Bringing Student Interests into your ESL Classroom

We are going to start off today’s blog with your reflection question. Are you including your student interests in your lessons? Take a moment to reflect on this question. Think about this question and answer to yourself honestly where you stand. 

There are so many times when we are looking for lessons to teach that we are so worried about simply finding a lesson. Often we forget to ask ourselves, will the students find this lesson engaging? Not including the students interests and strengths  in your lessons can lead to some of the lessons falling flat. This will result in the students being disengaged. Bored students will not connect to the lesson and in many cases fail to master the content. 

Like many of you I have experienced this firsthand. This really hit me hard last year while we were distant learning. I was so focused on everything else, and I did not take the time to learn and adapt to some of my students’ interests. This was such a missed opportunity for me because I later realized that some of the students had strengths and interests that I could incorporate in my lessons. 

This hit me so hard when I found out later in the year. For the upcoming school year, I vowed to pay attention and be intentional about finding out their interests. 

As I mentioned, I had missed an opportunity to learn more about the students’ interests. This would have given me the opportunity to incorporate those interests into the lessons. This school year I started looking for cues and clues immediately. For example, I immediately took notice that the students were interested in my classroom library. This excited me and helped me to decide to include independent reading time into my lessons.

Once while I was teaching this year, I heard students quietly ask if they could work with a partner. This gave me a clue that a lot of them love collaborating with their classmates. Now I am planning on implementing literature circles with my students. 

I also included a student interest survey for the students to complete. This helped me decide what are some topics that they are interested in learning more about throughout the school year. 

Throughout the school year pay attention to any cues and clues from your students. Being attentive to this will help you incorporate those interests into your lessons. Zoning in on these will help you meet the needs of a lot of your Language Learners. 

You can also do student interest surveys. You can do them around their interests in books and their basic interests. Completing both will give you a lot of insight into topics and strategies you can bring into the classroom. 

Think about some of your upcoming lessons. Plan to include your students’ interests into the lessons. If you are unsure of your student interests, then plan to find out some more details about what they love. 

How are you including your student interests into the lessons?

Download the transcript to this episode here.