There are many challenges facing schools today. From crumbling buildings to inadequate resources; from stringent accountability to a demoralized and vanishing workforce - these fundamental issues determine the atmosphere of the school. And yet, the work gets done and children are educated because the values of our education system are upheld by extraordinary professionals who dedicate their lives to teaching children. 

About fifteen years ago, I remember reading an article predicting that attention would be the resource that businesses would compete for. I was intrigued because the human attention system is controlled by rhythmic patterns in the social environment, particularly in relation to perceiving language. Image for a moment the type of voice that ‘drones’ and lulls us to sleep and it is not difficult to appreciate the power of rhythm on the attention system. 

At that time I wondered a lot about this new world in which human attention would become premium ‘real estate’ for tech companies. I asked myself how this might affect learning in schools and I think we are now seeing this playing out in rising numbers of children with anxiety, depression and internet addiction.

In my opinion, learning is most likely affected, because tech companies have built algorithms that now have gained expertise in triggering and manipulating the brain’s reward system. The human attention system can be trained (or groomed - depending on your point of view) to respond specifically to the triggers that are found on certain platforms. Human shares and likes are found on the most triggering content. 

In the workplace, robots continue to replace skilled manual labour in production lines and AI is poised to outpace creative workers in writing and composing- affecting our future perception of culture, media, the music industry as well as the film industry. The pace of change is accelerating and if our attention system has been captured to varying degrees by technology - how might we best adapt to these new conditions, which - after all - have been unleashed for humans, by humans?

Educators work closely tech companies, as they provide free resources to schools. Microsoft in particular pride themselves on their free resources and they have led the way on their suite of modifications for children specific learning difficulties. However, no matter how helpful these are, they do not address the more fundamental challenges that children face.

A specific and urgent challenge for educators today is this: to find a new type of reading intervention that will galvanize and strengthen children’s attention as well as equip them to read with fluency and understanding in an online social environment that is increasingly triggering and designed to manipulate the attention span.

Rapid response style teaching is used in phonics and is designed to provide small sharp shocks to the attention system. These bursts of novelty are effective as they are likely to stimulate long-term memory and activate automatic associations between the letters (graphemes) and their sounds (phonemes). It is very important to cultivate exposure to longer, more sustained forms of learning because these are necessary to galvanize and strengthen human attention across longer spans of time. Fluent readers have a capacity to sustain their attention across large units of time and to deepen their engagement with the text while they are in this almost trancelike state.

An emphasis on systematic approaches such as synthetic phonics represents only one aspect of learning to read. As phonemes are the smallest sounds of language, each single phoneme occupies only a tiny proportion of any sentence, amounting in natural speech to only a fraction of a second. An early reading programme with a focus on static individual sounds can dilute the child’s natural curiosity for contextual cues and can distract from the natural rhythmic flow of language, that underpins language comprehension.

For the majority of children, the early stages of reading then progress onto fluent reading, but those who do not move into the next phase of reading, continue to receive targeted support in phonics. In my opinion, a disproportionate amount of time spent on phonics can affect the attention system and over the long term fixate reading development on dislocated units of sound - without sufficient development of ease, fluency and understanding.

Reading well is a feat of delicate coordination between the reader’s eyes, ears and mind in a social alignment with the ‘voice’ of the author. Achieving this alignment involves an almost magical process that allows the reader to assimilate meaning as it ‘flies’ off the page (or screen) into the reader’s consciousness. Reading well depends on an intuitive, grammatical response to the underlying relationship between the subject and verb in every sentence. But it is rhythm that determines the grammatical structure of a sentence. 

This is why the rhythmic ebb and flow of reading is as intuitive as is the rhythmic ebb and flow of a conversation, even though, writing and speech can vary widely in terms of style. 

Overall, we can say that the sentence as a whole and coherent unit of grammar is vibrant, elastic and flexible. Its meaning is perceived not through the synthesis of its many phonemes, but through its overall rhythm and structure. And to detect the overall rhythm and structure of a sentence, we need children to have sufficient attention to engage their ears and their eyes with the voice of the author.

Enjoy this post? Why not keep reading...