How Do I Make My Demonstrations More Effective?
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Demonstrations can be a great way to engage students, demonstrate a phenomenon, and stimulate intellectual curiosity. You can highlight important concepts, recreate classic experiments, or showcase surprising results (though keep in mind that the power of surprise can only occur once students already have a firm grasp of the concept).
- When planning in-class demonstrations, keep in mind what you want your students to take away from the experience: What should students be able to do afterwards?
- Engage your audience
- Have them predict the outcome
- Ask them to observe and report what happened
- Encourage them to analyze why the outcome occurred
- Remember that engagement doesn't have to be talking, students can write, draw, or graph
- Assess their learning - Science teacher Stephen Collins says that if you don't assess your students' learning after a demonstration, then you don't know if you taught them anything.
- Appropriate assessment depends upon the objective of your demonstration, i.e., you won't use the same assessment approach for every demonstration
- Asking students to predict future outcomes is one way to see if they understand what they have observed
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