How to keep students focused in live lessons - structure of lesson

[HellyDouglas]

It's hard to keep students focused when they're not right in front of you. I found it really difficult when I was teaching online as I had to follow a "camera off" policy so I couldn't even see if the students were drifting off.

But, over time I found some things helped. One that made a big difference was the overall structure of the lesson.

As students joined at different times, I had a starter activity displayed that required no explanation.
Then I introduced the learning objective for the lesson.
I divided the lesson into bite-sized chunks, starting with retrieval practice.
I embraced gamification and tried to find fun activities that delivered the LO
I introduced mini-evaluations after each lesson chunk to review progress.
For each task, I had an extension ready to reduce students waiting for others to finish. Often it was just an application question I could display using screen share.
I shortened my live lessons so students were sent off to do an independent task in the last 15 mins (I have 100 min lessons) I kept anyone struggling on the video call for 1:1 or small group work.

I hope this helps if you're looking for ways to keep students focused in your live lessons.