Tag Archives: learning

Are You Listening? Teaching Young Minds to Focus

As teachers, repeating ourselves ad nauseam is not our intention, but we all do it. We engage, refocus, and double check our students have learned what we taught. Sometimes it feels like we work significantly harder than our students.

Focus is the beginning of all learning in the classroom
I attended a Learning and the Brain conference and was challenged by its theme: focus is the beginning of all learning in the classroom. What we choose to focus on is what makes up our cognitive schema. This concept seems simple, but I have since realized how profound a problem focus is for all ages.

As a Learning Specialist, I decided to observe classrooms through this new “focus” lens. I noticed in a classroom of students, even well-behaved students, focus was consistently inconsistent at any given time. In fact, I have yet to observe a group of 20 students all fully engaged for the same five uninterrupted minutes (this assumes focus requires more than having eyes on the teacher and lips closed).

Expectation of focus is a balanced responsibility
Some educators believe focusing students is the teacher’s job as informed by best practices, brain research, and engaging learning activities. But, they say, due to technology’s influence, students’ ability to focus is waning. However, I began to believe expectation of focus can be a balanced responsibility; we have to do our part, but our students have to do their part, too.

I pondered three questions:

In general, how do we teach students to focus?

How do I teach five and six-year-olds to focus?

How much cognitive control can we expect from elementary school children?

We can only control what we understand
Our brain controls our actions, thoughts, emotions, and learning. Yet how much do we really understand about our brain and its connection to who we are and what we do every day? We can only control what we understand.

So, my first attempt to improve focus in the classroom was to teach students what it means to focus.

Mindful Monkey, Happy PandaA psychologist in Atlanta introduced me to Lauren Alderfer’s Mindful Monkey, Happy Panda. The book’s main characters, Monkey and Panda, engage in a conversation that teaches readers what it means to be “Monkey Minded.” Monkey is always doing two or three things at once. When he is eating, he is thinking about playing; when he is playing, he is thinking about reading. His mind is never doing just one thing and, therefore, he feels scattered. Monkey notices that Panda is  peaceful, happy, and enjoying life. He learns that Panda’s secret to happiness is that he only thinks about one thing at a time. By focusing on one thing, Panda is able to fully enjoy the one thing he is doing. Monkey decides to give it a try.

The goal is to have children see both states of mind are appropriate at different times
Two useful phrases, Monkey Minded and Panda Moment, help teach principles of cognitive control to young students. If students can experience what it feels like to focus on one thing, a Panda Moment, then they are ready to notice when they are Monkey Minded. The goal is to have children see that both states of mind are enjoyable and appropriate at different times throughout the day. When it is time to learn, focusing all attention on the teacher, like a Panda Moment, is best for learning. If Monkey Minded moments occur during learning, important information can be missed, making learning difficult.

Panda Moments will come easily to some and with great difficulty to others. These are opportunities to build attention stamina  by introducing focusing strategies and breathing techniques. I believe students are able to focus just as well as they did before technology and video games. The only difference is that the new generation needs teachers to define what it means to sustain focus, and to help students build stamina since the world is full of ever-present distractions.

If we can empower students to recognize when they are doing their part and hold them accountable when they are not, we will be able to use our best teaching methods and students will be able to use their cognitive ability to listen, experience, and learn.

Secondly, I realized helping students understand their brain can help them focus. 

Fantastic Elastic BrainAt the Learning and the Brain conference, I discovered JoAnn Deak’s picture book, Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch It, Shape It, a fantastic tool to help students understand the brain, how it works, and how it impacts them every day. It uses age-appropriate language and captivating illustrations to help kids learn what is happening in their brain when they engage in daily activities. Here are a few favorite teaching points (among many) from this book:

  1. The brain is a muscle that wants to grow and be strengthened
  2. Making mistakes and practicing is essential for learning because the process helps our brain make and strengthen connections
  3. Learning new things stretches the brain and helps it grow.
  4. Our emotions impact our learning, but we can control and change our emotions if we pay attention and make helpful choices.

Finally, I was challenged to better understand focus as a teacher.

FocusIn Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman discusses how cognitive control and emotional intelligence are essential skills to achieving potential. As educators, we need to reflect upon how we teach students about the brain and its power to control thoughts, actions, emotions, and how all three cognitive aspects interact to create life experiences. We can only control what we know and understand.

Helping students understand how their daily experiences, emotions, and intelligence are a product of the brain in action empowers them to shape their brain to best of their ability. By understanding and balancing the teacher/student responsibility for focus in the classroom, we are able to establish a solid beginning for all learning.

Brynn Redmond is the K-1 Learning Specialist at The Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia.

This, I Want for My Daughter

Schoolroom in the Parlor

Huddled under voluminous blankets, watching the white pile up outside my windows, I reach for the old purple paperback that first gave me the word snowbound.

The book’s been sitting on a shelf next to the glider where I feed my four-month-old daughter six times a day. It’s there with the other children’s books whose covers can carry me back to parts of my life that I would otherwise never remember. This cover is a painting of a young girl standing in front of a glowing hearth, reading a book aloud to four other children. Their eyes are fixed on her.

I remember this image so well, I can almost feel the warm light on my skin, almost sense the snow outside their windows. Inside the cover, I find my name inscribed in careful, crooked second-grade cursive. I haven’t read Schoolroom in the Parlor by Rebecca Caudill for nearly twenty years. I don’t know what to expect when I open it again.

“‘I put all my books away the day Miss Cora’s school ended,’ said Chris. ‘That was the Friday before Christmas. I’m going to leave them there until school starts again. That won’t be till the first Monday in August’…”

I’m eight years old again, snug as a bug in a book.

The family is setting up the fire in the parlor they’ve turned into a schoolroom for the winter.

Kindling,
backstick,
andirons,
whittled,
blazed up…

These words crackled with warmth long before I knew what they meant. I still don’t know what andirons are.

Brown Paper Package

Father rides off on horseback to choose a prize for the children’s ‘Great Thoughts’ contest. The oldest daughter and teacher-for-the-winter Althy has taught a proverb or poem every day in January—who will remember the most, come the end of the month? The mysterious brown paper package from Father goes to the winner.

When the snow really sets in, the children all join in shoveling paths to the stable, the well, and the woodpile. The two youngest girls are handed long black breadpans to use as shovels. When I first read this book, I had no memory of snow, and no experience with breadpans. But I wanted to be there, knee-deep in the drifts, watching Father shovel faster than any of the rest of us, chipping in to weather winter as a family.

“Come outdoors with me a minute…”

When words like firmament and ethereal come up in the schoolroom, Mother takes her youngest daughter outside to show her the stars, the “spangled heavens.”

Author Rebecca Caudill never tells you how great this family is. But you feel it in everything they say and do.

The adventures the Fairchild children enjoy are real, exciting adventures. They’re given freedom and challenged with responsibilities (playing on their own in the orchard all day, rafting across the river to the store…), but there are limits. There are expectations and consequences. Their lives are warmly lit and safely enclosed, like the cozy schoolroom in the parlor. As a child, I barely noticed Mother and Father. Now I see that it’s Father and Mother who make it all safe, make it home, make it possible.

This, I want

Caudill doesn’t paint this family as overachievers. The children aren’t angelic geniuses. Mother isn’t super-organized, equipped with charts, books, or blogs about homeschooling and cookery. Father doesn’t wax eloquent about efficiency, education, and hard work. These are regular people, regular parents who simply care about what their children learn.

It’s a simple story. And it’s stoking my fires of hope: this, I want for my daughter. I want her to have a sweet and sturdy structure for her adventures. I want her to have a mother and father who don’t need to be the main characters of their own life stories.

And I want her to learn how to be amazed.

“Bonnie! Bonnie, wake up!” somebody was saying…

Father set the lamp on the table. He lifted Bonnie from underneath the covers, set her on the edge of the bed, and began to jerk on her shoes and stockings….

”Let’s go now,” he said, and he hurried down the stairs, lighting the way with the lamp….

Mother was already outside. Chris and Emmy and Althy were there.

“Look!” said Father to Debby and Bonnie. “Look at the sky.”

“Debby and Bonnie turned their faces up and looked into the sky. There, across the immense dark-blue dome of the sky, enormous yellow-green curtains of light, tipped with fieriest red, rolled and folded, one after another–rolled and folded, rolled and folded…And below, on the still, snowbound earth stood the Fairchilds, wrapped in blankets, watching, watching.”

It’s a true classic that can capture the imagination of the same girl at nine and at twenty-nine. When I finish it, I set Schoolroom in the Parlor back in its rightful place on the shelf of treasures—just until my daughter’s hands are ready to turn the pages.

The Blue Hill Meadows by Cynthia Rylant Blackout (picture book) by John Rocco Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan

While Schoolroom in the Parlor is no longer readily available new, here are a few recommended titles that also express the wonder of learning and a supportive family influence.

Kate Roberts is a writer, editor, and new mom who has watched stories speak into children’s lives over nine years of working with children as a nanny, teacher, and special-needs caregiver. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. They love to read Winnie the Pooh together.