Paying Attention, Teaching Attention

It is my belief that one of the most important things we can do as teachers of children is teach them how to pay attention. Of course it would be nice if we could just get them to pay attention to us at the front of the class but sometimes it is worthwhile stepping back from the immediacy of the classroom and taking a broader view of our role as teachers. The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote in Love's Work that there are three things required to become a philosopher:

"First, infinite intellectual eros: endless curiosity about everything. Second the ability to pay attention: to be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of concentration - in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall. Third, acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, attention, acceptance”

There has been a lot spoken on rekindling curiosity in the classroom and I will, at some point, write more on aporia too but today my focus is on that central requirement: attention. Throughout my life I think it is my attention that has really shaped who I am today and, on numerous occasions, it has rescued me from depression and boredom and hardship.

What is it that I actually mean by attention? At its most basic level it is the ability to not just look but to take notice of what it is you are looking at. It is the difference between seeing a pigeon out of the corner of your eye and taking the time to notice the grey-blue tint of a pigeon's feathers which change as they move through the evening light. It is not seeking ownership of what you are watching, it is existing alongside it and learning from it.

As a child I loved to throw rocks into rivers to see how big a splash I could make but as I grew older I learned to sit by a river and watch the eddies form and flow away, and notice the minnows just below the surface and to dip my feet in, and feel the fresh, cold water between my toes. There will always be time in life to throw rocks into rivers but I think that as teachers (and parents and people ourselves) we need to also acknowledge that time spent listening and noticing is just as important as time spent talking and doing.

I truly believe that the ability to pay attention to the world is a form of resilience which our students can, and ought to, be taught. Education and attention go hand-in-hand. Not only does education require attention, it also builds and strengthens it. Bertrand Russell describes how knowledge has the ability to make the unpleasant less unpleasant and the pleasant more pleasant. He gives the example of eating an apricot, a pleasant experience made all the sweeter for knowing a little about the origin of the fruit, its etymology and its place in culinary history. For me it’s seen in the way a visit to any English church can be much improved when you know just a little about the different architectural styles or if you have a brief outline of the history of Christianity in England in your head. These are the gifts that allow boredom to give way to attention.

And attention gives life a richness and a joy that boredom saps away. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel gives us this advice for life: "everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed". As an RE teacher I hope to give my students the knowledge to be able to interact with religion, philosophy and ethics but also the ability to formulate questions and thoughts so that they can have interesting conversations and listen to the responses people give to a well considered question. We cannot expect children to be curious on a trip to a museum or a park or a place of worship if they do not know what it is they are looking at and which questions they need to ask. Curiosity breeds attention and attention nurtures curiosity.

Attention is not a straight-jacket. We would not expect all of our students to be able to sit in silence and read for an hour but that does not mean we do not encourage all of our students to read in some form because reading is good and educational. So is attention. Attention could just be a moment of quiet as a usually hyperactive child is transfixed by something beyond their control. It could be the rapt attention of listening to someone who interests you or in reading something you are engrossed by. For me attention is most acutely felt when I feel still and present in front of a familiar work of art or when I stop on my walk to work and notice a change in the foliage of a bank of trees or the flowers on a roadside verge. All the time my attention is fed by, and strengthened by my knowledge and my curiosity. That is why we need to not just demand attention in education but to encourage, nurture and teach it.

I could not bear to believe that I was teaching a generation of students who will stumble obliviously into the world wearing blinkers, armed only with the instrumental tools of ‘critical thought’, deconstruction and opinion-forming. I can only hope that, through my teaching and my attention to them, that I will be able to give them the gift of attention to everything and everyone else. Jonathan Meades, a great hero of mine and a long-time chronicler of the banal once said “I find everything fascinating and that is a gift. Everything looks fantastic if you look at it long enough”. I have spent my life up until this point finding out just how true that is.

Five Practical Ways to Teach Attention

• Encourage your form group to start making scrapbooks. Ask them to keep and cut out any images or quotes which they find themselves drawn to. It doesn't matter if all you see is Fortnite and YouTubers, it will allow them to build up a record of what it is that their attention is drawn by. 
• Explicitly tell students how the knowledge you are teaching them will make their lives richer and keep them from boredom. When I'm teaching about religion I tell my students they will be able to step into any place of worship and immediately be able to orient themselves and feel comfortable because they will know about what is there and why.
• Attention thrives in nature. It is rare to have the opportunity to spend time amongst nature with your students but is there some way you could bring nature into the classroom? Could you have one day a week of still-life sketching in form? Could you grow tomatoes from seed in an empty orange juice carton on your window sill? Could you ask your students to bring back one (clean) leaf after break to spend a little time looking at and understanding.
• Encourage students to enjoy descriptive writing for what it is. I love Virginia Woolf's novels but I certainly didn't when I first read them and was told to deconstruct them in a search for meaning. Allow students to read beautiful descriptions of the world around them and relate it to their own lives.
• Pay attention yourself. Simone Weil describes attention as "the rarest and purest form of generosity". By being an attentive person you will naturally share that love of the world around you with your students. Attention is a gift you can give your students too. I find myself needing to step back every once in a while and remind myself that my students are worthy of my time, not because I am paid to be there or because I need them to succeed but (as my A-Level students well know) humans are worthy of being an end in themselves.

Why was I scared to ask my students to read?

One of the things I knew I wanted to do when I started my teacher training was to challenge myself and my students to learn in ways which are difficult, rigorous and rewarding. This undoubtedly stemmed both from my belief in teaching as an activity of challenge and my own experiences in secondary school a decade ago. It is a hard thing to try and become a teacher when you define your identity in a negative relation to those who taught you but I cannot deny the feeling that many of the lessons I had as a teenager were defined by pedagogical gimmicks and a shallow engagement with knowledge. I felt a transience and a disjointedness when skills, rather than knowledge, were the focus of lessons. I never truly felt that we had the time to grasp something before we moved on. The tasks du jour were completing worksheets and workbooks, copying paragraphs out of textbooks and 'applying' knowledge I had barely been given a chance to digest, let alone retain. 

The fact is that reading and writing only became pleasures in my life after I finished my GCSEs. After my exams in 2007 my English teacher gave me a novel as a leaving gift, it was the first book I ever read cover-to-cover. Sitting in my garden and under the heat of the July sun was the first time I realised that reading could be an enjoyable end in itself rather than a tedious means to an end. Remembering this on a freezing February morning in my first year of teaching, I realise I am not teaching in the way I want to. Why have I never given my students the chance to read something in class? Where I use texts (usually textbooks) I have used them as a means to an end, something to be applied in order to gain or improve one skill or another. The way I currently plan lessons my use of textbooks is like this:

The purpose here is for the student to be able to demonstrate their knowledge by applying it in the short, written activities. How do I know that they have grasped the significance of Jesus ignoring the Sabbath rules? I know because they have written a sentence or two which describes the story and then a postcard-style paragraph where they tell an imagined friend how shocked they were to be witness to said story. It takes a lot of teacher talk and stilted class discussions to reinforce the 'point' I hope the text to infer and, at the end of the lessons, I collect in the text they have spent time reading and hope they will be able to reaffirm the knowledge they have from the answers to questions I have set. I do not think this is a fatally flawed way to teach, it can work well enough, but I do not feel like it is the pedagogy I am looking for. Instead I thought back to what reading looked like when I really enjoyed it, as an A Level and undergraduate student:

In this process the text stands on its own as something to be enjoyed and read for the sake of learning something. I am trying to move past the fragmented feeling I have in many of my lessons by creating a clear and coherent structure which makes sense, each part builds on the last without discarding it. Each part keeps the text central to the work. One of the most important differences is that the student annotates the text and has physical and intellectual ownership of it. They are able to return to it to reaffirm their knowledge and use it in lessons to come to add depth to their written work. Realistically you cannot give students copies of entire books, at least not regularly, but there is a difference between a worksheet and a photocopy from a book. One is a piece of work to be completed, one is a source of knowledge and understanding to be read and returned to. 

With this in mind I set about planning a Year 8 lesson on Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. Normally I would have found a video, come up with some paired or whole-class discussion, perhaps asked students to complete a worksheet or a match-up activity, maybe put forward a few questions or a short written task using the textbook. Instead I wanted to see if this group of 30 mixed-ability students could happily spend a lesson reading, annotating and then writing about their reading. I used a story from the Gospels and Nick Page's excellent The Bible Book and asked students to read and annotate both. They were able to use highlighters and coloured pens to make the photocopy their own and I also allowed students to use their phones to translate or look up difficult words. After being given around 20 minutes or so to read the text I then had a short class discussion and a short paired discussion followed by 30 minutes to complete some comprehension questions and a longer writing task which were on the reverse of the photocopy. The longer task had a number of options from something creative like writing a letter or a play scene to a more traditional essay / 12-mark style question. 

I have to admit I was taken aback by how well they took to such simple, unglamorous, old-fashioned educational tasks. This is not a class where behaviour or differentiation are non-issues. The text was written for an adult audience so I wanted to make sure that the EAL and lower ability students in the class weren't left behind. The EAL students I spoke to were happy to use their phone to help with translation and all of them had shown that the reading was within their ability by annotating the text well and answering the questions. I spoke with three or four of the students who I would normally create differentiated resources for, they did find the reading challenging but, again, the ability to look up words on their phones helped and I encouraged them to seek out peer support from students sat next to them. Even a student who struggles to write more than a few lines read two full pages of text and told me that they would not have rather been reading something simpler. 

My lesson objective was that the students would understand why Jesus's entry into Jerusalem caused a commotion amongst the political and religious leaders. I can absolutely tell you that every student knew that when they left the room. Furthermore they improved their literacy and confidence in reading and writing when they realised that they were capable of reading, digesting and recalling information from a book aimed at adults and a sacred text. This was a lesson I enjoyed teaching because I felt that I was teaching and not co-ordinating a series of disparate activities. I felt confident that when I held a short class discussion at the end of the lesson, all of the students were able to contribute because we all had the same reference points and, furthermore, that those reference points were still in front of students with their notes in the margin. 

Perhaps this is all very straightforward and obvious and this is how everyone has been teaching all along. For me it was just the reassurance I needed that it is okay to spend a lesson reading and writing with students without having to include gimmicks or dress things up in a way that hides the true learning processes. I will not teach every lesson like this but I am inclined to try it with different groups, levels of ability and styles of text. I love reading, I love writing, they are two activities that have given me great joy and challenge so why should I deny that fact to my students? Reading is good.  

Half-Term

It is February half-term in Oxford. My sash windows are speckled with rain and rattling in their frames every time the wind gusts past. As I sit here and count on my fingers I realise I have now been a teacher for six months. I first stood in front of a class on my own in mid-September and since then I have stood and felt my PGCE year wash over me like a stone beneath a flood-swollen river.

When I'm in school (which is now five days a week) the hours don't seem to conform to linear time. An hour in front of Year 9 lasts approximately 25 minutes whilst an hour spent writing assignments in the dingy staff room can range anywhere from 90 minutes to half-a-century, especially if it is the period before lunch. The year itself has had just the same quality, the Christmas holidays seemed to last forever but the first four days of this half-term have barely felt like one Saturday's worth of free time.

Hopefully writing again help me to anchor myself and give me some kind of concrete proof of my experiences in my PGCE year. I am not sure what kind of writing this website will be for. I am years away from being an 'expert' in anything but I am a teacher, standing in front of classes, creating and experimenting with resources and living out the theory which I spent three years of my undergraduate degree writing and thinking about. There has to be something worth sharing about that experience. We shall see I suppose ...