Day 1

That was a thoroughly enjoyable start to the semester. Aside from the typical worries about having enough desks, or students in the wrong room (the room number is beside RM, not beside the course), it has been a successful first day.

I spoke in yesterday's blog about setting some personal and professional goals for the semester, beyond the basic classroom goals. Further reflection on this has illustrated another large benefit to goal setting. Not only is focus provided on those things that we as professional educators and human beings find important, but also allow for refocus when our attention wanes, or has been forced to go another place. For years, educators have been known as excellent multi-taskers as they navigate a crowded classroom, delivering a lesson, and keeping of regular classroom management (along with dozens of other tasks that need to be completed in our world of accountability.) This ability is/was also highly valued in the workplace. A worker who can do two tasks is that much more valuable than a worker capable of only one. As such, educators for generations now had become multi-"task" masters. Write notes and listen to me while watching this PowerPoint being the most obvious example. When we look at the information generation it's not just the task, but the processing that must happen on multiple levels at the same time. There is an evolution at work from multi-tasking to the ability to multi-refocus (my term).

As more an more information is available from more and more places, the students focus on the industrial model of education is bound to wane since it bares little resemblance to the information world of the 21st century. Where else in their daily lives, even the workplace, are they asked to focus their attention on only one activity? As I stated to my students today, my issue is not with their ability to multitask (listen to music, text, and do homework) as much as it is with their inability to focus on one task for a limited time and then return to the focus at hand. It's not the distraction of technology that is the issue, it is the students inability to be distracted and then reengage. This indicates to me that one of my jobs in lesson planning is to provide opportunities throughout a lesson for those who have become distracted can reenter the focus of the class.

The importance of this skill (multi-refocus), is shown again in the "real" world. The issue with distracted driving is the all encompassing nature of the distraction. It removes a person from the context of a moving vehicle, as such, by choice or otherwise, two "tasks" that both require complete focus, can rarely be accomplished effectively at the same time. For our students, it is as if they have done the right thing by pulling the car over to speak on the phone (when they get a text in class), but then forget how to drive (after reading or responding). Today's workplace is replete with examples of this skill of multi-refocus. In the information age, where so much can take our focus, how do we learn to quickly refocus. I think as educators, we are ideally placed to both model and develop this skill.

Tomorrow: About those personal and professional goals........