Advertisers use these same strategies to grab consumers' attention, so you might find inspiration for ways to adapt them to your lessons in a TV ad or on the side of a city bus! Keep this in mind as you guide students to improve their selective attention: The first step toward learning is paying attention. Wilson, D. By honing our ability to focus attention at will, we can more effectively screen out two types of distractions: Input through our sensory organs Our emotional responses Distractions via sensory input may be the easier of the two to block, according to Daniel Goleman in his book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.
Cognitive Strategies This shift in emphasis about where problems with attention may lie, when combined with recent neuroscientific findings, suggests that explicit instruction on regulating students' attention may provide them with a valuable cognitive strategy to support self-directed learning.
Shine the spotlight on attention. Brainstorm ways that regulating attention can improve learning, such as: Paying attention to a lesson instead of being distracted by noise in the hallway or something happening in the schoolyard outside the window Switching from learning one subject to the next or from one class to another Putting aside a lunchtime disagreement with a friend to focus on class in the afternoon Completing a homework assignment before turning on TV or a video game "Turning off" worries about doing well on a test in order to stay focused and remember everything studied Identifying what's most important right now and paying attention only to that most important thing 2.
Emphasize that focusing attention is a skill that can be learned and improved. Pace your teaching with students' attention.
Look for ways to make lessons relevant to students' lives. Ask questions to engage students in learning and inquiry. Remember that variety is the spice of attention -- a mix of learning activities helps keep students engaged. Second, they should use imaginative teaching and management strategies to enhance the development of their students' adaptable attention processes.
The stable mechanisms. Even though the scientific understanding of our attentional system emerged only recently, successful teachers have long grasped the first principle at the practical level.
A more intriguing example of teachers' intuitive grasp of the first principle is the tendency of elementary teachers to schedule individualized skill subjects in the morning, and the less precise, more socially engaging subjects in the afternoon PE, art, group projects.
It makes sense to schedule curricular priorities that require rapt attention and precise response during the morning, when it's easier to maintain attention. It is also logical to schedule interesting activities that demand less precision and sustained attention in the afternoon, when students' inherent interest in the activity will elevate their attention level. The principal problem teachers face with our attentional system's built-in bias for high contrast, novelty, and emotional overtones is that the curriculum presents a predictable universe: C-A-T always spells cat , and 6 times 5 always equals We want students to solve such problems automatically and unemotionally, but mastery reduces their need to actively attend to the process.
The result is that such routine, low-contrast curricular tasks tend to bore the same students who spend hours watching TV, with its emphasis on high-contrast, bizarre, and violent programming, which attracts active attention. It's a dilemma: the effective teaching of skills can reduce students' active attention to the process. Again, teachers have creatively responded at the practical level through such—sometimes bizarre—behaviors as playing skill mastery games or threatening nonattentive students—in order to artificially increase their students' attention on otherwise unemotional, low-contrast learning tasks.
For example, a math relay game is totally unrelated to mastering the multiplication tables. But since such games artificially engender attention-getting excitement through rapid action, teachers have intuitively used them to adapt their instruction to the processing realities of their students' stable attentional mechanisms. The adaptable processes. Our profession's principal challenge is to help students learn how to consciously manage those adaptable aspects of their attentional system that aren't preprogrammed to enhance survival.
In the modern era, human life is more than attending to immediate survival. It is now vital to attend to the quality of our lives and to the potential gradual erosion of that quality. Our attentional system constantly separates foreground from background and focuses on the foreground. If we don't consciously control the decision about what's important, the system will revert to survival needs—and we end up trampling the beautiful flowers at our feet in a mad dash toward survival.
It's important that we teach students how to ignore an insensitive comment that wasn't meant to hurt, how to develop into adults who can appreciate a fine work of art without asking about its cost, how to simply observe a sunset. The energy released by the plants that surround a rocket launch site is at least as socially meaningful as the energy used to launch the rocket.
Although we automatically attend to the televised blast-off, we now have to learn how to attend to the equally important gentle growth of the plants in the background of the televised sequence: that's our curricular challenge.
A brain that can't control its own attentional system can be manipulated into thinking that background is foreground. Recent presidential campaigns have used shrill slogans to force limited but very emotional issues into the foreground, in order to meld more pressing and complicated national problems into the background.
The electorate and the media, focused on their own survival, consistently fail to rise up in righteous anger to demand that the candidates reverse the attentional focus.
Helping students attend to potentially important subtle differences and gradual changes is not an insurmountable challenge: educators have already developed many practical responses to an attentional system we didn't understand. We can expand effectively on what we already know and do. It's mostly a matter of emphasis. Graphing can teach students how to identify gradual trends. Multicultural programs can celebrate both the unity of the human race and its subtle differences.
History can explain how the past gradually became the present. Drama can demonstrate how a simple gesture can communicate what would otherwise take a page of script, and literature can allow us to look behind social facades. Discussions, debates, and story-telling activities force students to hold bits of information in their minds that they can use to respond to others when their turn comes up. Cooperative learning activities oblige students to attend to others' as well as their own contributions.
Simulations, roleplaying, and games require students to compare the real world with a created world. Metaphoric stories and dramas provide only the outlines of the story, forcing students to fill in the personal details. And metacognitive discussions about attention compel students to confront their own thought processes. The bright, busy classroom environment we've developed, with its plus students and continuous flow of sensory information, forces students to constantly make foreground and background decisions, to attend and respond to events outside and inside their skull.
We can use the classroom as a laboratory for student attention research. Good, simple ideas will easily emerge in an exploratory environment that, for example, attends to subtle differences in classification activities and gradual changes in prediction activities. Before students can help solve such problems in the larger world, they must learn how to solve them in their limited world.
Simple activities such as these don't ensure a world solution to global warming and industrial pollution, but they do help students begin the process of attending to subtle differences and gradual changes. They help to reset our brain from its current built-in focus on the attentional problems of immediate survival to the subtler problems of the present and the foreseeable future. It's a beginning, and attention is a process that celebrates beginnings.
Norepinephrine and dopamine two of the catecholamines appear to be the principal neurotransmitter systems that process attention. Schizophrenia appears to involve excessive catecholamine activity, and some forms of hyperactivity may involve an insufficient number of catecholamines.
Attention functions best with an optimum middle level of catecholamines. Brainstem or Reptillan Complex. The brainstem passively receives incoming sensory information and starts the process of active attention. The reticular formation and locus coeruleus appear to control arousal and our ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli. Limbic System. The limbic system provides the emotional overtones and motivation for attention.
The amygdala and hippocampus play librarian-like roles in the selection and classification of incoming information for long-term memory storage and retrieval. The sensory lobes the back half of the large sheet of neural tissue that makes up the neocortex process the various forms of sensory information that our brain is attending to, and the frontal lobes control, fixate, and shift our attention—thus consciously determining what's foreground and background and how the current situation refers to our previous experience.
A schematic model of the human brain by Paul MacLean1. Chall and A. Hobson, J. Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong. Please Try Later. Sign In.
How we use LinkedIn. We also use this access to retrieve the following information: Your full name. Your primary email address. You can revoke this access at any time through your LinkedIn account. Sign In with LinkedIn. Already have an account? Login here. Pay Attention! Write or read Comments. The best collection of eLearning articles, eLearning concepts, eLearning software, and eLearning resources.
0コメント