Helping the Students Stay Focused
Chaz Pugliese, France and UK
Chaz Pugliese is a self-employed teacher, author, teacher trainer and international presenter working out of Paris. His latest book, Creating Motivation, was out in 2017 with Helbling. Prior to this, he wrote ‘Being Creative (Delta Publishing 2010) and Principled Communicative Approach (with Z. Dörnyei and J. Arnold Helbling, 2015). A certified Intercultural Trainer, Chaz gives workshops on Intercultural Communication in France and abroad. In 2013 he founded, with Alan Maley, the Creativity Group. A keen long distance runner and jazz guitarist, Chaz likes any music that’s real, genuine and raw. E-mail: chazpugliese@gmail.com
Menu
Introduction
Activity #1: Countdown
Activity #2 Birthdays
Activity #3 Slap, clap, snap!
Conclusion
Refences
This short article is about getting the students to pay attention to their environment at the very beginning of a lesson. One of the teachers’ main tasks is to be able to prime the students, in other words, get them ready for the lesson. Picture this: you’re walking into your classroom, you’re mentally and physically ready to teach, you’re looking forward to seeing your students. You’re assuming the students are equally psyched up but wait a minute: as they trickle in, some look listless, some others look worried, some others will sit down and look out of the window, apathetic, clearly unfocused, or they are excited, fidgety, maybe thinking about that last whatsapp they received and to which they need to reply, it’s a question of life and death! Now, I believe that if I start a lesson when my students are not ‘in the moment’, I’d be wasting my time. Being in the moment is what the Hungarian psychologist M. Czisentmihalyi (1996) has called ‘flow’. According to Csikszentmihalyi, we reach a state of ‘flow’ when we’re so immersed in a task that we become totally oblivious to anyone and anything around us. Flow, then, must be any teacher’s Holy Grail! When the students are not in flow, unfocused, distracted, they will behave in a way that betrays disinterest and/or demotivation. But this behaviour often doesn’t have anything to do with motivation (or lack of) per se, the real culprit is lack of readiness. Whatever the reason for their diminished focus, when the students aren’t paying attention to us, it’s simply that they’re paying attention to something else. Being distracted, in short, means being attracted by something else. So, it’s never a good idea to start teaching when the students aren’t paying attention. Attention, according to neurobiologist Daniel Levitin (2014), is a process that inhibits certain inputs and enhances others. In other words, it’s a competition of stimuli, it’s multiple inputs fighting for space in our brain. Attention is, in our days, an increasingly precious commodity, something that is getting more and more scarce. It’s easy to see why. We live in a world dominated by sound bites, a world in which quick cuts and channel surfing prevail, it has become harder as a consequence, to sustain a complex thought and task. Distractions are everywhere: the million thoughts that inhabit our minds, but also the hundreds notifications that constantly pop up, the relentless flow of information from social media, the urge to update our status on any of the social media we might be using to communicate with the world, the fear of missing out. It’s clear that in our situation, the cognitive effort required to perform these tasks should be devoted to learning. And the unanimous consensus among neurobiologists these days is that multitasking is nothing but a myth. It’s not that we can’t do two things that require the same amount of brain power at the same time. We can. But what happens is that one of the tasks we’re trying to accomplish will suffer badly.
Hence, the need for a teacher to help the learners improve their focus, by slowing down and giving them a chance to declutter their minds before the lesson actually starts. And this is the aim of the activities offered below: to raise the students’ awareness of their distractions so that they can eliminate them, start focusing and hopefully get into a state of maximum alertness (what psychologists call flow). A few words of caveat: a) unlike most warmers or ice-breakers, the activities don’t have a language learning point as such, because they serve a different purpose altogether. The point being that until the students’ concentration has been enhanced, no learning can actually happen and nothing the teacher does or says will have any impact whatsoever.
B) The activities, which use both physical and psychological methods of reducing or eliminating distractions, are not meant to be one-offs, and in fact, may be repeated (perhaps using variations). Their aim is not strictly linguistic, but rather to help the students be in the moment, and chase one rabbit at a time, as it were. C) Because of all that, some students may object to being asked to do an exercise like the ones below: it has happened to me, many times. If they ask me ‘excuse me, why are we doing this?’ I explain the rationale, and there’s never been a problem, quite on the contrary: in my research, my students say they always appreciate an opportunity to slowly ‘tune into’ the lesson.
- Ask the students to work in pairs.
- Explain that the As must count from 1 to 60, and that the Bs must count down from
60 to 1.
- They must do the counting slowly, and they should start and finish at the same time.
- When the students have finished, ask them if they found it difficult and why this may be so.
This activity does not present any language challenges as such. This is of course intentional. However, the activity requires the students to pay close attention to the task, eliminate all distractions and focus on their counting, as well as their partner’s. It is simply impossible to do the activity if the students are distracted by something else.
- Ask the students to stand and form a circle.
- Explain that their task is to line up according to their birthdays from January 1 to
December 31. Give them 2 minutes max.
- Explain that they are not allowed to speak.
- When the time is up bring the activity to a close.
It’s always interesting to see the different ingenious strategies used by the students to solve this little puzzle. Some will use gestures, some will write things on the board/piece of paper. In one group a student pulled out his ID, soon everyone else followed and the activity was completed in less than two minutes. But they could have created a time line on the floor, or they could have sung their birthdays! After all, I had asked them not to speak, but I didn’t say not to write or use other means.
Variation
The same, but students have to line up according to the first letter of their name.
- As the students to stand up. Make sure they allow some room to move around.
- Demonstrate this with the group: start slowly, slap your thighs and say SLAP, then
clap your hands and say CLAP, then snap your fingers and day SNAP.
- Do it slowly at first, then speed up a bit.
- Let it run for a minute or so, then stop the activity.
One way to prime the students is by using movement. While many students (and quite a few teachers I’ve worked with) raise an eyebrow when they’re asked to do more physical exercises, it turns out movement is not a bad thing at all when we’re learning a language, as amply demonstrated by Harvard cognitive psychologist John Ratey. Dr Ratey (2005) ran a neat experiment with 50 language learners (he controlled everything: age, levels, methods, environment). He divided the group into two subgroups of 25 and then gave them a vocabulary test. The same test, obviously, the only difference being that one of the groups had to do a one-minute jog on the spot exercise prior to taking the test. The results yielded by the study (which was replicated five times in different parts of the world) were stunning: the movement group inevitably scored between 24 and 33% higher. The explanation is purely biological, according to Dr Ratey: when we engage in physical exercise, our blood pressure goes up. Which means that our brain gets more oxygen, and performs much better. So, in this case, the areas of our brain responsible for language storage and language retrieval (the pre-frontal cortex and the Broca’s area) because they were flooded with oxygen, did a great job.
And this is the story I tell my students when they object to exercises that require them to move.
Hope you and your students will find the activities useful.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper)
Levitin, D (2005) The Organized Mind (Penguin).
Pugliese, C. (2017) Creating Motivation (Helbling Languages).
Ratey, J. (2008) Spark. (Little, Brown and Company)
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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