Teacher Strategies to Gain and Sustain Student Attention

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Pedagogy - The Teacher, Educational Leadership, grade: A, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, course: Masters Degree in Teaching Secondary Education and Vocational Training, language: English, abstract: The strategies to gain and sustain student attention have been studied by many experts, convinced that without the involvement of the students the teaching cannon be effective. The objective of this small-scale research is to explore the task implemented in a language school for adults in order to understand what strategies adopted by the teacher contribute to students¿ involvement. The analysis of the data obtained from the video recording, complemented by the feedback from the students and other teachers shows that the observed teacher uses successfully many different strategies to gain and maintain students¿ attention, such as setting a positive mental set, employing clarity, encouragingness and using attention-getters. Key words: gain student attention, sustain student involvement, positive mental set, encouragingness, group focus, activity flow, effective monitoring