Helping all children become happy learners

Task Management

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Task Management Prerequisites

Having the ability and willingness to focus attention

Need

Though there is a difference between having the ability to attend and be willing to attend it is probably best not to try too hard to work out which of these a student has. Many teachers often assume that poor attention is a matter of deliberate choice. I would argue that this over simplifies a rather complex set of cognitive processes that we have only limited conscious control of. However, it is useful to consider attention being limited by capacity, concentration and motivation.

All of us have limited concentration before requiring a mental break. For the average graduate adult this is just over ten minutes. A break can be a few seconds if we are highly motivated to remain focussed but generally it is longer. For children the general rule of thumb is a minute of concentration for each chronological year so that the average five-year-old would have attention span of about five minutes. 

Motivation has a complex influence on our attention span. We can all relate to struggling with focussing on topics that we lack interest with whilst being happily able to concentrate for long periods on our passions and things we enjoy. It is difficult to say how much conscious control we have over this. In school even the most conscientious and well-behaved student will struggle with complusory subjects they do not like. For students with learning or behaviour difficulties these additional concentration difficulties compound the situation leading to task breakdown. Equally, the difficulties with attention often lead to off-task behaviours that can then often escalate into behavioural challenges for the teacher.

Strategies

Try to be mindful of how long you are expecting students to concentrate for. Breaking down the lesson into a series of 'chunks' of between 5 and ten minutes can help students to switch their attention and provide the refocussing they need. These chunk transitions do not need to be big movement breaks or changes to their task, though these are the best forms of break, but can also include stopping the lesson to recap, summarise, give further instructions or even just give out praise!

It is not always possible to make every topic that we teach exciting and fun to illicit motivational interest and support their attention span. Remind students of the reasons why this learning is important. It can also be appropriate to indicate the negative consequences of not completing the task but this should be the last resort.

Bullet Point
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Bullet Point

Having the necessary working memory capacity

Case study

I was in a class observing a student who I was told presented with distracting and sometimes disruptive classroom behaviour. I was watching the beginning of a lesson where the teacher gave some visual and verbal input before the class were given instructions to do a writing task. The student, I was observing, began writing the date and then a title in his book. This took him a minute or two. Then he started looking round at other students to see what they were doing. He looked vacantly around the classroom for a while and then swung back on his chair until the class teacher noticed and intervened. I then asked to withdraw the student from the classroom for a chat and also did a digit memory test with him. He scored very poorly in this test and this confirmed my hunch that he had poor working memory.

This student had shown a positive willingness to get on and do the task like the rest of the class. But then the task had broken down due to his inability to recall instructions and manage and organise the products of his thinking. Initially, he relied on learnt 'class rituals' to write the date and title but then was unable to proceed without further scaffolding of the task. He had tried to gain clues from looking at his peers but in this writing task that strategy did not help him. His next strategy was to gain attention by low level distracting behaviour by swinging back on his chair. I am sure that had the teacher not intervened his behaviour would have escalated as he inappropriately sought to get help to do the task.

Need

Working memory is the name given to the sum of the processes involved in the retention of data from sensory perception, cognitive thinking and retrieved long term memories. It is limited both in capacity and longevity and has a significant impact on an individual's capacity for learning. Studies have shown that poor working memory is the greatest predictor of academic success. Teachers frequently exceed the working memory capacity of their students and it is, in my observational experience, the single biggest reason for task breakdown. Research shows that students with the following diagnoses will also have co-existing working memory deficits: ADHD, ASD, dyscalculia and dyslexia. Please see the article on working memory that I recommend as essential reading for all teachers.

Strategies

Try to limit the number of instructions given at a time. 

Summarise key points to be remembered. 

Actively teach strategies for remembering.

Identify students with weak working memory and anticipate forgetting of key information and instructions.

Provide visual prompts of the process success criteria using task sheets and task boards.

Empathise and support these students to maintain learning resilience and positive self-esteem. Help them 'save face' in front of peers.

Please also see the article on the management of weak working memory for more strategies.

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