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[The importance of looking at things again]

You will love this one – and so will your students, so make sure you use it in class. Just take this test – it only takes two minutes. Follow the hand movements and see whether you remember under which cup the sweet is at the end. Then watch the rest of the video.

This is a demonstration of a phenomenon that Psychologists Chabris & Simons have dubbed ‘The Illusion of Attention’. The basic idea is that when we are focused on one thing it is extremely difficult to focus on something else – or even to notice some pretty obvious things. The original experiment involved getting people to watch a short video of people passing a ball to each other. The observer’s task was to count the number of passes. Half-way through the 30-second clip, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks into the frame, turns to face the camera and thumps his chest. Incredibly, it turns out that when asked whether they noticed anything strange about the clip, 50% of the people who had watched it fail to mention the gorilla!

So what is the moral here? Well, as teachers we think we know what goes on in our lessons, yet experiments like this one show that what we perceive is a small fraction of reality. What we remember is smaller still.

We are usually so focused on sticking to our lesson plan, or giving out handouts, or simplifying the input, or giving clear instructions etc. etc. that we fail to notice that Maria is bored or that John has not understood what he is supposed to do or that everyone ignores Peter who is feeling very cut off and excluded.

The moral: we need some more eyes and perhaps even another brain to help us. Stick a camera somewhere to record your lessons or, better still, get a colleague to observe you. Then listen to his/her comments to see what you have missed.

The Moral: You cannot pay attention to everything. Get another pair of eyes.