According to Daniel Gadman, the hidden driver in excellence among all people is focus, or as he refers to it in his video lecture, attention. There are two types of attention that humans have: voluntary attention and seductive attention. Voluntary attention is the attention that we give to a certain person, task, or thing in order to learn from or reap the benefits of the attention that we gave. For example, Sally pays attention voluntarily to the teacher during math because she loves the subject and wants to do well on the next test. Seductive attention is attention that we give something, while we are giving out attention voluntarily to another thing. For example, Kenyon is listening intently to Ms. Decker give a presentation about half-life …show more content…
There are four factors that largely influence an individual’s emotional intelligence, all of which impact our attention in one way or another, and they include, self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skill. Another interesting point that Gadman made about attention was that it directly correlates with delay of gratification. A follow up of the famous marshmallow study conducted by Stanford University, found that those students who were able to delay their gratification for the marshmallow were found to score an average of 210 points higher on the SAT than their counterparts who were unable to delay their gratification. This same study found that the 210 point increase was higher than that between a student whose parents did not receive an education higher than elementary and students whose parents received a graduate degree. Cognitive control is another very important piece of increasing the attention of a child. A study found that by testing a child’s cognitive control between the ages of four and eight would predict the child’s financial success and health 30 years down the road more effectively than IQ tests or the SES of the …show more content…
Some of the teaching techniques that he mentioned that help to increase attention include, modeling the behavior, having breathing buddies, and even having a SEL Stoplight. Children learn the most through modeling, which is why I would be sure to model what it looks like to have voluntary attention. As a future teacher and an advocate for self-reflection, I loved the idea of having breathing buddies. Since the child is able to choose which stuffed animal they will use as their breathing buddy, they will be more encouraged to focus on the stuffed animal moving up and down with their breathing. I also love that this activity can be done to calm the entire class down if they are becoming too rowdy, but also has positive benefits for increasing their awareness of their attention. I like the general idea of the SEL Stoplight; however, I feel as though with younger children this may be a hard concept for them to grasp. To modify this idea, I would have a green, yellow, and red beanbag in a quiet corner of my classroom. When a child was acting out, I would have them sit in the red beanbag and have them use cards, which would be on the floor near the beanbag, to determine what they are feeling inside. For example, the cards would have a picture of a child who looked happy, a picture of a child who