Attending seems to be a huge underlying cause for most of the “problems” in my classroom. For example, the students who tested low on their MPSs in my class are falling behind, and not because of their intelligence or ability, but because they’ve spent the last weeks doodling or fidgeting with their desk instead of listening and participating in the lesson being taught. These are the same students who are missing work, or have turned in incomplete work. Not because they can’t do the learning or aren’t motivated to learn, but because they weren’t paying attention to the directions or they missed the assignment completely. Some classrooms will have these same problems of attending in addition to students who have missed so much learning that their knowledge is genuinely many grade levels below standard. The later is not present in my classroom, only the attending issues are relevant. This is true because the classroom I’m in is in a PACE program. A school within the school, were admission is granted by a lottery in the 1st grade. Once a student is in the PACE program they always have a spot, moving through the grades as a cohort. Once a student is in the PACE program the parents must volunteer a total of 80 hours a year for each child in the program. If the hour expectation is not met, the student is not allowed to continue in the program. Students must also exhibit a willingness to learn and participate.
Because of these guidelines for the program, the students in my class are all well supported by their parents at home and at school, and they all have a willingness to learn. Sounds like a dream right? And it is, although not without a whole new set of challenges that don’t add up to “easier”. One of the biggest problems I see in this setting, right now, is students falling behind and getting low scores because they can’t attend. Discussing this with my CT and parents during conferences cleared one thing up for me: There is no way to make a student attend. The only solution that makes sense to me right now is building better school and community supports for students who need help attending. This should go beyond medicating. I don’t know if these are the correct answers, but I feel like there has to be experts out there that can speak to these solutions and offer others. Solutions that seems reasonable to me are: involving children with attending problems in many, frequent, and regular physical outlets; finding a tutor that can teach organizational and attending strategies (not just curriculum skills); helping the student build their identity as a means for focusing (who are you as a person?). These may not be the right solutions for every child, and an expert may tell me that I’m off base, but my point is there must be something else we can do aside from helping label students as “problematic” or “bad”. I can’t watch my beautiful wonderful students fall behind because they just can’t pay attention.
Learning to Teach 