Making Physics More Engaging For Your Students
When you are a physics teacher, there is a good chance you know that most of your students don't really want to be there and that very few have a genuine interest in physics. This is just the name of the game when it comes to education in general. It is always a challenge to get students interested and engaged in what you are trying to teach. However, in a physics classroom, there are steps you can take to make physics more engaging for your students. Get to know some of those strategies you can use so you can start adopting them in your classroom right away.
Talk About Interesting Physics Inventions and Their Inventors
One of the ways that you can engage students in physics is by teaching them about cool physics inventions and the inventors behind them. You can even assign projects to your students so that they each get to research a different interesting and unique inventor and invention.
Take the optical amplifier, for example. Your students could work individually or in a group to find information about the inventor of the optical amplifier as well as about the device itself. They can then present their findings to the class. You could even make it more interactive by encouraging them to reach out to the inventor of the optical amplifier or to scientists who use the device to interview them about the importance of the invention and the ways in which it enhances science.
As you can see, this type of activity can greatly enhance the physics class environment as it gets the students involved in their own learning in an interactive and interesting way.
Have Them Do Physics Experiments
Physics can be boring if you are just learning concepts from textbooks. As such, it is a good idea to have your students run experiments in the classroom to learn how to apply physics in the real world. You can have them run tests to determine velocity, momentum, and more.
Giving your students hand-on experience using physics concepts will not only help make physics more interesting but will also help to ingrain the concepts of the class into their minds so they will perform better on exams and may even remember what they learned beyond the walls of your classroom.
With these methods of making physics more engaging for your students in mind, you can start working on your lesson plans to incorporate these ideas as soon as possible.