Giving the Right Attention to All Students

While every educator has likely experienced a child who makes a spectacle in class to receive attention, not every teacher knows how to react. Last week, Coach G (Education Week) offered some tips to steer teachers and administrators in the right direction. “It all starts with the need to focus attention on constructive behavior at the expense of disruptive behavior rather than the other way around,” he said.

Three of Coach G’s tips include:

1. Give attention to attention givers

2. Leverage all available attention
3. Communicate non-verbally

As Coach G puts it, “There's no way around it: all children need and deserve attention. And how you manage a classroom full of kids vying for attention can make or break your overall effectiveness as a teacher.”

To learn the “how” behind Coach G’s tips, click here.

Exercise Increases Students' Ability to Focus in Class

Keeping students focused and engaged in the classroom can be more work than covering the actual lesson material at times. According to an article in the New York Times, one aid in attention retention is exercise. A new study of 138 schoolchildren ages 8 to 11 living in Rome demonstrated that students’ performed better academically after physical activity, specifically endurance exercise (results based on students’ performance on a written test widely accepted as a good indicator of a person’s attention and ability to concentrate).

The study also revealed that when students were asked to learn new drills with a ball in their gym class versus the endurance exercise class, the test scores increased, but not as much as with endurance-focused exercise. The second session, which was “geared toward the development of both motor control and perceptual-motor adaptation abilities,” required more thought than the endurance class, the researchers wrote. The same researchers speculated that asking the students to both think and move was too much, inducing “an excessive stress load” on their brains.

To read the full article click here.