that will last a lifetime.
1. Storytelling
Many students enter schools familiar with storytelling through books or narratives that their parents tell them. They become eager to listen to stories, even in languages other than their own.
Storytelling engages children and encourages their innate creativity and imagination. This is important for a child’s overall development and can support creative thinking, critical-thinking skills, and project-based learning.
In addition, stories help to promote empathy. When teachers share personal or historical accounts, they can help students to see that other people’s experiences and beliefs are valid as well. Additionally, storytelling evokes oxytocin, which is the “cuddle hormone,” a necessary feeling to foster connection in classrooms. This can help to build student trust and engagement, especially when discussing sensitive or difficult topics. For example, students bonded with a teacher when she told a story about her family and her journey as an immigrant.
2. Demonstrations
Demonstrations can be powerfully emotional and engaging forms of science theatre. They have unique value in eliciting communal emotional engagement and focus among students, triggering cognitive learning.
Clarity and Understanding
Seeing demonstrations demonstrated step by step helps students understand concepts or procedures, especially for visual learners. Demonstrations are also effective for teaching skills and techniques by allowing students to observe how they are performed, leading to improved skill acquisition and proficiency.
Students are often surprised by the outcome of a classroom demonstration, which can help them identify the assumptions that led to their erroneous predictions. These surprise experiences motivate curiosity and encourage students to give weight and credibility to disciplinary concepts and models rather than the naive ones they used to make their initial predictions.
3. Interaction
Schools provide a social environment for children where they can learn from others. Children have a certain degree of social abilities, but they need guidance from teachers, parents or mentors to fulfil their true potential.
Student-content interaction is the transaction students have with educational materials, whether it be a textbook, lecture, simulation or online course content. The interaction enables cognitive development through the sharing of ideas, perspectives and strategies and fosters motivation, self-esteem and social-emotional development.
Interaction between students also promotes linguistic and communicative development. This can be achieved through a variety of interactive teaching strategies including dyads, group projects, document based question analysis, gallery learning walks and experiments. Even media and technologies that are not inherently interactive can be made so, for example podcasts could include comments.
4. Games
Games can help students practice important social skills such as teamwork and collaboration. They also can boost student motivation by adding a sense of fun and achievement to classroom learning.
One classic educational game that teachers can use in class is Guess in 10. Have students prepare cards with words and topics related to what you’re teaching, then divide them into groups of two to four. Each group has a turn to draw a word or topic on the interactive display, and their teammates have to ask questions that allow them to figure out what’s being drawn.
Other educational games such as Jenga can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom, for example by having students read decodable words or solve mental math problems before they pull a block. Or, they can write sight words or questions on the blocks themselves.
5. Routine
Routines are sequences of recurring tasks or actions that teachers and students perform, designed and taught to establish structure, predictability and consistency in learning (Lemov, 2021).
Establishing routines that are clear and productive can minimise interruptions, maximise time for learning and support student engagement.
For example, a teacher who doesn’t have a system for handing out papers to her class will waste valuable instruction time everytime she needs to give a group of students paper. With a system in place, the teacher could simply prepare all the paper her students will need for that period and day and put it all together in a folder.
Teaching a new routine is best done in stages, starting with explaining the expectations and why the routine is important (I do), then modelling the routine to all pupils (we do) followed by lots of practise so the routine becomes automatic and frees up working memory (you do). This allows students to be more independent in class.