For effective teaching and learning, student participation in the classroom is important. For all those students who want to achieve academic success, and ensure professional growth, participating in the classroom is necessary. This helps you to foster communication skills, public speaking, confidence, and social skills and broadens your knowledge. Let us discuss some tips that students can follow to enhance their participation in the classroom.
Tips for students to enhance their participation in the class
1. Listen to the teachers actively
For effective classroom participation, active listening is very important. To understand every topic in detail, listen to the teachers attentively. Stay disciplined, maintain eye contact with the teacher and ensure proper concentration. This will help you to relate to the classroom discussions well, and share your thoughts and knowledge too. Teachers should also interact with every student to teach online as well as in conventional classrooms effectively.
2. Make notes
Many students are not able to remember everything explained by the teacher. So along with active listening skills, you can go for note-making too. Notes help to make studies more systematic and easy to approach. Listen to the teachers carefully, and jot down the important pointers emphasized by them. By writing the important pointers, your understanding and memorizing skills are enhanced. This will surely help to participate more in the different class activities.
3. Come for the classes prepared
Only being dependent on teachers’ classroom learning with no self-effort won’t work to participate well. When students don’t study at home or avoid revisions of the done topics, they come to the classes unprepared. As all lessons are interlinked, a lack of command over the previous ones makes students face understanding issues with the new lessons.
To avoid facing low classroom performance, make sure to self-study every day. Try to keep your classroom learning and self-studies going hand in hand. Read, revise and learn in small portions daily. You can also have the gist of the new lesson going to be started in the next class. This will help you to come to the classes prepared, understand and relate with the teacher’s explanation more, and participate better too.
4. Use technology for a better understanding
For many students understanding the lessons from the textbooks becomes difficult as well as less engaging. This makes them go to the class without any revision, and relate less to the new lessons and participatory activities. If the same happens with you, switch to technology. By using online teaching apps and sites, students can access several audiovisual tools like educational videos, modules, demonstrations, picture cards, PowerPoint presentations, visual notes, graphs, and more. With the help of visualization, students tend to understand the concepts better and quicker. This will work to enhance your classroom participation.
5. Don’t let your fears stop you from trying
Many students, even having ideas and knowledge to share, stay quiet in the class because of the fear of speaking. If this fear won’t become at the right age, it can cause trouble in the future. With speaking fear, you won’t be able to express yourself and give job opportunities properly which can affect your professional growth. To avoid this happening to you, try to overcome your speaking fear.
Many students feel that they might be judged, scolded, or joked about if they speak up incorrectly in the classes. But this is a wrong assumption. Don’t let these false assumptions and beliefs stop you from growing. If you say something incorrect, teachers are there to guide you and show you the right path. Therefore, don’t be afraid, participate freely and take the feedback and suggestions constructively.
6. Ask teachers if facing doubts
Not all students have the same understanding level. Some grab the concepts in one go very quickly while some need time to process and understand a topic. With theoretical and applicative portions, facing doubts is common with many students.
A doubtful mind can affect your participation skills. To avoid this happening with you, ensure proper doubt resolution. Once the teacher is done teaching a topic, wait for the right time and turn, later take your doubts to the teacher. The answers, or re summarization received will help students to seek a proper academic understanding, and become an active participant in the class.
Conclusion
To have effective academic performance, being an active class participant is very important. By following the above-mentioned tips which are active listening, note-making, doubt resolution, self-studies, and using technology, students can enhance their participation in the different classroom activities such as group discussions, recitations, question-answer rounds, and oral tests, presentations, and more.
