Your kind attention please!!

Have you ever noticed "Ladies and gentlemen, your kind attention please!" over the public addressing system during your wait in the railway station or an airport?

Our attention is sought before making an announcement since attention is the action of dealing with or taking special care of someone or something.

For the past few months, I had been conducting "Story telling" sessions in the Government district libraries of Chennai city. The sessions lasted for 2 hours and the participants were children aged 5-15.

 

As observed the children were very inattentive and got distracted even for a trivial thing, though majority of them were adult children. I had to plan the subsequent sessions with various activities in between, which actually led to a break every 10 minutes for a certain activity related to the story narrated.

According to the psychologists, the attention span of children lasts from 5-20 minutes maximum. The general cut off is 5 minutes for the children and 20 minutes for older children and adults. [Dear Managers, keep your meetings short or with breaks please. Dear parents, let your advice session to your children be short and sweet]

And I observed that the retention of attention in children was really challenging even though they were extrinsically motivated with special gifts at the end of the session for their groomed behavior, attention and retention skills. Intrinsic motivation of getting inner satisfaction and recognition by others alone can boost up the morale of the children to develop their attention span to the maximum. [This can be achieved by displaying their art work or drawing, making them sing or dance etc]

Extrinsic motivation is currently used as stimuli as in Pavlov's theory. According to the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov's greatest Nobel winning theory, learning can be conditioned with external stimuli. By constantly training the children with proper stimuli, the attention span can be increased and the learning can be improved. [Practice maketh perfection with a good external stimulus. The stimuli may be play time, tv time or reading time]

Learning can be developed by fulfilling the low level needs - physiological, safety, belongingness, self esteem which will automatically lead to the high level need of self actualization, as per Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For this the parents should take the initiation at home and the teachers at school. When the basic needs are eliminated, higher things can be achieved. [Start with reading out books for the children, tell bed time stories]

When we stop talking, we start hearing what others talk and what is happening around us. [Parents can guide the children to observe things, people, flora, fauna etc during travel, accompanying to the library]

Learn to be attentive and attentive to be a learner!!