Principal's Report

We all know the experience of sitting in front of someone with whom we are having a conversation, however, we notice they have drifted off; their physical body may not have moved but their eyes seem to recede in some way, and we know attention has gone. And so not only do we feel not heard, but we also actually feel disconnected. The attention we devote to anyone, to any task, is very much a physical force that connects us. Nilli Lavie is a Professor of Psychology and Brain Science at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and she argues that some people have a biological propensity to distraction, a variation on Attention Deficit Disorder. And her research also suggests that our capacity for attention is strictly limited.

Professor Lavie argues that ‘Inattentional blindness’ is a phenomenon that occurs when our attention is engaged in a task that involves a lot of information, resulting in a high information load on the brain. When people pay attention under such conditions, the brain’s capacity to perceive any additional information that is not perceived as inherent to the task that they are doing is drastically impaired. And it leads to various phenomena of inattentional blindness - where quite conspicuous events that would be easily noticed if you did pay attention to them, people fail to notice them entirely. Her research concluded that it is critically dependent on how much capacity a person still has available in order to ‘attend to’ a growing number of tasks – there is a finite limit to our available capacity.

In one experiment, Professor Lavie asked respondents to do a visual task, (either demanding or it was very easy) and at the end of this series of visual stimuli  a sound or a beep was displayed - 80% of the people who engaged in the demanding task, in the high load task failed to notice that there was any sound, whereas only 20% of the people who performed an easy task failed to notice the presence of the sound. Therefore, it appears that it is critically dependent on the level of load in the task, whether we are ‘inattentionally deaf’ or not. Obviously, it is all happening in our head, and we can actually create a situation of high information load on the brain, even when there is no stimuli load in our brain at that moment such as being asked to memorise a certain visual picture, if that visual picture is more complex than we have more information to memorise.

In the week leading up to term 1, teachers participated in a one day professional learning experience that supports our three year school strategic plan that promotes John Hattie’s ‘Visible Learning’ program. A critical element of this extensively researched and respected program identifies the importance of structuring learning and teachable experiences that respect certain learning dispositions, with the intent of providing students with an increasing level of resilience and ‘ownership’ of their engagement with learning; learning and subsequent attainment that reflects the uniqueness of student learning dispositions in the context of the addition of key teaching strategies. With you, I look forward to both our staff and student response to the creative insights on teaching and learning subsumed in the principles and practices of ‘Visible Learning’ that will hopefully channel attention to outcomes rather than overload and ‘tune-out’ learners.

Thank you to all in our school community who remain attentive to important learning in a time where our attention can often be focused on many sources.

Regards,

Rod Linhart

(Principal)