There are times when students become very distracted and they don't want to pay attention or learn anything that the teacher says. I remember when I was at high school, most of the students didnt pay attention to anything unless there was a lesson at the end of the class.

A very important part of the teacher's work should be to motivate their students to pay attention and to learn the subject. You need to engage them in the topic, let them investigate, create, challenge, debate and contribute to the class.

If you want your students to learn, you need to find creative ways to create a genuine interest in the topic. It is not enough to give them a grade for a lesson, that is not enough motivation and the result will be that they will just study the necessary information to get a decent grade. But if you want them to really learn the topic, you need to create a genuine interest in the subject.

But how do you create interest in learning your subject? There are different ways, one is to reward them, like saying that the best students will receive extra points, however that is not always a good method. What you can do is let them make an investigation in groups and then challenge the ideas amongst each other in the classroom.

You can create live case studies of the subject they have to learn or tell them to create a live case study. When students apply what they are learning to real life examples, they will be much more interested and with the power of the internet there is a lot of great information that they can find.

Another way to create interest in learning is to visit places that encourage learning. For example, if you are teaching history, take them to a museum or let them go to the museum for an investigation. If you want them to learn about administration, tell them to go to an enterprise and interview an expert.

There are many other ways to use live case studies, but sometimes the best ideas will come form your own students, ask them what they would like to see in class or how would they like to learn the subject.