Teaching Methods

Appealing to triggered situational interest can be a great way for teachers to catch students’ initial attention and view the content as something fun they get to participate in. However, teachers should use this technique very sparingly due to the fleeting nature of this first phase of interest. Teachers could appeal to triggered situational interest by starting a lesson with a fun game using a digital formative assessment tool, such as Plicker, Blooket, Kahoot, etc. These types of activities will peak students' inital interest in the lesson and have them leaving the class with a fun memory.

A teacher can help students achieve maintained situational interest with the content that they are teaching by helping students find real-world connections within the content which will help them find meaning in it. In the article titled "Helping Students Develop an Appreciation for School Content", Pugh and Phillips emphasize the importance of guiding your students towards finding connections in the content ot their own lives so that they can find meaning in it (Pugh and Phillips 2011). A great way to do this is to model, as the teacher, how the content connects to your life and why that makes it important to you. Then, have your students find similar connections within their own lives that will make the conetnt more real and exciting.

Because emerging individual interest is typically initiated by the student finding new things that they are interested in, teachers must give students the opportunity to find things that peak their interest within the content that they teach. This requires a lot of creativity on the teacher's end; they must think of new ways to introduce the topic and to appeal to the wide variety of things that may interest students. For example, a teacher can take a single lesson about the weather and highlight a wide variety of subtopics within the overall concept of weather that could potentially peak the individual interest of your students. For instance, you could have one of your lessons about weather focus on the impact that it has on aspects of our life beyond whether or not we should wear a jacket. This lesson could emphasize that the weather impacts agriculture, wildlife, and energy. Then, students might find that the topic of weather is more interesting and impactful than they previously thought. Teachers should always give their students ample opportunities to find new individual interests within the content.

Teachers should find creative ways to implement the variety of topics that their students are already interested in. For example, a student who is really interested in space could benefit from a lesson that implements a fun space theme and emphasizes how the lesson relates to concepts about space. There are a wide variety of benefits of taking the time to incorporate your students' well-developed interests into the content that you teach. Doing this will show your students you care about them and listen to them, and will therefore strengthen your student-teacher relationship. It will also increase the chance that your students will be genuinley interested in learning more about your content because it will appeal to things that they have already found a deep interest in.