Supporting Attention Development

Sustained attention, controlling one’s attention, and selectively attending to what is important for learning are all complexities of how young children develop attentional resources to learn in a classroom environment.

It is important to recognize how different a classroom is from real-world interactional contexts; instead of a family or a small group, there is a large group of same-aged peers with an adult or two leading them in highly structured ways. The specific pedagogies of these ways will be discussed in this text, and each comes with varying types and degrees of structures that help to define the social context of the classroom. This can be said of early learning care environments as well as preschool and elementary school.

One of the commonalities across these contexts is that attention is often demanded of young children in a way that does not naturally occur in other contexts of their lives. If in a group, they must listen to a story together, or perhaps engage in singing together or line up together to go out to play. Children must develop different types of attention in order to focus on what is necessary, sustain interest over time, and not get distracted (selective attention).

Think back to the first activity of this chapter, where you contemplated the many ways that you have observed children engaged in learning and having to pay attention. Now, think about how we can actually promote the development of that attention. Establishing joint attention is key to creating opportunities to draw infants’ and young children’s focus on things we would like them to learn. We learn about this in the context of language development, in which adults can label objects and people in the environment as they establish intersubjectivity and joint attention on them.

The video below (from RecerCaixa’s “Before their first words” project) shows the important role adults have in establishing joint attention with children for language development. However, it imagines the many other domains of thinking that could be impacted positively through this mechanism. We will revisit the concept of joint attention throughout the book to look at how engaging infants and young children by directing their attention can lead to many kinds of learning.

Video: Joint Attention (duration: 2:39)

(Abans de les Primeres Paraules, 2015)