Engagement

Engagement in a math class is essential to student learning. If students are not engaged, they will not learn or retain the information. Diversifying the means of engagement is a great strategy to incorporate a variety of learning styles. Now you may be wondering, how do I provide multiple means of engagement? There are many ways that this can be done. 

The most imporant key for boosting engagement in math is to make math fun. In standard math education, lessons are boring and bland. Adding fun aspects to the math lesson will make it more enjoyable for students. One way to do this is to incorporate math games into the lessons. Technology based or hard copy math games are engaging and boost student learning. For some ideas on math games, please visit the online math games page. 

When creating word problems, writing them to include students interests is a great way to invlove the students in the problems. You can also have students participate and write their own word problems. I like to have each student write a word problem, add them all to a jar, and have students take turns pulling problems out for the class to solve. 

Another way to boost engagement is to have students set their own personal goals. At the start of each of my math lessons, I provide students with the learning target and the start of the success criteria. I will ask students to evaluate how many problems they think they can correctly answer by the end of a lesson. My students also know to push themselves, so if they think they can solve 3/5 problems to set their goal to be to correctly solve 4/5 of the exit ticket problems.