Medina's Brain Rules is by far one of the most inspiring teaching-related books I have ever read since entering the teaching profession (Thanks to Karen!). Dr. Fritz mentioned the 60/40 rule which I have come to understand as being mandatory if we don't want to lose our students. Now Medina's 10-minute modules truly hit home on why and how we can manipulate/exercise our students' attention. According to Medina, we can only have students' attention for 10 minutes and we will lose them on the 601st second of the class.
Say, if we can only have the first 10 minutes in the beginning of the class to get through what we must, the remainder of the class would be pure torture for everyone, unless we introduce new hooks in the beginning of the next 10 minutes. Medina mentioned the use of jokes, stories, anecdotes, etc., provided they are relevant to the main concepts. Now, that reminds me of my homeroom class this year, a dream to teach. Students are engaged just about the entire time I have them. It can be a lesson on vocabulary, text, character recognition, sentence structure, or whatever I had on my lesson plan that day. Did I unconsciously plant the necessary hooks every 10 minutes? I usually have 2 or 3 main activities (I count teacher talk as an activity, but it does not happen often). That would give me 15- to 20-minute modules to a class.
I started wondering if maybe my students have longer attention spans, or there is something else at work. Kaiwen is my very enthusiastic in the class. I don't usually take more than a few minutes when explaining major concepts, but I do follow up with details and let the students practice the newly taught concepts. I give the students opportunities to join in express themselves when I give details, so they actually express their thoughts and ask more questions. Kaiwen, in particular, does this without dominating the class and I felt that I can pull back the reign when everyone's had enough of a little break from my teacher talk. So instead of 10-minute modules, I can have 15- or 20-minute modules with a mini-energizer Kaiwen session in the middle. Often, peer talk energizes the classes too. What's the lesson of the story? Know who those kids are in the class that you can throw the ball to for a little bit without them taking over. They can help you break up the lesson a bit so you don't lose everyone's attention in the 11th minute of your lesson.
In a class where students are generally quiet, I have to artificially create the Kaiwen dynamic by "suddenly" remember a little anecdote, or invite students to share their personal experiences that relate to the present topic. Once when I was reviewing the fruit vocabulary with students, I 'remembered' that Taiwanese people use 'strawberries' to refer to certain generation of young people, who are too easily bruised and whose feelings are too easily hurt. When I invited them to guess why we call these young people the 'strawberry tribe' (草莓族）the kids were happy to chat for a few seconds, revitalizing themselves before losing attention for the rest of the period. I was thankful that most of them engaged in a short, short conversation and laughed for a little bit. It would have been hard to carry on for another 5 minutes if they are near their 10-minute mark.
With overly energized classes, it's hard to perceive talkers to be of help in terms of classroom management, but if channeled appropriately, our talkers can be our best allies!
kaiwen!
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