During the past four weeks, I have blogged about the who, what and where of education. In my final blog, I would like to discuss the people at the center of all this debate, students. Educators today face students who demand more than tedious memory exercises. Lectures must be interactive and engaging. Today’s students are assaulted, nearly from birth, with text messaging, Facebook, TV, Twitter, Myspace, blogs, podcasts, iTunes, and the latest apps. These students do not have the same attention span because they are the tweet-text-info junkie generation or the fact that so many students have ADD/ADHD, these combined make it impossible to keep today’s students engaged. Teachers today are in direct competition with a world full of distractions.
I use the 50 minute rule in the classes I teach, 50 minutes of classroom work and then 10 minutes of free time. This is for a class comprised of 19 to 25 year olds. Preston J. 2013, states that for the K-12 instructors, the attention span of students “is the average age in your class and then add 5 minutes” (par. 3). After this amount of time, no real learning is achieved; therefore, a 5 minute break is needed to refocus the students. Faced with a shorter attention span of students and a growing demand for accelerated, progressive curriculum's, a teacher today is ask to do more than their predecessors.
Hello David,
ReplyDeleteLast week, I attended a class sponsored by Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE) at my grandson's middle school, our discussion focused on some of the pressures adolescents have to deal with that are different from when I was an adolescent, and sure enough all of the parents in the room stated, SOCIAL MEDIA! We all agreed that our children are bombarded with the overwhelming amount of technology available to them for everything and how it affects their attention span, their ability to focus and listen, really listen, and not just hear their parents. The personal interaction with families are becoming fragmented and the phrase "quality time" has become an acceptable part of raising a child nowadays.
About a month-and-half ago I saw a documentary call "Generation Like", which discussed the power social media has on students (particularly teens and twenty-something) age group. I was very, very, enlightening and informative.
Here’s a link: http://video.pbs.org/video/2365181302/
References
Douglas Rushkoff (2014, February 18). Generation Like. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://video.pbs.org/video/2365181302/
Parent Institute for Quality Education (2014). Making America Stronger. Retrieved from http://piqe.org/