When Jenny Odell first walked through the Rose Garden in Oakland, California, all she could hear were the many birds chirping.
After more visits, however, she started to differentiate between the various birdsongs: raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch. Odell was able to do this by literally doing nothing but sitting and listening. She let the sounds come to her instead of seeking them out.
She refers to this state in her book How to Do Nothing as “deep noticing”: slowing down and using all the senses to draw our attention to the present. The outcome is a better understanding of the world around her.
“The [bird] sounds have become so familiar to me that I no longer strain to identify them; they register instead like speech. This might sound familiar to anyone who has ever learned another human language as an adult.” (p. 8)
Odell also humbly realized as an adult that her mother spoke another language from her native Philippines, not just Tagalog.
“This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.” (p. 9)
Developing Our Attention Capacity
It is examples like Odell’s that motivated me to write my new book.
Our current evaluation systems guide supervisors to look for specific practices. While the language described in rubrics certainly helps us be more objective, they also limit our perspectives when observing instruction. When you add in the fact that expectations for observations are only 1-2 a year, this can be problematic.
No rubric or evaluation system will help us completely capture and understand the dynamics of a unique classroom. So, instead of looking for specific practices during your next instructional walk, try the following activity:
Enter a classroom without any notetaking tools - no computer, pen or paper.
Allow the experience of the classroom to come to you vs. looking for anything.
After 10-15 minutes, let the teacher and students know what you noticed and what you appreciated.
Go back to your office and write down what you observed, then give your notes to the classroom teacher at a later point.
This exercise can develop your attention capacity. You have nothing else to do, so you are forced to pay attention. To check how well you documented the experience later, compare this instructional walk to previous ones you scanned in for that teacher. How do they compare? If this attempt did not meet your expectations, retry this activity in the same classroom in the near future.
Artifacts, evidence, and notes are no replacement for deep noticing in classrooms. And the more we notice, the more we can name, celebrate and learn with teachers and students.
Wisdom from the Field is also a feature in my new book. Pre-order today!
Excellent point!