Children's Attention Span

     Short attention spans don’t stand a chance in our classroom!

     I recently read that children’s attention spans don’t exceed 12 minutes - and I’m sure many parents will agree! However, while some might see this as a limitation, we see it as useful information in structuring our classroom.

     Psychologists have recommended that teachers break up their classes into smaller segments, because the study had revealed that children tend to “retain” more information at the beginning and at the end of a session.

     You have probably noticed that in our classes, the children never work on one any one skill for more than a few minutes. If you watch, you’ll see that the kids don’t even stay with the same teacher for more than about 7-8 minutes. At first glance it may appear to be chaos with the kids moving back and forth in the classroom, but believe me, we are very much in control.

     However, there is a purpose to this “craziness.” At the beginning of each class, the students line up, bow in, and do a quick warm up. As the children are stretching after their warm-up, the head instructor begins to divide the class up by age, rank or size.

     Each of the other instructors has a different part of the lesson plan - it might be forms, self-defense, kicks, corner blocks, or any number of drills - and each is given a small group of children to work with.

     After a few minutes, you’ll hear the me yell “One minute everyone!” This is the cue for each instructor to finish their drill and prepare to send their group to the next teacher.

     The kids are sent off to another part of the room, with a new teacher and a new drill, just as their attention span had reached its limit with the old drill. A short attention span isn’t given a fair chance when faced with the combination of this “switch” and the “SSL” rule.

     “SSL,” by the way, stands for “Smiling, Sweating, and Learning.” In other words, our students are learning an important skill at the same that they’re getting a good workout… and having a good time. And balance is the key to accomplishing our goal of improving our students’ lives.

     We get much better results when we have a good balance between teaching kids life skills, giving them a good workout, and making sure they have a great time when they come to class. If we only focused on one aspect of the class - “sweating,” for example - the kids wouldn’t want to come. If we didn’t teach the kids valuable life skills, parents wouldn’t be interested in bringing their children.

      After all… what keeps us interested in working with children is seeing the benefits of their training - improved self-esteem, confidence, respect, courage, integrity, and perseverance. And these are the things that keep parents interested.

Jeff Cvitak

Martial Arts USA