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Focusing

© Thomas Robertson

"I cannot begin the lesson until every mouth is closed and every eye is on me!" Does this sound like you? Me, too!

It's important to focus, or to gain the attention of the entire class before beginning a lesson. If you're lucky, the momentum will carry through the entire lesson.

So let's find a better way to gain the attention of those few offenders than to snap at the entire class. Try any of these on for size:

The Skinnerian approach

"I like the way Kevin is listening. I like the way Cathy is listening . . ." There isn't enough time to call every name in the class, so when you have the attention of the whole class, you can say, "Hey! Now everyone is listening!"

This works with the lower grades; maybe there's a subtle way to use it in the upper grades.

Beat the clock

I always thought it was unfair for the teacher to start a lesson when I was talking to my neighbor and was in the middle of a sentence.

Does the clock on your wall have a second hand? If so, then you can focus, offer practice in reading the clock, and be fair to those students who would otherwise get caught between a subject and a predicate - all at the same time. Say, "I want everyone in the class to be quiet by the time the second hand reaches the 12."

I've tried this approach and found that it works.

The teaser

I borrow this term from the television medium. The object of the game is to catch the viewer's attention with a puzzling stimulus.

When I was student teaching, I read the class a story about a man who gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, catches the bus, and goes to work. Instead of using the words he, him, or his, I repeated the name Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakoff every time. Then I asked what was wrong with the story.

I got their attention; I hope they all learned what a pronoun is.

The transition activity

After reading Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, the day care worker said, "Now we are all wild things. So let's creep over to the art center."

This is an example of a transition activity, or a brief activity which relates both to the former activity and the upcoming activity. Preschool teachers claim that this tradition renders the change much easier for the children. But for some reason, it hasn't caught on in the public schools. Maybe it should.

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