Ten minute sessions support transformation

May is the month of revision and assessments, but many children are struggling with studying and to such an extent that schools are breaking learning down into ten minute study sessions.

A ten minute session is a strategy that works very well for children with scattered attention. In Rhythm for Reading I’ve always used this approach. It is just long enough to work intensively and finish with the children wanting more.

Finishing a ten minute session with a room full of energized children, is a really beneficial option because ending the session before the children feel tired, sends the brain a signal to say that this was more like fun than work.

In a classroom situation, there are more opportunities for peak learning and engagement if sessions are spliced into units of ten minutes. Of course, sustained learning is also important, and a proportion of children are spending so much time on the internet that they are losing their capacity for sustained focus. There are also children who needed to develop their attention from scratch, perhaps because of socioeconomic disadvantage, and as educators we all recognize that this area of development is vital.

Today I just wanted to zoom out a bit so that we can see a broader context. All of the most powerful ideas that are a big part of our culture nowadays had their roots in the 1950s and 1960s. There were concerns about productivity in farming and food security. Rationing had been enforced for years. [And this week we celebrated the 80th anniversary marking the end of the war]. There is now a surplus of food and too much of it is wasted, even though children are starving in the places ravaged by human aggression.

Back in the 1950s and 60s when food security was a top priority, a team of researchers led by a scientist called Harry Harlow ran experiments on baby monkeys. They discovered that monkeys would survive if they were separated from their mothers. This discovery was a major breakthrough for livestock yields and a major breaking down of the natural bond between the mother and child. The result was industrial farming.

For educators, the details of the experiment are important. Monkeys were offered a metal mother made of wire which dispensed milk from a bottle. They was also a cloth mother with no milk. The scientists were surprised to see that each infant monkey preferred to starve while clinging to the cloth mother for comfort in these very artificial conditions. The two mothers had crude faces attached to them and were pushed closer together so that the infant could cling to the cloth mother and drink milk from the bottle fastened to the wire mother. When these infant monkeys were released back into the company of other monkeys they were aggressive, struggled to play alongside others. Although the infant monkeys survived, they were emotionally disturbed for their entire lives. These days productivity is a main concern of our schools. It’s a question of how to get more done in a shorter amount of time, and how to obtain better 'yields' if you will, from the minds of the children.

A second theme that shapes us today and has its roots in the 1960s is the rise of the 'superhero'. Marvel comics and movies were popular before and after the war years. The ideal of the superhero character, who rescued innocent people from villains and saved the universe is rooted in the monomyth identified by Joseph Campbell as the 'Hero’s Journey'. This particular pattern of storytelling has had a strong resurgence in the 21st century, made all the more alluring and magical by advances in CGI and other special effects which play with and distort the audience’s perception of time. Also, flashing lights push visual processing to the limits of what is safe.

The collective effect of the 'Hero’s Journey' has always been to teach and to hold attention for a very long period of time. The first such tale, the story of Gilgamesh, was about the King's brother who wanted to thwart death by becoming immortal. There is evidence to suggest that these stories helped the early civilisations of the 'Fertile Crescent' to shape the first cultural practices amid rapid urbanization. There were clear benefits of organising human behaviour around a single belief system, particularly in places where there was a social class of scribes and priests who oversaw the distribution of goods, food supply and trade.

In storytelling around the hearth, humans naturally use hyperbole and exaggeration to build rapport and to take their audience on a 'spin' around powerful feelings of awe, admiration and wonder. It’s interesting that in the 21st century, the scientific community concerned with 'Project Gilgamesh' is focused on human enhancement through technology.

Although the roots of comic book superheroes may be the fantasies of the mid 20th century, we now find ourselves knee deep in GMOs and incredible life changing prosthetics that are enhanced by nanotechnologies. The genetically modified Spiderman helps us to appreciate the wonders of science, whilst connecting us to recent cultural icons of our grandparents.

Things have changed a lot even in the past 15 years. The Marvel films started to ramp production of their superhero movies, games and TV programmes. Children started to own smartphones. I started Rhythm for Reading in 2013 and since then there have been huge breakthroughs in what scientists have uncovered about learning. Rather than apply this to education, this information has been applied to the development of robotics and artificial intelligence.

To learn about the effects of the Rhythm for Reading pilot in Year 7, I invite you to watch the video where I share the data and discuss the way that the secondary school adopted ten minute study sessions. The pilot was very encouraging. The school assessed the children. Many made more than 12 months of progress after ten weekly sessions of ten minutes, as measured using the Suffolk Reading Scales. At that point in 2013, the amount of information available through neuroscience was still in early stages. I continued to work with this secondary school and was delighted to see they’d decided to introduce ten minute booster classes for older children. This was something they’d learned from Rhythm for Reading. They found that ten minute sessions worked really well...watch the video to find out more.

I hope this post resonated? In education, our role is to understand as quickly as we can how we to protect, strengthen and develop children’s attention and focus, during this time of acceleration in technology.

If you have children in your class who are struggling with focus and attention, you might like to join my next webinar on Thursday at 8:00 BST / UK/Europe Click here

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