4 Essential Tips for Educators Teaching with Movies

Every teacher knows that students love movie time in the classroom. It’s a welcome change from the ebb and flow of the school day and a great way to make learning meaningful. However, as a teacher, you know that movie time comes with its challenges: some students will want to zone out or relax, and it takes up a lot of class time.

Consider these tips to maximize student learning and engagement during classroom movie time.

This one may seem obvious but can be overlooked in your search for a movie. In the context of education, movie relevance can be broken down into three buckets:

Lesson relevance: Is this movie relevant to the lesson I’m teaching?
Age relevance: Are my students mature enough to watch this movie/clip?
Recency relevance: Is the movie from the 1950’s, or is it a movie that was released recently?

Lesson relevance is important because it helps you accomplish your lesson objective. If the movie/clip is not relevant to your lesson, what is your purpose in showing it?

The importance of age relevance is probably a given: you don’t want to expose students to inappropriate content. It won’t look good on you as an educator.

Recency relevance is applicable when you’re showing short clips to your students. The more familiar your students are with the characters in the movie, the better. This not only gets them more excited to participate in a discussion or an activity about the clip but also has benefits to retention, as they can connect prior knowledge (familiar movie characters) to new information (your key lesson ideas).

Having a strong combination of all three types of relevance will make sure your use of movie clips is highly effective.

Introducing movies into your classroom doesn’t have to be a special occasion or a large time commitment. When used effectively, movies are a powerful instructional and engagement tool that can foster greater student learning and understanding.

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