Key points:
In the past decade, students have been inundated with more and more distractions. The internet provides an infinite amount of said distractions: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to name a few. While the environment that grows children into students–and eventually young adults–has been changing, the education system has proved less dynamic. There are ways to embrace these changes as a means of benefit to a child’s education instead of a burden.
Engagement is the name of the game here, and educators are losing. According to a 2022 Gallup poll, engaged students are 2.5 times more likely to say that they get excellent grades and do well in school. This is massive, but even more impressive is that they are 4.5 times more likely to be hopeful about the future than their actively disengaged peers. Students who are happy to come to school and who see it as an opportunity are bound to feel more self-agency and to be better prepared for their post-educational lives.
Gone are the days of teachers lecturing in front of students who are taking furious notes. Students can be too easily distracted to hang on most instructors’ every word. The more you treat education as a game, the more likely students are to pay attention and be engaged in class.
Many of the best educators use review tools like Kahoot, and Jeopardy! This allowed teachers to complete a module of lecture-based learning, generally a week of class, and imprint the knowledge into long-term memory via these tools. This leads to many downstream effects: better grades, superior retention, and interest in further education.
