Teacher Tech: Class Demonstration, Why don’t they work?

You’ve asked a student to do a problem on the board, you’ve asked a group to perform a task in front of the class, or had a pair of students do an experiment for the class.  Why do things fall apart at that point?

As soon as a student begins to write on the board, other students lose their focus and disengage from the lesson.  An effective teacher can’t allow unengaged students.

I observed a veteran teacher, Carl, solve this problem by doing three things.

1.              Carl made sure that all students could see the demonstration.  If a student is visually cut off from the show, there’s no more reason to pay attention to the lesson.   I watched Carl praise a student who moved to the front of the room and sat on the floor in order to see what was going on.  In his class, it’s a student’s duty to see what’s happening.

2.              Prior to starting the demonstration, he made all students predict what was going to happen.  His students had access to scrap paper, and he made each one quickly jot down what they thought the results would be.  Carl then had students share their prediction with a partner and allowed them to change their predictions after the sharing.  By the time the demonstration began, all students were curious to see what would really happen.

3.              Just before the demonstration was to begin, Carl told his students that he wanted them to watch the demo carefully to see if their predictions were right.  This was key; he gave all students a job to do, not just the students involved in the demo.

Probably of these three steps, the most important was step number 3: giving everyone in the class something to do when a student approaches the board.  Next time you have a student come to the front to attempt solving a problem, or some other demo, think about Carl’s technique.