Steal my 3 secrets which can make your NCEA lessons incredible! Part 3

Welcome back! Did you notice a giant change in your classroom once you have had a conversation about relevance? Keep going!

If you’ve stumbled onto this blog, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

I am going to share my third secret in this blog which has made my lessons incredible. It is all about enquiring about interest.

Ask the NCEA students what they are interested in to gain engagement

Here's my third secret:

Ask NCEA students what they’d like the subjects to be about

The idea is to ask students what they’d like the subjects to be about/what they find interesting and then incorporate their ideas into your lessons and resource bank.

In some subjects, this may be a challenging thing to try. But in NCEA English, NCEA Drama, NCEA Dance, NCEA Media and NCEA Social Science, it can work out well.

In the teaching world, we learn that prior knowledge is a big factor to building interest in the lesson. An aspect of prior knowledge, is student interest, meaning what they already know and what they enjoy that is relevant to the subject. So, it is a great idea to use student interest to develop your lessons.

We always want to create content and lessons which relate to students and will have relevance in their lives, but sometimes, it doesn’t turn out the way things have been planned.

So, one way to ensure the students enjoy their learning is to give them opportunities to have a say in what they learn about.

Here are ways you can do this with your NCEA students:

- Song choice

- Dance genre choice

- Script choice

- Theatre form choice

- Text choice

- Film choice

- Historical context choice

Other areas you can let the NCEA students contribute to their learning choices:

- Chance to express opinions

- Chance to work with people they wish to work with

- Chance to lead others

- Chance to choose how they will submit work (written, typed, speech)

- Times for scheduling rehearsals and practice opportunities

Ways you can provide choices in a structured manner for your NCEA students:

- Give them a choice of three text options

- Give them a choice between two song options

- Give them a choice of where in the song they are going to develop choreography e.g. chorus or verse

- Give them a choice of submitted work online or in a written format

Remember, part 1 of this blog series can be found here and part 2 can be found here.

Best of luck!

Tovah

Tovah’s Tutoring

NCEA exam prep available now:

www.tovahstutoring.co.nz

Email:

info@tovahstutoring.co.nz