Plan, Control...all at the right speed!

Since this week's blogs are all about attention, I would like to continue with the five important things about attention.  Monday and Tuesday I blogged about:

*choosing the right "channel" to focus on a the right time and for the right amount of time.

*filtering distractions

Today I want to talk about planning things, controlling impulses and regulating speed.   I love how Dr. Levine writes as though he is talking right to a child.  This is great conversation to have with your child/student to see how they are feeling about their attention and give you great insight in how to help them.

Keeping A Head in School, Dr. Mel Levine

Reflecting or Planning

When you reflect or plan, you concentrate on things before you ever say or do them.  By planning things, your brain predicts what you will do and how it will sound or look.  If, during the time you are palnning , it looks as if the results will be bad, you can think of some other way to do what you need to do.  In fact, you can keep tinking up differenc ways of doing something until you come up with the very best way.  Planning takes time.  When you're in a hurry, you can be impulsive.

An impulse is a feeling that you get that makes you do something very quickly without thinking or planning.  You might have the impulse to say something mean or to take something away from someone or to guess at a question on a test.  If you are impulsive, you sometimes act too quickly, and often you don't take the time to notice how things are going.  By slowing down and concentrating before doing something, it is possible to control impulses so that you get better results.  You can see that control over impulses is needed for good behavior and for good learning.

          Concentrating While Doing Something

It is also important to be able to concentrate while you are doing something.  By concentrating at that point, you can control what's happening.  You are much more likely to get the right answer or do the best job when you're watching what you're doing.  Unfortunately, concentrateing while you're working also takes time.  If you don't concentrate, you can work much faster, but then the results are often terrible, loaded with careless mistakes.  So, you can see that working at the right speed--not too fast and not too slowly--plays a big part in attention.  It takes time to concentrate, and it takes concentration to do things a the right speed!