Teacher Tip: Motivation and Engagement Strategies

Modern Classroom Educator Laura Domingo shares the strategies she uses in her classroom to support student motivation and engagement.

First, Laura highlights how important it is to spend time building community, taking brain breaks, and playing games. After all, balance is key!

Some Tips for Creating a Balanced Learning Environment

• Teach students to create space for independent breaks when they need them. This can help them to create awareness around their attention and mental capacity.

• Plan for whole-group breaks to build community through academic games or team-building games. After all, learning is a social activity. When we engage students socially, learning becomes more fun and memorable! And when students see themselves as part of an academic team, they are more willing to take risks and engage in the learning process.

• Gauge your students’ motivation and create breaks to keep momentum going. When students’ attention begins to wane, a break can be re-energizing.

Ideas for Independent Breaks

• Stand up and stretch

• Listen to one song and close your eyes before going back to work

• Doodle or draw for five minutes

• Answer the question of the day on the board and read your classmate’s answers

• Watch a Pixar Short Film

You can even use independent breaks as a way to gauge student progress. By putting a pause for an independent break in your instructional videos, you can determine by the actions students take where they are in their learning.

Ideas for Games

• Would you rather?

• Loaded questions

• Look up, look down

• Improv

• 20 questions

• Who am I?

• Bad dancing contest

• Scavenger hunts

• Write and follow directions to a hiding spot

• Escape room

• Memory games

• Human memory

• Scattergories

• Pictionary

• Checkers tournament

• Uno

• I spy

• Knock knock jokes

• Fill in the lyric

• Plan a party

Take the time to build community in your classroom. It will benefit all learners!

Laura Domingo provided her email address to anyone who is looking for additional information. Her full slide deck is available. Try out these strategies with your own students!