Attentiveness is about the choices a student makes.  Is he or she paying attention to the things that are most important?  Some students need to pay attention to teacher directions, others to the quality of their spelling work, still others to the quality of their friendships.

Each student is different in terms of the elements that are most critical to attend to, but children need to recognize that they are actively making choices in attentiveness at every moment of the day.  Students might assume that playing video games is down time or relaxation, but instead it is actively making a choice to focus on the game instead of errands or homework or playing outdoors with others.  Life is about the choices you make, the attentiveness you choose to expend.  Where you direct your attentions will determine your success as a human being.

I like to think of attentiveness as being a focus on goal setting.  Successful people are people who set appropriate goals for their skills and dispositions.   Teachers can begin by asking students to establish weekly or monthly goals for themselves.  In the youngest grades these goals tend to be non-school related: take out the trash Tuesday, be nice to a sister, wake up using your own alarm clock, etc.  However, in older grades, students will become more disciplined in their academic goal setting focus.  Students still need to be reminded that goal setting in later life is not all professional.  Personal goals like regular exercise, pleasure reading time, or financial security goals should be regularly established and fine-tuned.

Teachers in the youngest grades can work with their students to choose goals for Attentiveness month that best reflect the student’s needs.  Class discussion can focus on goals that were ineffective or too broad versus more effective and specific.   Teachers should be able to articulate that their own lessons involve an attentiveness to the areas they believe their children should focus on.  Regular activities in handwriting, or geography, or technology, or math facts demonstrate the things to which the teacher or school choose to pay attention.

After a class discussion on grade level appropriate goals, each student can be asked to establish personal goals for the week or month.  It should not be hard for a teacher to demonstrate that paying attention to the quality of one’s success will yield greater success.  If I spend more time studying for the social studies test, I am more likely to get a good grade.

Teachers looking for a larger discussion on Attentiveness and goal setting can find it in Traits for Success: The Case for Character Education in American Schools at the authors website, johnzurn.com.

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Coming Next Wednesday- How to Grade for Courage

From our first posting:

“As parents and teachers, we need to reclaim our traditional role as influencers of our children – not by shouting louder than the influencers our children discover online, but by stressing ideas that are more important than fancy shoes and snappy TikTok tunes. We need to emphasize traits that everyone agrees children will honor.  We need to convince our children that the people who are most important to them have a better understanding of what it takes to be successful in life.”

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