The more you know about a topic, the easier it will be to develop it and learn more about it, so there is a reciprocal relationship between learning, memory and attention, Watson said.
As a teacher, your role is to support the construction of memory through planning and reviewing assessments. Because? The likelihood that students will be able to learn and also control their own attention is zero, he said.
It’s easy to blame students for their attention and memory deficiencies, but in reality “learning is actually very difficult and takes up most to all of the cognitive resources that my students actually have,” Watson said. For example, if your students are learning to make topic sentences, they should think about how to accomplish this difficult task, not how to focus on the task; That’s something Watson can help them do.
Useful attention strategies for the classroom
High School Teacher Blake Harvard supports self-assessment in the learning process in your AP psychology class.
Use simple assessments, such as asking students what they learned the day before or even five minutes ago, to learn what class material students are having difficulty remembering or learning. The frequency of these opportunities to remember information helps the lessons stick.
An assessment is a learning opportunity, Harvard said, and “retrieving information (pulling out that memory) and using it on itself strengthens that memory.”
Harvard believes that teaching should focus on memory and that students should think critically about the way they assimilate and retrieve information. Your new book, “Do I have your attention?“brings research to teachers in an easy-to-digest way that has positively contributed to their own classroom practices.
To keep its students’ attention, Harvard places them facing the front of the classroom, even when classroom furniture doesn’t easily support that configuration. Currently, his students sit at tables, not individual desks, so he had to get creative to get everyone facing forward.
Decorations are also kept to a minimum in Harvard classrooms, and those that remain have to do with the subject of their classes. But “it’s not completely bleak,” he said. Cell phones are kept away at all times during the school day and he also encourages his students to take notes with pencil on paper, rather than transcribing on a computer.
Common classroom practices, such as movement, can be helpful in engaging students’ attention and memory retention, and benefits of exercise when learning is well documented. But Watson cautioned that the movement is not a panacea for students’ attention problems. “The issue is not that motion is a good idea or that motion is bad; it’s a really useful solution to an alerting problem, but it could make an orientation problem worse,” Watson said.
So if a student falls asleep in Watson’s class, he could resort to having him get up from his desk and perform a task, such as returning a book to another teacher’s classroom. But if a student appears to be distracted by a football game outside the classroom window and his attention is diverted from the lesson — an orientation and executive control issue — “movement might be a bad idea,” Watson said.
Give students time to think.
brains forgetand that is a normal memory process, but sometimes students can experience recovery failure. When its students have trouble remembering, Harvard helps them by providing context clues or rephrasing the definition of the concept they are having trouble remembering.
Reviewing material from a previous lesson, Watson takes a simple approach to boosting his students’ memory and memory recall. Instead of starting with a brief review of the previous day’s topics, ask your students to write down what they learned in the previous lesson. Then walk around the classroom and monitor the students’ responses. “Now, [students are] practice retrieving it from your memory instead of me telling it to you,” he said.
If students can’t seem to remember what they recently learned, “that’s not their failure, that’s my failure, because I didn’t practice enough. So what I need to remember is to include that in more frequent practice remedial exercises,” Watson said.
The pressure teachers face from schools, administrators, and districts around standardized testing can be overwhelming, and students’ failure to remember class material can contribute to that stress. However, Watson knows that laying a solid foundation in the first half of the year is essential for her students’ long-term success.
For example, Watson sophomores should be able to write excellent five-paragraph analytical essays by the end of the school year. Instead of following a fast pace of teaching, Watson spends the entire fall semester studying individual sentences and paragraphs. Her students often ask her why her class is behind because their peers in other classes are already writing five-paragraph essays, but Watson assures them that first mastering the individual components of a five-paragraph essay will make writing longer material easier come the spring semester.
