Are you looking to change or redesign your current curriculum? That’s already a good sign as it shows that you want to stay up-to-date with the most effective learning methods and you take the growth of your institution seriously. The next step is to actually realise what this willingness to change implies and what you need to be aware of. At the end of the day, it’s the quality of learning received by your students that is directly affected by your curriculum upgrades. In the last blog post, we have already covered the first 3 aspects of a successful curriculum redesign plan. In case you missed it, you can always revisit it here.
Today, we encourage you to deepen your knowledge even more and get yourself fully prepared for an effective and successful curriculum upgrade!
4) Analysis
Are you looking to change or redesign your current curriculum? That’s already a good sign as it shows that you want to stay up-to-date with the most effective learning methods and you take the growth of your institution seriously. The next step is to actually realise what this willingness to change implies and what you need to be aware of. At the end of the day, it’s the quality of learning received by your students that is directly affected by your curriculum upgrades. In the last blog post, we have already covered the first 3 aspects of a successful curriculum redesign plan. In case you missed it, you can always revisit it here.
Today, we encourage you to deepen your knowledge even more and get yourself fully prepared for an effective and successful curriculum upgrade!
To keep your students on their toes and maintain their level of focus throughout the lesson, it is essential that you give them a good enough reason to be present and pay attention. Create a new habit in your class and ask them to list 3 new things they learned at the end of each lesson. You can also go one step further and introduce a system where students collect points based on the number of things they managed to remember. Of course, this has to be carefully planned to ensure your students perceive it as a game and a healthy competition that won’t cause them stress.
5) Gamification
This point elaborates on the previous one. Gamification can be a serious game changer in driving student engagement, so let’s first explain what exactly it is.
According to Groh (2012) it’s adopting game elements to improve user experience and user engagement, specifically in non-game contexts. All this with the primary aim to appeal to your students’ competitive instincts and make it a highly interactive method of achieving results.
Introducing an element of competitiveness, as in the point above, has already proven to be successful in different student research studies carried out by recognised educational researchers worldwide such as Thamvichai et.al. (2012), Cronk (2012), Sheldon (2011) and a couple of other scientists.
Some may falsely perceive that this can only be an effective method for younger students, which is not true. It does not matter whether you are primarily working with primary school, college or university-age students, a gamification model constructed correctly for the given age group, can always work wonders.
6) Play to Your Students' Strengths
If you have taught different groups, then you will know that no two classes are ever the same even if they are in the same age group. Students can be categorised according to their preferred learning styles, interests and an array of other characteristics which means that first, it takes understanding of your students’ profiles very well in order to prepare lesson content they would benefit from most.
Teaching nowadays is far less about imposing a given learning method on your students, and much more about addressing and responding to their needs and reactions.
In order to construct your learners’ learning profiles accurately, you will need to spend some time on assessing them according to the following five aspects: biological traits, cultural and societal factors, emotional and social influences, academic performance, and learning preferences, as William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell recommended in their book on the most effective teaching strategies (2011).
7) Personalised Learning
By understanding your students’ interests and motivations for learning you significantly set yourself up for success with your curriculum.
Personalised learning not only improves the ability of a learner to retain knowledge but it also increases their motivation levels to master more challenging concepts. By making references and links between the academic content and your students’ ambitions, goals and interests, you immediately create a positive impression and create positive associations with the subject matter in their brains. Researchers have found that providing different kinds of choice in personalised learning encourages autonomy in learners (Goodwin, B., 2010).
Educational Leadership magazine says: “Choice is a matter of degree”. What this in turn means is that once you adjust the content to make it as relevant and appealing as possible to your students, they will be more engaged and will take the initiative more often. They will simply feel more willing to take over and take the lead in their learning journey, feeling that they are truly investing in themselves as they pursue your institution’s curriculum.
Bibliography
Goodwin, B., 2010. Giving Students Meaningful Work. Educational Leadership, 68(1).
Kusuma-Powell, O. and Powell, W., 2011. How To Teach Now. ASCD.