Useful tips for maintaining students’ interest during class
BY BRIAN BALLOU
It’s 1330 hrs and you’re teaching the afternoon session of "Hose Packs: Their Assembly and Use." The stuffy, warm room is dim because you’re projecting a PowerPoint presentation onto a screen. Lunch has hit your students’ stomachs, and it’s hard for them to keep their eyes open. As you read your lecture off the slides, you try to ignore the fact that your students are sliding down their seats and someone in the second row is snoring softly. Nobody’s learning anything. Everyone—including you—is miserable. What should you do?
One fix: Snap on the lights, tell your students you’re going to teach them how to make a hose pack in five easy steps, then herd everyone outdoors into the fresh air and sunlight. Break them into groups and start opening some rolls of hose. Give each group a packboard, some rubber bands and some bits of rope. Go from group to group and teach them two of the five steps; then let them work with the hose and discuss what you taught them. Once everyone has mastered the two steps, start your circuit again and teach them two more steps. Keep at it until they learn all five steps and each group has a completed hose pack.
Photo by Tom Story
As a teacher, you just bridged the gap between telling them something they probably won’t remember and teaching them a skill they will retain. The information you provided them in the outdoor working groups is the same information you would have provided them in the classroom. The difference: the environment. In the classroom, the students were in an environment where they were the least willing and able to stay alert. By bringing them outside and prompting them to move around (particularly during the post-lunch sleepies), interact with each other and work with their hands, you enable them to immediately apply what you taught them in the classroom.
Learning to be a teacher requires you to thoroughly understand both the topic you’re teaching and how people learn. But there’s more to it than simply recognizing when it’s time to move your class into some sunshine. You must engage their interest and earn their respect.
General Teaching Tips
1. At the beginning of any class, take a few minutes to learn some specifics about your students. What’s their knowledge level of the subject matter? If they have some experience, encourage them to participate in discussions. If they have little or no knowledge of the subject, determine their goals and motives for taking the class. The more you know about your students’ needs, the better equipped you’ll be to help them meet their goals—and hold their interest.
2. Use interactive learning opportunities whenever possible. Small-group problem-solving exercises give students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned and use whatever experience they may have. Watching them work will also tell you a lot about the individuals in your class. Who are the leaders? The problem-solvers? This will help you identify experienced, dynamic members of the class who can, in turn, coach or mentor others.
3. Don’t be serious all the time. Humor loosens up a classroom and can even be instructive. Telling a funny story about the guy who turned his hose pack into a Gordian Knot can lighten the mood and gives students a small bit of practical advice—don’t zig zag through a stand of trees while unrolling your hose pack.
4. Keeping No. 3 in mind, use humor wisely. Avoid jokes that may be offensive. A joke or humorous story intended to lighten your students’ mood may instead alienate them. In general, avoid religious and ethnic jokes. Lawyers may get a kick out of lawyer jokes, but blondes won’t necessarily think blonde jokes are funny. Get to know your students before digging into your joke bag.
5. Give students frequent opportunities to move around, talk and think. Take a break every 60–90 minutes so they can use the bathroom, get some fresh air and shake out the kinks. This also gives them a chance to get acquainted, discuss what they’ve learned and form questions for classroom discussion.
6. Go easy on the jargon. Government employees often use acronyms and other forms of shorthand in their speeches, but not all agencies use the same terms. Define potentially unfamiliar terms, and watch for signals from students who may not understand what you’re saying. Consider furnishing them with a written list of common terms and their definitions prior to the start of class.
7. Make sure your teaching tools are ready for prime time. A balky laptop computer can ruin a PowerPoint presentation—and remove your students from a learning frame of mind. Test computers and other teaching aides before class starts. If you want students to take notes or tests, make sure you have enough paper and pencils. Additionally, make sure you have materials ready for hands-on demonstrations. If you’re planning to hold an outdoor exercise on flanking a fire with hose, make sure the pump works and you have enough water and hose for the exercise. Not being prepared compromises your students’ confidence in what you’re teaching them.
8. Know your stuff. If you don’t have a thorough understanding of the topic you’re teaching, the students will recognize this and, consequently, won’t learn very much. If you teach the class by reading extensively from the lesson book, students will wonder why a lecture is necessary. Break away from the book. Leave the podium. Walk around. Make eye contact with your students while you’re talking. Challenge them to ask questions and solve problems. By keeping them on their toes and working from the knowledge stored in your head, you’ll put aside any doubts about your command of the subject and invite them to participate in what they’re learning.
9. Dress the part. If you’re teaching firefighters about fireline construction, it’s appropriate to wear Nomex and boots. Likewise, it would be appropriate to wear a uniform shirt and pants if you’re teaching dispatchers about new resource-ordering procedures. Gauge the students’ expectations in your class and dress accordingly. Whether you’re wearing Nomex or a necktie, be clean, be neat and look professional.
10. Pay attention to time. Start the class promptly and end it promptly. Don’t skip breaks and don’t dig into your students’ lunch hour. Likewise, make sure they know the class hours, too, and stress the importance of keeping on schedule.
PowerPoint Presentation Tips
Computer-generated slides are commonly used as teaching aides and can dramatically improve the quality of your presentation—but only if the slides are meaningful and produced tastefully. Microsoft PowerPoint is the most commonly used presentation slide-generation program.
1. Keep it simple. PowerPoint has many wonderful features, but this is also its greatest shortfall. All too often, teachers create presentations laden with dramatic visual effects that detract from the lesson. Ever sit through a presentation in which every slide title is laboriously and loudly spelled out, letter by noisy letter, using the machine-gun feature? If so, you probably remember flinching as every letter hit the screen, but you probably can’t remember the subject matter of that class. Use your PowerPoint slides to enhance what you’re teaching; don’t let them overwhelm what you’re trying to say.
2. Keep it short and to the point. Use your slides to repeat your key points. If you include your entire presentation on the slides, your students will read it and tune you out. In addition, use photos or illustrations to convey information that supports your topic. Crop pictures so the most important element is clearly shown.
3. Don’t read your lecture off your slides. If you constantly swivel around to read what’s printed on the projected slides, then repeat it word for word, you convey the message that you haven’t learned the material. It’s OK to glance at your slides as they change to make sure the correct one is showing, but quickly return your attention to the class. Move around. Ask questions. Keep their attention on you.
4. Stick to a consistent background theme and typeface. A slide show that looks more like a bad quilt is distracting. It also tells students that you may not be very organized. Choose a template for your slide show that’s easy to read and doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. In general, a dark background with bright lettering is easy to read in a dimly lit classroom.
5. Be careful when overlaying text onto photos. If the photo is small and you’ve got a lot of text, you run the risk of making the text illegible and ruining the photo. Text works well on photos that have a large, reasonably blank, high-contrast area. A splash of sky or a stretch of asphalt make good backdrops for text. Unfortunately, text floating on top of a photo of roaring flames doesn’t work very well.
6. Change slides often. Having a slide on the screen for more than five minutes tends to draw students’ eyes off you and toward it. Two minutes per slide is a good rule of thumb. This also forces you to keep the messages on the slide brief and to the point. Best of all, keep the entire slide show short. Consider using slides for only a portion of the presentation. This adds visual variety to your lecture.
7. Lastly, check your spelling. Misspelled words projected onto a very large screen are quite noticeable—and embarrassing.
Tips for Teaching Kids
Photo by Karl Witz, Oregon Department of Forestry.
When working with kids, get down on their level so
you don't intimidate them.
In general, the younger the child, the shorter the attention span. Keep the learning points short and simple, and repeat key messages frequently. Prompt them to give correct answers to simple questions, and reward them when they get it right. Here are some additional tips for working with kids.
1. Work in small groups. If you’re teaching fire safety tips, for example, breaking a classroom of kids into groups of four or five helps them to focus on you and what you’re teaching. This, of course, requires that you have enough trainers. Make sure your training assistants know the material they’re teaching and how long you want them to stay in their small groups. Assign a rover to monitor all of the small groups and to act as a troubleshooter and problem-solver. Small groups also work best if you’re giving kids a hands-on look at an engine, or running them through an exercise, such as stop, drop and roll. Having fewer kids to manage reduces competition for attention among the children and better enables you to answer their questions.
2. Get down on their level. If you’re working with elementary school-aged children, they’re not very tall. A towering adult may be intimidating. Kneel or sit when you talk with them, particularly in one-on-one or small-group situations. This removes the intimidation factor and allows them to focus on what you’re saying.
3. Visual cues help children absorb information. Whenever possible, use pictures that show kids doing the things you want them to do. If you’re teaching them about fire prevention, for example, show pictures of kids giving matches they’ve found to adults who look like their teachers or parents.
4. Keep your presentation low-tech, and test any equipment you’ll be using. Adults have limited patience for technological glitches, but kids have zero patience for such things. If you have to wait three minutes for your laptop to boot up so you can show your PowerPoint slides, you’ve lost your audience. Be ready to go when the kids are ready to learn. The same goes for video presentations. An outdated video can cause kids’ minds to wander, and once they’ve wandered, it’s difficult to get their attention again. Consider using static visuals, such as photos or colorful drawings mounted on foam board. This keeps kids focused on you and minimizes the possibility of technical difficulties.
5. Rewarding kids for learning is important. However, avoid rewarding only some of the kids if you want them all to learn the same thing. Consider giving a single award, such as a fire-safety poster, to the entire class.
Ask for Help
Improving your teaching skills requires a desire to learn. If you’ve never taught a class before, you should seek advice from an experienced teacher. Think about classes you’ve taken. Which of them were good experiences? If the people who taught those classes were good teachers, ask them to give you some teaching tips. It doesn’t have to be someone who taught an Incident Command System course; it can be a teacher from college or high school. But it should be someone familiar with teaching people in the same age range as the students you’ll be teaching. It also helps if the subject matter is similar. Regardless, getting tips from an experienced teacher will help you succeed.
The Internet is another excellent resource. There are sites devoted to theories about how people learn, sites with pages and pages of ideas for elementary school teachers and still more sites with advice (some good, some bad) for making PowerPoint slides. To start, use a Web search tool, such as Yahoo, Lycos or Google, and type in "teaching tips." If you work with kids a lot, search for "teaching kids about wildfire." The results will likely give you some good ideas.
Lastly, have fun. If you enjoying teaching, your students will learn more. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Brian Ballou frequently teaches wildland/urban interface residents about ways to keep their houses from burning down. He is also part of a lively team of screwballs who annually teach S-203, Introduction to Incident Information. In his day job, he’s a wildland/urban interface specialist and a public information representative for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
