Interactive classes have long ceased to be a “new trend” and have become part of a teacher’s daily life. It often feels like creating engaging activities requires too much effort and time. However, there are techniques that can quickly diversify classes and increase student engagement. These are the tools that teachers from leading Russian universities and members of the Mehhod.GSOM community shared at the master class “How to make a lesson interesting: simple techniques that work.”

A closed community about modern teaching methods Method.GSOM for professors and methodologists of universities and corporate universities. The community brings together professionals from more than 132 universities and corporate universities in Russia and neighboring countries and the best teaching practices online, offline and hybrid.

 

The first of these tools at the workshop was storytelling – a teaching method used to create captivating and memorable stories. This presentation of information helps students better understand and remember educational material. There are many ways to use storytelling for educational purposes. For example, teachers can use stories to illustrate complex cases, and students can use them to collaborate on projects, exchange ideas, and even defend their thesis.

 

Senior lecturer at the Higher School of Economics Natalia Alyamovskaya spoke about how to build a structure, come up with plots and characters within the educational context:

 “Storytelling is a powerful tool that helps students understand better, remember, and engage in learning. It is important to remember that approaches to the use of storytelling and the structure of stories may change depending on the goals and objectives that the professor sets for himself, as well as depending on the audience who is studying in the course (values, interests, level of education, etc.) . Thus, we can use storytelling both for “local” tasks and examples, and for building the relationship of the course with other disciplines. For example, if students are studying a course on logistics, then you can choose a hero and problem based on the context, and through his example show that the discipline intersects with some others on a global level, and/or explain the structure of the course. The variety of storytelling techniques makes it possible to use different approaches to solving learning problems.”

 

One technique that works in conjunction with storytelling can be gamification. Irina Gilmanova, manager of the online pedagogy laboratory at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics, said that many teachers often find gamification difficult to implement. But in fact, many people use it in their daily work without knowing it. One example is creating a system of points and ratings that can be built into an entire game with specific characters. The main rule in using the tool is to maintain a balance between gaming and non-gaming formats. It is important to consider that gamification can limit free decision-making, and its effectiveness has a short-term effect.

The last tool that the workshop participants discussed was artificial intelligence. Olga Akimova, associate professor at Moscow State University, demonstrated how virtual tours of museums and the creation of drawings using AI can be used in foreign language classes to engage students.

 You can find out what programs Olga Akimova used when storytelling definitely doesn’t work, and what kind of character you are in the game by watching the recording of the event.