ATTENTION AND SIGNIFICANCE IS VITAL TO LEARNING!

Grabbing the attention and bring significance to your lesson is the most important part of a helping your students understand the content and move the content into their working memory. Administrator's expect/hope to see scientifically research based instruction during an observation to help create the meaning of the lesson and to keep their attention on the lesson. Ormrod states "information that an individual pays attention to moves on to working memory whereas information that is not attended may be lost from the memory system". With that being stated, it is vital an observation has a meaningful initiation in the lesson. How does the teacher activate the class' attention in regards to the lesson? It is important that one of the eight factors that Ormrod mentions that influence attention should be considered when creating the initiation for a lesson (motion, size, intensity, novelty, incongruity, emotion, personal significance, and social cues). What exactly does this mean for you as a teacher? This means being creative. For example, any vocabulary can be brought to life through motion or action. Asking the students to create a motion with the meaning of a word will definitely bring attention to the lesson and bring significance and help the students move the meaning of the word into working memory. In addition a teacher sharing their emotion of a lesson will make or break a lesson. If a teacher models positive passion about a lesson then that passion will transferred to the students. 

Besides having a great initiation that captures meaning to the students, the instructional practices that administrators should see during formal or informal observations would be one of the working memory or "thinking" that Ormrod refers to (176). Any instructional practices that enables the students to think about the lesson is working memory. Effective strategies that I have used in my own classroom and I have seen other teachers use to move the content into working memory would be "think-pair-share", "everybody writes" , "think-write-pair-share", "read and retell", "exit/entrance tickets", "nonliguistic representations", "summarizing and note taking", "identifying similarities and differences" and "higher order thinking questions". All of the strategies listed above have been proven by SIOP, CRISS, and Marzano's research. These strategies get the learner to think about the lesson and bring meaning to the lesson. 


To be an effective teacher it is important to consider using research based instructional strategies to help students to "think", grab and keep their attention and are meaningful to move the new knowledge into working memory. As an administrator it is our job to provide the professional development for teachers to ensure that teachers are aware of the best strategies to help their students succeed and learn.