IMPROVING THE LACK OF ATTENTION ON THE STUDENTS´ PART IN THE CLASSROOM

“An excess of information leads inevitably to poor attention.” (1977-Herbert Simón).

The capacity to focus our attention on something and stop addressing something else is a harder task for the most teachers, mainly when dealing with teenagers and children.

The learning and the academic performance are improved by focusing one´s attention.

As soon as we are able to withdraw our attention from what is a distraction to us and we can focus on learning, our brain connects the new information with the one we have previously stored and establishes neuronal connections.

Kids drill nouns and vocabulary they are taught when they pay attention. Otherwise, they forget those words very quickly.

A method to gain the attention of the children is to speak to them through a puppet. This way their attention is focused on us and there are no distractions. (Focus-Daniel Goleman)

During a congress held in Silicon Valley, the speaker enquired about the number of attendants who had their devices connected and were actually checking them. The result: 78 percent of the listeners. The speaker called this state ”continuous partial attention”. If such state is extended in our mind, our total capacity to concentrate vanishes over time and those tasks requiring that capacity become more difficult for us. In order to overcome the lack of attention, we should devote some time to our portable devices every day, but the rest of it we should focus on other tasks and ignore them.