Difficulties to maintain the attention of your students? Learn a little about the empathy map.

It is common that in the XXI century students have little interest in the subjects whose classes are traditional, as more and more children and young people are more connected to a number of devices with access to an unlimited source of information: the internet. For this reason if you have problems to maintain the attention of your students and get them to develop the skills you require, you can not pretend that the problem is theirs because they do not want to learn, go further and put the problem in you, ask yourself doing wrong? or what are you not doing or doing excessively? as for example being, more professor and less practical and ludic.

But do not worry, as you know, although you are already a teacher who inspires and teaches others, every day you, just like your students, can learn new useful things for your work. Today we will show you a great tool that will allow you to find answers to the questions referring to the learning of your subject and to maintain the attention of your students, in fact with this tool you will be able to know thoroughly your students, so that you will understand what their interests are, what their fears, what they are passionate about, what they want to achieve. You will know the best ways and means to approach and make your subject your favorite.

The tool that we bring to you today is called Empathy Map, and it is a tool widely used in innovation and the business sector, however it can be applied in any context, in this case in education. The Empathy Map will allow you to know and define your target audience.

Steps to use the empathy map:

1.  Define the problem in the form of opportunity, that is, if your problem is that your students do not pay enough attention to your class, then you can turn it into an opportunity like this: how could I get my students interested in my class and stay tuned?
2. You already have your opportunity and you public clear, now you must complete each of the fields that contains the empathy map, to do it, make a few interviews, talk with your students, get information that allows you to fill your map:

1. Write each idea you got as a phrase and paste it in a post it in the corresponding quadrant, guide yourself by the questions in each quadrant to correctly locate all the information collected.
2. Once you complete your empathy map with the results of your observation, you will have a clearer picture of your audience and you will get the first clues related to the path you could use to reach it more easily, and devise the best solution to answer to the challenge that you traced.
3. Analyze the information you obtained and you have already classified and see how you could use some elements to solve your challenge, for example, if your challenge is: how could I get my students interested in my class and stay tuned? and on the map of empathy you discover that they like music and most of the time they are on their cell phones they watch videos of youtubers and they download and use apps for each thing, think how you can use these elements in your favor to keep your attention in the class, you can ally yourself with the music or arts teacher and look at how to teach your subjects through music, take advantage of technology and search many applications to do some research that may be useful in the development and learning of the subjects that you require. Remember that everything depends on the perspective from where you look at things.

If you follow these steps correctly, you can be sure that you will have broadly rewarding results for you and your little learners. If we know what someone's strengths and weaknesses are, we will quickly learn how to get along with that person in a short time, like children, if we do not have the courage to be flexible with our teachings, we will be incomplete teachers since we do not we show interest in wanting to train our students in a positive and efficient way. Thanks to technology, the mentality of current generations is different from that of our times and only updating as teachers and giving more practical classes and fewer conferences will achieve real changes. Thank you very much to @steemiteducation for letting me talk about a topic that I really like and that I know perfectly, if you have any questions, I invite you to leave your question in the comment box, I hope and you liked the topic that has been discussed today.

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