Make Your Students More Receptive

Sometimes you have to come up with your own unique strategies if you are going to foster more receptive students.

It doesn’t matter if you are teaching adults in a boardroom or tiny tots in a preschool; you want to get your message across. Your students need to be receptive for your lesson to get through, but how can you really get their attention? The following are just a few tips that can help make your students and coaching clients more receptive when teaching courses or conducting coaching courses and training.

Training strategies

When teaching or training online, you want to make sure that the material you are trying to teach gets through to your students. Try as you might, if you have a group of unreceptive students, they won’t learn a thing.

There are teaching strategies that you can use to help your students pay more attention to your message. Several teaching and training strategies exist to help students be more focused, attentive and receptive. There is no sure fire way to guarantee receptive students, but these tips can help to give you greater odds.

Interact often

Your students will be more prone to pay attention if they know you are paying attention. The more care and attentiveness you show in the way of feedback, the more likely you students are to pay attention and get engaged with whatever it is you are trying to teach.

This means you should leave comments online for nearly everything your students do. You should acknowledge that your students put in hard work and let your students know whether or not they are on the right track. Leave comments on homework assignments, respond to journals and participate in any discussion going on online.

Use calls to action

Telling your students that they have homework to do is indeed a call to action, but it isn’t the best teaching strategy for creating more receptive students. You want to ask them to do things that make them think more and go above and beyond the bare minimum.

Calls to action challenge your students to do something, meaning you should offer additional assignments to help foster growth, ask direct questions, and suggest that they do something beneficial outside of the curriculum. Of course, interact with your students when they answer your call to action; if they don’t get recognition for doing these things, you will start to lose them.

Make “viral” content

You don’t want your lessons to necessarily go viral, but creating viral style content one of your training strategies can keep your students more receptive. Creating content that can create the same buzz as say a meme or viral video among your students seems daunting, but it is really a formula that you can master.

First and foremost, you should create content for you students that makes them feel strongly. This gets them to pay attention. Make them very happy, angry or loving.
Then you need to surprise them or turn expectations upside down! This is the most important part. They will be shocked and will remember the message; they also may go back to this content you created again and again.

Change things up to appeal to diverse learning styles

People learn in many different ways, referred to as “multiple intelligence theory.” This theory stated very simply means that people learn best from different modalities. You surely have heard of visual learners, kinetic learners and the like: these ideas originate with multiple intelligence theory.

To keep all of your students engaged and receptive, present your online material in ways that appeals to learners through these different modalities. This may mean incorporating music such as a recorded mp3 in your online material to appeal to auditory learners, asking students to do a physical task as part of their homework for the kinesthetic learners, incorporating visual aids for the visual learners, and so on.

This teaching strategy is great for any classroom. By changing things up, you have the best bet of keeping everyone interested and receptive to your message.

And more…

These are just some training and teaching strategies that can help to make your students more engaged. These teaching tips help, but the best thing you can do for receptive students is to be engaged yourself. If you are not enthusiastic, upbeat, excited, and committed about what you are teaching,  you can’t expect your students to be engaged and receptive to your message.