The Role of Teacher Attention in Supporting Student Engagement

• In Event: Teaching as Inquiry: Learning With and About Students

Abstract

The Role of Teacher Attention in Supporting Student Engagement
Purposes
The central purpose of my classroom is to support the learning of all children. In order to do this, I must attend to the children before me. In this paper I focus on four children and the ways in which my ability to know them was influenced by outside factors, affecting my attention, my time, and my understanding.

Perspectives on Practice
“Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do.”
Matthew 23: 8 -10 of The Message Bible.
The evaluation of my work as a teacher is predicated, first and foremost, on the model of teacher leadership posited by Jesus Christ. This is also known as “the servant leader” model (Blanchard & Hodges, 2003).
Also central to my evaluation of practice are the following frameworks: caring as investment in the growth of another, and knowledge as central to one’s ability to care (Mayeroff, 1972); categories for seeing children (Carini, 2000). From these I developed strategies for attending to students.
Methods and Data Sources
My research traces the evolution of my relationships with these four distinct children over the course of several cycles of inquiry. It records my reflections on the factors influencing my attention based on analysis of student generated artifacts, written observations, narratives, anecdotes and otherwise recorded discourse related to the four children at the heart of this work.
Results
This work helped me to recognize four major ideas. Firstly, the work of teaching requires several types of prerequisite knowledge about the students. Secondly, gaining this knowledge places demands on my attention. Thirdly, my understanding is often challenged by my assumptions and prior experiences. Finally, reflective practices can help overcome obstacles to knowing.

Further Questions
This work offers the opportunity to discuss jointly, through the examples presented, the invisible and yet, salient factors impacting the ability of teachers to attend to all children.

Author

• Carolyn McCall-Sinclair, Lower Manhattan Middle School