Observation Week of 10/17 - Distractions

This week was a shortened week so I only got to observe in my 6^th grade classroom one day, but during this time I focused on finding what was causing distractions for students in the classroom.

What I found is that 11 and 12-year olds get distracted by many, many things! They are not allowed to have their phones on them during the school day (they must stay locked in lockers), so while that eliminates some distractions there are countless others.

For one thing, the biggest incident that happened was that one girl kept putting stickers on her face! As soon as she was told to take one off she put on another! Obviously, this was a big distraction to her table mates, but also to the whole class as their teacher kept having to stop class to tell her to remove the stickers; eventually she did stop.

Other than the “sticker occurrence” I spotted a lot of little distractions across the class. One student was leaning his face down and trying to look inside his computer through a crack, another was trying to wrap their entire pencil in gum wrappers, another was fascinated with tracing the decorative fake wood lines on the table, and countless others were distracted with things as simple as fiddling or looking at the ceiling tiles.

The one thing I noticed that all these distractions had in common was that they all occurred when their teacher was talking or giving instruction. But, if they were doing group work or independent work, they were almost always 100% focused and on task. Their teacher seems to know this too because they often are always using a large portion of class working in groups or independently.

I learned this week that distractions are everywhere and can be anything, and therefore are impossible to eliminate completely. In light of this, I think it’s great that their teacher is so aware of this, has found a way to minimize them in her class, and therefore increase productive and learning among her students.