How to Increase Classroom Presence

Most of us have struggled at some point in our career to be the teacher who gets the attention of the students very quickly, whose students grasp the point of the task very easily and who feels confident when entering new classrooms, working with challenging groups, etc.

Some teachers just have it in themselves, they do it naturally, without putting much effort. Some of us, however, need to learn, build our confidence and work on our skills.

Let’s look at some ideas on how to improve our classroom presence and how to get the students’ attention easier. This is a coin that has two sides: our classroom presence as teachers , i.e. our teacher talking time and classroom management skills, and our students’ classroom presence in terms of attention and involvement.

Teacher Presence

To begin with, I would like to highlight that having good classroom presence doesn’t mean to get all the attention all the time. It actually means being able to interest and manage the class in a way, so that you can meet the lesson outcomes, the students can leave the classroom having some tangible knowledge and enthusiastic to come back.

1. Teacher’s voice

This is not about yelling, annoying the students with meaningless “Pay attention”s, “Silence”s, “You need to focus”es. If you have tried this, you know it doesn’t work. Students are more likely to continue doing whatever they’re doing, ignoring your efforts, moreover, you are risking to lose your face as their teacher.

The ‘teacher voice’ to me, is not what you’re saying, it’s rather how you’re saying it. The key here is to be confident, to use a slower tempo when giving instructions, to use falling tones rather than rising ones (to use statements NOT questions) if you want the students to complete a task, to carry out an instruction, etc. In short, you need to sound authoritative but not commanding.  Using a low pitch voice as much as your vocal cords give you the chance to, can play the trick. This may sound very minute, but you don’t know unless you try it?

2. Body Language

As it is in everyday interaction with people from different walks of life, in the classroom as well, gestures, mimics and body language, in general, have a huge impact on how people comprehend you. Your body language in the classroom should allow the students to read confidence, politeness and respect. Hands play a huge role here. When anxious, we tend to hover our hands around, hide at our back, etc. Students are very quick at reading in confidence and, make no mistake, they will use it against us. When I was just starting to teach, I used to conduct a 10-minute class in front of a mirror, or record myself when doing so, and then giving feedback to myself. This really helps, no matter how artistic it may sound?.

3. Personal Space

This is something nobody likes to be violated. Though talking face to face to the student rather than across the room is more effective, we should not forget to keep a proper distance as well. This, first of all, respects the individual and secondly, reinforces confidence. However, approaching misbehaving or inattentive students every now and then and guiding them through a task while keeping an appropriate distance will get their attention more than shouting out across the classroom.

4. Manage Emotions

Though sometimes it can be really challenging to manage our anger and dissatisfaction with a student, showing it has never done anything good for anyone. Firstly, take a minute before you decide to get angry with a student, just pause and use the “Look” instead. It can work miracles. By doing this, you will keep your face and respect towards a student – a skill that should always be implicitly taught. Same is true for super excitement. Holding emotions a little back to me and keeping an appropriate level of distance helps to manage classrooms better and achieve better results.

How to Increase Student Presence

It is not a secret, that students can be aloof, distracted and unwilling to participate. There can be a lot of reasons for this – exhaustion, disinterest, lack of motivation, etc.

The best way to cope with this, is to understand the reasons. Once identified, it is much easier to work towards a solution.

Anyway, here are some ideas that can help to improve student classroom presence more.

1. Keep it varied

If the class is not interesting – this is what the students will say in most of the cases – we need to address the issue upfront. Reflecting on our teaching methods, the choice of activities and lesson stages, in general, can help us to identify the issues and fix them. Instead of the original Teach-test method, we can use the ideas of the flipped classroom for instance. You can read more about it here. It will be refreshing; students will have something to work on and be responsible for.

2. Use Students’ Interests

We all have things we enjoy doing. Using this to make the classes more interesting definitely increases student involvement. Using smartphones to play a vocabulary revision game (Kahoot), Organizing online debates and discussions (Flipgrid) and integrating other online tools and platforms can help to keep up to date with technological developments and the natural interest of your students.

3. Work on Motivation

To ensure students want to come back to class and are open to learning, it is critical to address their motivators and demotivators. Demotivators can be a lot; strong students, not comprehending the material, not enough individual approach to the student, etc. However, finding some common motivators and then working on the individual ones is the best place to start with. Common motivators can be like; praising the students open class for a good job done, working out a point scale to award points for progress, using motivational quotes, writing personalized “Good Job” messages to the best performers, etc.

4. Keep Students Responsible

To involve the students more in the learning process, you can also assign group projects to bring them together where each student will be responsible for a specific part. You can also assign co-teachers where students need to help each other to assimilate new material and analyze it together. You can also allocate a day of “student teachers”, where each student or a group of students (depending on the number of your class) will be responsible to revise or teach something to the rest of the group. Here they start to appreciate the teacher and the class time more as they appear in the teacher shoes with all its challenges.

These were some basic things we can try to make the journey of teaching and learning more interesting, stress-free and rewarding.