What do you see?
The Educationalist. By Alexandra Mihai
Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”! With spring slowly but surely on its way, I start paying more attention to the small changes in nature- this makes my way to work more fun and it also helps me feel more grounded and less immersed in my own thoughts. On one of those walks, it actually dawned on me that noticing, paying attention to something or someone, are very important ingredients for learning. That is why I’m dedicating this issue to thinking about how we can be more intentional about taking in the world around us, how we can practice attention and how all this can help us as learners and educators. As usual, at the end you will find some suggestions for further reading, should you wish to go deeper into the topic. I hope you enjoy reading and feel inspired to try out some of these ideas, by yourselves, with your students or with your friends. Have a nice week!
Noticing is a radical act.
An act of resistance- against distractions.
An act of choice- among the myriad of things that ask for our attention.
An act of reclaiming- our time and mental space.
An act of awakening- of our senses and curiosity.
What do you notice?
Let’s do a quick exercise. Look around yourself for a moment, taking in the space you are occupying. Then step out, go into a different room, or outside. Take a piece of paper and try to draw (sketch, the quality of the drawing is not the point here) the space you were in just before. The setup of the furniture. The windows, doors. Objects. How is it going? Do you find it easy? How many things do you remember and how many did you miss? My guess is that it’s probably more challenging than you imagined.
Every day we are being bombarded with all kinds of stimuli that steal our attention. It’s not until we stop or at least slow down that we realise we are actually missing a lot.
Noticing is an intentional act. But it is also an art. Something that can give meaning and enrich our everyday. Something that can help us better connect with others and better understand ourselves. Realising we actually can control what we notice gives us a lot of freedom. It also makes us aware of the things that are often left at the periphery of our perception, the things we don’t notice.
We are often good at noticing things in a new place. But the really valuable skill is to start noticing new things in familiar places. During the pandemic, I walked the streets and parks of my neighbourhood thousands of times. It felt like I knew every stone and patch of grass by heart. So I gave myself small challenges, to notice things that previously escaped my vision. If you slow down, look at something long enough and from different (sometimes surprising) angles, things will keep revealing themselves to you. I became sensitive to small details, changes in colour, sounds and smells and it felt like I could connect to the world around me in a completely new way, previously unknown and inaccessible to me.
Reclaiming attention
Like every skill, noticing takes practice. Moreover, it requires a healthy amount of curiosity, intentionally directing our attention and quite a bit of patience. If you are reading this, I know you’re probably thinking: yes, these are some pretty challenging things in themselves.
One of the things I find very difficult especially nowadays is to direct my attention with purpose, often, over and over again, to a desired object/ person/ activity. It’s a habit we really need to work on, actively, and the good news is that we do get better at it with practice.
Asking yourself “What do I pay attention to? And why?” at different moments of the day is a good start. We may find that our mind is wandering or we may find we are extremely focused. And one more thing: it’s impossible (and not healthy) to pay focused attention 100% of the time. In fact, one of the things I often do when I feel I am too focused is intentionally letting my mind drift away aimlessly, for a bit. I find this change of modes particularly refreshing. Again, just remember you can control your attention, so do it for your own benefit.
Implications for learning
Noticing and paying attention are generally valuable skills but they are also very important for the learning process. Here are just some of the reasons why:
Genuinely engaging with the world around us (inside and beyond the classroom) can provide unique insights that we’d otherwise miss;
An increased sense of awareness and perception- noticing details and nuances that can escape a more superficial look- allows us to better understand the things or phenomena we are studying;
Focused attention can lead to deeper learning;
Attention can facilitate creativity: seeing *what is* helps us imagine *what could be*;
Getting into the habit of paying attention to our surroundings can fuel our curiosity and openness to learn and help us practice our patience.
Learning design ideas
There are many ways we can integrate the act of noticing and paying attention in our courses. Below I am sharing some design ideas I came up with, that can easily work across disciplines. I split them in two categories: the “easy” ones require a simple prompt and a limited amount of time from both teachers and students, while the “more challenging” can be conducted for longer periods (even an entire course). Have fun trying some of them out!
Easy
Ask students to notice one new thing on their way to class next time, something they had never noticed before. Next class ask them to share what they noticed and to reflect on what made them notice it. This can be a good way to start the class, and form a habit.
Do something different in class, where you normally have an established routine. You can change the order of activities, you can move something in the physical classroom, sky is the limit. See if your students notice the change. Yes, this is an exercise for you as well, paying attention to their reactions.
Have your students write down three things they learned while they listen to their colleagues doing a presentation. Mind you: not questions! Just things that have stuck with them (they can be about the content or about the presentation itself). It’s your choice if you check/ ask them to report afterwards. The idea is to have them (really!) listen, without the pressure of responding or questioning.
Design a treasure hunt: ask your students to collect/ record various pieces of information on the topic of next week’s class. They can be snippets of conversation they hear, videos, podcasts, newspaper articles, anything really. This will make them receptive to the topic and their findings can enrich the class discussion.
Provide the same material in two different media. Ask students to interact with the material and note down for each medium three things they noticed that they had missed in the other medium. This makes them attentive to the way they access and retain information and, ideally, can help them find effective ways to learn.
At the end of a class discussion, ask students to summarise the various points of view exposed. Then ask them what point of view they think was missing. Noticing what is not there is as important as noticing what is there.
More challenging
Introduce a specific storyline and weave it through the course. Make it subtle, but still present in different ways in the various parts of the course. For instance, you can use one example to follow through your narrative or always refer back to a certain aspect. After some time ask students to reflect on whether they noticed that or not and what impact it had on the learning.
When engaging with the literature, have students monitor what they notice most often (authors from a certain background, certain arguments, references to one book, a specific question…). Have them reflect on the patterns they notice. This can easily be part of any class activity.
If you have an assignment where students have to do similar things (e.g. case studies) every week and you provide them with feedback, have them collect all the weekly assignments they submitted and compare them with each other. Ask them to write down three changes they noticed in their own work. The idea is to make them aware of their own progress, which can often go unnoticed but can be very motivating.
Ask students to repeatedly observe one thing (it can be an object, a process, an interaction…), record their observations over several weeks, draw conclusions and reflect on them. If you want to take it a step further, have them imagine how they would change/ improve their object of study and why.
Attention monitoring. Ask students to make a chart (in whatever form they want) to record they attention levels at certain moments in class. Ask them to do it for a few weeks and then reflect on it. If you think it’s useful, have a class discussion on this topic. It will help you adjust the class design (maybe as simple as switching two types of activities) and help them understand what keeps them attentive and motivated.
Resources
“The Power of Patience. Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention”- inspiring article by Jennifer Roberts about a learning activity she designed that challenged students’ attention and patience;
“The Art of Noticing”, by Rob Walker- I really recommend buying the book, it contains 131 exercises that help you develop noticing skills (one of the best non-fiction books I bought in a while). You can also find many interesting articles in Rob’s blog. These activities can easily be translated into learning moments;
“On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes”, by Alexandra Horowitz- another great book that encourages us to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities;
“Ways of Seeing”, by John Berger- one of the classical books that offers a unique look at the way we view art but also, I would argue, everything else around us.
Excellent! Some ideas that I'll try to practice in day-to-day life as well!