The Power of Reflective Attention

This is my last post on the incredible book The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum by John Dewey. If you want to learn more about this book, you can read my previous posts here, here, here, and here.

Much is talked about deeper learning nowadays. How do we get students to go beyond what is being taught in schools? How do we get them to retain learned material? How do we transform students into life-long learners? According to Dewey, developing reflective attention is a good starting point.

Here is what Dewey has to say about reflective attention:

A person who has gained the power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind, is in so far, intellectually speaking, educated. He has mental discipline — power of the mind and for the mind. Without this the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions.

He continues later on…

True, reflective attention, on the other hand, always involves judging, reasoning, deliberation; it means that the child has a question of his own and is actively engaged in seeking and selecting relevant material with which to answer it, considering the bearings and relations of this material — the kind of solution it calls for. The problem is one’s own; hence also the impetus, the stimulus to attention, is one’s own; hence also the training secured is one’s own — it is discipline, or gain in power of control; that is, a habit of considering problems.

It is hardly too much to say that in the traditional education so much stress has been laid upon the presentation to the child of ready-made material (books, object-lessons, teacher’s talks, etc.), and the child has been so almost exclusively held to bare responsibility for reciting upon this readymade material, that there has been only accidental occasion and motive for developing reflective attention. Next to no consideration has been paid to the fundamental necessity — leading the child to realize a problem as his own, so that he is self-induced to attend in order to find out its answer.

Reflective attention is the ‘gain in power of control’ over one’s learning quest; it’s the ‘habit of considering problems’ in a way that only its originator can satisfactorily solve.

So when we talk about deeper learning, who owns the learning? The teacher or the student? This is the question that we teachers should be asking ourselves every day, every time we interact with students. Students who have mastered the skill of reflective attention owns their learning and there is nothing that you, as a teacher, can do to stop that.

Learning in focus — My goal is to develop the power of reflective attention in students. This can only be done if we transfer learning agency to students. So how might we do that?