Paying Attention to Everyone in Class

Hello everyone,

Something that you need to be conscious of in the classroom is to give attention to every single student every day.

By "be conscious" I mean that, especially at the beginnings of your careers, you need force yourself to pay attention to everyone.

If you're honest with yourselves, you will notice that there are often quiet, obedient students--especially those who sit in the far off corners of your room--who don't seem to require your attention, and frequently don't get it.

If you think about it, you realize that you know the names of all the trouble makers (they're the first names you'll learn--it's a necessity) and you've learned the names of all the really outstanding students. Those will normally demand most of your attention.

It's the ones that screen writer Jean Shepherd called "the nameless rabble" that you will ignore unless you force yourself not to. These are the students that sit quietly, never cause trouble, do work of various levels of mediocrity (or slide by without doing anything because they're quiet and unobtrusive), and are content to be anonymous.

One way to make sure you're able to have contact with every student every day is to have a seating chart. I always had a seating chart in all my classes. It helped me to take roll, true, but I used it more to make sure I didn't lose anyone. (By the way, in some classes I assigned the seats, and in others I allowed students to pick their seats. It depended on the size of the class, the maturity of the students, and the number of students whose names I already knew.)

Working from my seating chart, I could easily keep geographic patterns of my class in my head. I could work quadrants or lines or diagonals of my classes with no regard to the individual behavior of the students. Since the same students always sat in the same seats, I could work the same pattern for every class throughout the day, and I could make sure that I gave everyone a chance to read or answer a question or participate.

If you don't use a seating chart, it's harder, but it's not impossible. You simply have to keep track of every individual student in the class, and whether or not you've given some attention to every student. (When you get really good, you'll be an expert at balancing positive and negative attention, but that's an email for another day.) Be especially aware of the quiet students who sit out of your normal line of vision. A little gentle encouragement for most of them is like the sun on a budding flower, and you'll see them open up before you. Ignoring them simply confirms their suspected anonymity, which is not really good pedagogy.

At the same time, remember to make frequent complete visual sweeps of the room when you're doing direct instruction. It's an easy habit to fall into that you'll speak to only one or two segments of the room. Force yourself to look to all the outer edges as well as the comfortable middle.

Jeff Combe