Why don't the kids sit still and listen??

I often get asked about classroom management, especially with small children. 

The mistake teachers often do is that they presume that kids will be sitting nicely on the chairs (or wherever) all lesson long and listen and interact with them the way they want them to. And if that's not happening, they feel incapable of managing a class and believe they are not good teachers.

The problem with this is .. it is IMPOSSIBLE for a child to sit still during such a long period. No matter how great of a teacher you are and no matter how calm the child normally is. It is just not in their nature to sit still. As Sir Ken Robinson once said: A 3-year-old is not half a 6-year-old. 

And a 9yo is not half a 18yo. You get the point.

How long the attention span actually is, depends on different factors: age, but also the type of activity and the motivation of the student.

The general concentration span of a child is between 10-15 minutes, when the task is not very demanding and the child is highly motivated to do the task (hence, your activities should always be cool and engaging, sounds easier to do than it really is, for reasons I'll tell you later in this blogpost). If the task requires more concentration from the child, the span may even be only 5-7 minutes. 

The typical attention span for learning is the chronological age + 1min

Attention span for learning = chronological age + 1

Say your children are 4 years old, the span would be around 5 minutes.

Now you try to make him or her sit there for 45mins or 1h (which is btw the concentration span of an adult - lessons are designed after the concentration span of adults, not of kids) … you see, my point? It’s not going to happen!

So what’s the secret? You must keep the kids engaged with interesting and/or fun activities - and move them around. My classroom is usually pretty busy, because we are playing around, running and interacting a lot. So, sitting around a table it pretty rare. Only when we have to write something or for certain crafts. Learning is much easier, when the children don’t realize that they are actually learning ;).

Now, keeping things interesting sounds easier than it really is. It happened to me (and many other teachers that I know), that I prepared a project for weeks in advance and thought that the kids would totally love it and I was sooooo looking forward to do this project with the kids. Then I get to school in the morning all happy and excited, because I want to see the happy faces of the kids when they hear that we will do this awesome project. And then ...  you get this reaction … "meeehhh, what's that?!". 

If this happens, don’t take it personal. Kids, like everybody else, have good moods and bad moods. It can happen that today they find your project “mehhh” and one week later they really want to do it. (That’s why I always say: “ALWAYS have a plan B!!!! I usually have more than a couple of other activities instead the original one, in case the kids are up to it today).

So we said the general concentration span of a child is between 10-15 minutes, when the task is not very demanding and the child is highly motivated to do the task. What’s the problem with this? The motivation! Every  child is different. None of them have the same level of motivation and certainly not the same approach to learning.

 The problem is that in schools we treat kids as if they were the same. One size fits all. But they are not the same. Let me emphasize: They are SOOOO not the same. 

You have heard about different learning styles, you have heard about different characters, you have heard about different interests ... what makes us believe that we can teach every child in the same way? 

When I was still a young teacher (yes,yes!), I would always carry around coloring pages (my thought back then: just in case everything goes wrong, at least you can give them something to color). I might write a blogpost on coloring another time, because coloring can be awesome – or not, depending on how you use it.

Anyhow, so I would carry around those pages and sometimes use them, because I thought they would be sooo much fun!! Kids would love it!!! I don’t know why, but we almost always presume that every kid loves coloring, don’t we? So far I haven’t come across any teacher who, before their first lessons, didn’t believe this (like I said, including myself).

But this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve actually had kids that absolutely hate coloring (yes, that exists).

You give them their coloring page and after 3 seconds they come back to you and tell you that they are done - while other kids are still picking which colors they want to use.

Their picture probably will look something like this:

Then you have those that do semi-like coloring, so the ladybug would be colored in a bit more and maybe they even tried not to color outside of the lines. And then you have those that you actually have to drag away from the table after a while, because else they would spend all afternoon with it.

And yes, tears may fall and you have to promise them that they may finish it next time or they can take it home with them to finish it or come up with an awesome distraction tactic!!

Moral of the blogpost: you really want to make sure that you teach the topic you are teaching with a wide variety of methods. Use something for the auditory learners, some for the visual learners, some for the kinesthetic learners ... don’t forget to move around to loosen up a little, etc.

And also make sure that each of those activities doesn’t take a long time in order to fit the concentration span of the children.