6 teaching strategies to help your students understand your topic

There are a lot of people that are so brainy but when it comes to impacting what they know to someone else, their score would be complete zero. The art of teaching is another ball game altogether from intelligence. A lot of people spend time talking without removing what is in their mind to the listener. Below are simple strategies that you can adopt to make your students understand your tutorial

Empathy

 Empathy simply means putting yourself in the shoes of the person you are teaching. Doing so will not only help you to impact but also help you to know the techniques and strategies that will work for a particular person, audience, or group. You can ask yourself these questions “ what if I were the one learning, what would I have expected from my teacher? How should he explain the concept to me to get me to understand?” most times people are interested in talking and discussing without the learners at heart. Empathy will make you go the extra mile to sort for materials that will aid your students' comprehension. Empathy will help to reduce impatience and over-expectation from the teachers to the students.

Use Known and previous concepts to explain new concepts:  
A lot of teachers do not know this concept and some that know it, do not make use of it. Knowledge pours in heavily when unknown concepts are explained using the known. Everything in this world operates by relativity. Concepts and events repeat each other in different aspects of life that can be used to explain things that are new to us.  Using the known concept to explain the unknown concept is the fastest way to get your student to understand. Because this method uses previous knowledge to explain new knowledge, they tend to stick in our brains. This strategy will not only get the student to understand but also make it stick in their brains.

Ask Question: Asking questions is a very powerful readymade tool in assessing the learner. This will help you know the depth of your student’s understanding of the subject matter. As a good teacher, it is expected of you not to talk throughout your lesson period like a tape but pay attention to your audience. Find out if they have any questions.  Give room for questions and answers. If the student you are teaching does not have any questions to ask, then you ask them. Ask them questions related to what you’ve taught. This will enable you to throw more light on areas that seem unclear. You can also leave room for their course mate/ classmate/ colleague to answer. Then you finally shed more light.

Tell stories, jokes along the line: There is a regular and popular adage that says “ all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” this is very important especially when delivering a long tutorial. Once in a while bring stories that will take the boring minds of your students to a refreshing state. This will trick the brain to forget that it had been learning for a long time. But in any case, your story should be powerful enough to remove them from a boring state to a highly refreshed state.

Teach with examples: When you teach, make sure you give loads of examples. This will help to make a mental connection to the concepts. Your examples should not be far from reality or something unknown. Your illustration should be visualised in a crystal clear manner that even a blind man can see.

Make it simple and short: Most times, teachers do not come at the appropriate time they ought to come for lectures. They wait until the dying minute, then everything will be pushed into the brains of the students in one day, spending a lot of time teaching to cover up their syllabus which is not beneficial to students or learners. Any teacher that does this shows that he/she does not have his/her student in mind. It is not a good practice to hold people for a very long period in the name of teaching. As newer concepts come to the brain, it erodes the previous new information that has not been stored properly in the permanent memory. Make your lesson short and simple. Do not bring swelling words that will discourage your students. Make the student see how easy the topic is because if you make it scary, they will take that up. Which will result in a very poor performance in the end.

Finally, be patient because you are sowing seeds.