What I learnt on ‘Learner Engagement’ from Barack Obama’s twitter account
Let’s face it. As a facilitator, keeping your learners meaningfully engaged is one of the chronic and hardest challenges in the classroom. Children are the toughest audience one can ever have.
The Social Media Conundrum
In today’s world, an ‘influencer’ on social media faces a challenge that is similar to a facilitator’s.
Both of them need to cater to a diverse and distracted audience.
As I was scrolling through my twitter feed distractedly, I came across a tweet from Barack Obama, and ruminated on how one goes about in capturing the attention of his followers on social media.
I happened to find out that Barack Obama’s twitter account is one of the most widely followed twitter accounts today. I was intrigued by this and wondered if I could use his twitter account as a use-case to draw parallels to the classroom environment.
And I did.
An anatomy of Barack Obama’s twitter profile
#1 : Tweet
Think of every lesson plan as a tweet. Reflect on how lengthy it is. Does it acknowledge and respect the attention span of your learners? Keep your lesson plans bite-sized, coherent, intuitive and powerful.
#2: The display picture
Being a facilitator, your body language is highly important. Maintain a positive body language, be authentic and remain zestful.
#3: And keep tweeting..
To be a creator, you need to keep creating. You may not write your best tweets (a.k.a lesson plans) in the beginning, but keep at it. It’s the only way to improve the art.
#4: Follow the right accounts and tags
As a facilitator, it is imperative that you stay connected with your learners, fellow facilitators, the administrators and the wider education fraternity. Nurture a growth mindset.
#5: Retweet
The advantage of staying connected with your peers is that you can simply customise and/or reuse successful lesson plans.
#6: Hit the ‘Like’ button
Acknowledging the interests, effort, voice and space of your learners is crucial. If you want your learners to listen to you, be the one who proactively observes, listens and complements in the classroom. Doing this could give you important feedback and therefore help you devise meaningful contexts that you could use in your future lesson plans.
#7: Set expectations, be predictable
Learners feel secure when there is predictability in the classroom, be it in the form of routines or schedules.
#8: But, mix it up
Your learners are diverse, and so should your lesson plans be. Adopt diverse but appropriate pedagogical approaches so that you can cater to all your learners. Your lesson plans can be diverse yet consistent in the delivery.
#9: Notification: “You have 100 new followers today”
When you focus on quality and stay authentic, it is only a matter of time you gain the attention of even the inattentive and disinterested learners.
Concluding thoughts
The examples quoted above may not be comprehensive, yet I believe it offers a head-start to the facilitators and encourages them to seek solutions that are inter-disciplinary, prevalent and obvious in the community today.
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