Voices from the Middle a Journal of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Attention: To Have and to Hold
Add
the Science of Learning to the Art of Teaching to Enrich
Classroom Instruction
By Judy
Willis, M.D., M.Ed.
Never in
the history of education has there been the challenge
teachers face today where curriculum content and
accountability are rising and educational funding is not
only failing to keep up, but is becoming increasingly
linked to performance on standardized tests of the material
that must be successfully taught from that expanding
curriculum. Teachers who know how to capture and hold the
attention of their students can create excitement and
creative learning environment by utilizing brain-based
strategies to bring students’ enthusiastic attention into
their lessons so these students can become critical
thinkers with the highly developed skills of executive
function to not only master state standards and the
associated tests, but to make connections, judgments, and
critical analysis using the information they learn.
It has been liberating and gratifying to join the
professional educators who are already workings as critical
analysts of education related research. Valid brain
research, and not misleading statistics, must drive
educational methodology. If we want to energize and enliven
the minds of our students, we, as informed educators must
begin in our own classrooms.
As informed teachers, we can serve as the voice of reason,
first to the parents, then to the school boards and voters.
The ultimate goal is for professional educators, and not
the politicians, to utilize our expertise in education, to
take the lead in developing and analyzing brain-based
educational research and techniques and free ourselves from
government dictated assumptions, into creative ways of
looking for solutions that will help emancipate teachers,
students, parents, and administrators from the confinements
erected by uninformed legislators. Until then we can bring
excitement and enrichment to our lessons and still achieve
and exceed standardized requirements. Some of the
strategies that have empowered me to do this in my
classroom are presented in this article so other teachers
can use them to rekindle the spark of joyful learning and
rescue their students from the confines of teaching to the
test.
Capturing Their Attention
Before
students can make memories or learn, you must capture their
attention. Neuroimaging and brain mapping studies have
revealed the structural changes in the brain that occur
when new learning becomes retained in subcortical storage
areas. Although this can occur in all the lobes of the
brain, it is especially noted in the subcortical memory
storage areas of the frontal and occipital lobes. A recent
study demonstrated increased brain growth in the occipital
lobes after subjects learned and practiced juggling.
Similar studies reveal memory storage becomes more
efficient when memories are related to prior knowledge. The
more memories in the bank, the more neuron circuits there
are to connect with new information. In a similar manner,
each time a student focuses attention, the activation of
alerting and focusing pathways results in these neuronal
circuits becoming stronger and more efficient at carrying
new data into storage.
Practice
or repetition of the process of focusing attention is like
exercising a muscle. The neuronal circuits involved become
more developed because of their repeated activation.
Practice results in the circuit being easier to access and
activate. Repeated stimulation of the attention circuit is
like hikers along a trial who eventually carve out a
depression in the road. Repeated hiking makes the path more
defined and easier to follow. Similarly, with more use, the
brain pathway for focusing attention becomes, with use,
easier to activate and follow into the memory banks.
Awareness is the
attention of the moment. The subconscious mind needs to be
on automatic pilot to process the enormous amount
information from the world coming in through all the
senses. When our brains are working optimally, we recognize
some input as familiar but unimportant and ignore them. We
then automatically consider the data needing to be
acknowledged at that moment. After brief consideration this
is either dropped from working memory and forgotten, or
selected for storage. For example, when looking for a
particular highway exit you are aware of passing exit signs
and pay attention to them momentarily. If an exit is not
the one you are looking for, you won’t send its name to
your working memory bank. Attention becomes not only one of
focus, but also one of correct elimination of inappropriate
or unimportant stimuli.
Optimal
brain activation occurs when students are in positive
emotional states. Attention is also prompted when the
material holds personal meaning, connects to their
interests, is presented with elements of surprise, and/or
when it provokes wonder. This is why attentiveness is so
closely linked to positive emotional cueing and personal
meaning. When there is connection to prior knowledge or
positive emotional experience, new information passage
through the information filters (limbic system) is faster
and more extensive. If this system of filters is positively
stimulated to pay attention to the information, the new
material is linked onto existing brain cell networks. If
there are no emotional or intellectual connections with the
new information, as is often the case in streamlined
curriculum geared to teach the students facts to
regurgitate on tests, their brains are less successful at
developing the meaningful connections that create efficient
memory circuits. When information is not presented in a way
that sparks attention, it may be discarded, and attention
withdrawn.
Grab Their Interest
Attention
is a process of selecting the most relevant information
from the mass of sensory input all around us. One of your
tasks as a teacher is to emphasize the important
information. What may seem obvious to you as the main point
of a lesson may not be as clear to your students. You also
want to help them filter out some of the distracting
environmental stimuli that might interfere with focus on
the critical data. Gaining and keeping students attention
will promote information passage from simple momentary
awareness to working memory and then to stored long-term
memory banks in the subcortical areas of the brain.
I recall a poster that read, “A
Mind Stretched Will Never Revert to its Original
Size.” Good
teachers can and do stretch their students’ brains by first
stimulating their imaginations and interest to captivate
their attention. One valuable attention grabbing strategy
involves the same methodology you recommend to your
students to encourage them to write more compelling essays
by the “Show, don’t tell” technique.
Before a
lesson, consider how you can “show” so students will be
drawn into the topic. One strategy is to build
anticipation. If you are approaching a lesson that could be
rather dull, but is critical to their fund of knowledge,
you can build excitement by having a sign up such as,
“TWENTY FOUR HOURS UNTIL THE FORCE ARRIVES.” The next day
when you lecture about forceful or powerful opening
sentences for essays, you’ll have created anticipation, and
that will harness attention.
A medical colleague primes the pump of the residents he
teaches by telling them in advance what three or four
diseases they will see in the patients they will examine
the following day. In that case, knowing what to expect
prompts them to read with focus about those illnesses. The
information they acquire when they examination and discuss
these patients then has a preexisting memory circuit to
latch on to. The result is greater attention, connection,
and memory retention.
To
engage students in active attention and learning you can
also prime their pumps to motivate their interest in the
information you have to offer. Pose a question that will
not have a single, definite, correct answer. Don’t permit
students to respond immediately, but be available to answer
a few questions that help clarify. Then, after giving them
a reasonable amount of quiet think time, ask them to do a
quickwrite or think-pair-share about their opinions of the
answer. After this personal involvement with the
information, they will be more attentive to your lecture
because they’ll be seeking confirmation of their own
opinions, or the facts to back them up.
It is
always helpful when cross-curriculum studies can work as
stimulators for student interest and critical thinking. For
example, as a prompt for analytical writing in English
class, after students studied the Constitution in history
ask them to write about, “How would you create a law that
would protect rights of free speech without having the KKK
use this law to burn crosses near the homes of African
Americans?” You can explain the need for substantive
supporting paragraphs in this type of essay. Because the
students are stimulated by the topic and the connection to
their history class and empowered by thinking of themselves
as lawmakers, they will feel an authentic reason to gather
more interpretive knowledge about the Constitution and Bill
of Rights. They will also have a motivation to learn about
writing convincingly in expository essays because they are
connected to the topic. If you start the process with a
class or partner discussion of the subject, this
verbalization of their opinions will also prime their
interest in learning how to write a convincing essay.
It is
valuable to rotate techniques, lest the unexpected become
expected or even tedious. Greet students at the door with a
riddle along with a hello, or a vocabulary word the
definition of which is posted at the table at which they
should sit. Give them an unusual fact or tell them a
provocative quote and ask that they consider who might have
said it.
As
important as it is to capture your students’ attention and
help them practice building attention-focusing skills, it
is equally important for you know when to let their brains
rest. If you are delivering complex material, especially in
a lecture mode, brain rests (“syn-naps”) can be necessary
after as little as 15 minutes. If you see your students
becoming fidgety, distracted, and unfocused you have gone
on too long. It is best to have students take the brain
rest before neurotransmitter depletion occurs.
These
neurotransmitters are the brain chemicals needed to carry
information across synapses from nerve to nerve. They can
be replenished within minutes if the break is taken
before
complete
depletion, but their rebuilding takes longer if they are
severely depleted. Observe your students for the very first
signs that precede the glazed expressions of brain burnout.
Try to plan brain rests before they reach that state.
In
addition, if you identify these overload times before they
occur and have a break before that point, the topic about
which you were teaching will not be linked with or
negatively reinforced by the students’ associating their
bored feeling with that topic when it comes up again. You
also want to avoid the cycle whereby they feel their acting
out is rewarded by a break. You can do this by planning
these rests to occur while they are still feeling good.
Just remember to give them a short warning before the
actual brain rest. They may be so engaged in their activity
that if the break comes without a few minutes to reach some
closure, they will be frustrated. Also, let them know if
and when they will be coming back to the activity so they
learn to plan their time.
Once you have their attention, you empower your students to
become engaged in their learning process. Using surprise,
novelty, and variation to capture and hold their attention
will activate the centers of the brain needed to begin the
process. They will now be ready to sift through
information, form connections and relationships, and
achieve the ultimate goal of placing new knowledge into
their memory storage centers. Surprise them today and
they’ll reward you by retrieving the memory months from now
and on standardized testing day.