It is the third period on a humid September afternoon, and the ceiling fan turns slowly above forty heads. Chalk squeaks across the green board as the teacher draws arrows for the water cycle. In the second row a girl sits perfectly upright, hands folded on the desk the way she was taught in Class 1, eyes fixed on the board. Two benches behind her a boy jiggles his knee and rolls a pencil between his fingers. Once he whispers “evaporation” to himself. The teacher’s eyes find him. “Sit properly.” The knee stops, the pencil goes down, and the room settles back into the smell of chalk dust and the steel tiffin boxes waiting under the benches.
Which of these two children was listening? The teacher cannot know, and neither can we. Only one of them was asked to change.
The posture of attention
In most of our schools attention has a shape. Back straight, arms folded, finger on the lips, eyes to the front. Children learn this shape before they learn the alphabet, and teachers praise it long before they praise a good question. A child may hold it for most of the six hours she spends on a bench. We read stillness as attention because stillness is visible and attention is not. From the front of a room of forty, it is easy to check who is sitting still. It is much harder to check who is thinking.
The shape tells us less than we think. Jonathan Carriere, Paul Seli and Daniel Smilek found that people whose thoughts drift away on their own also tend to fidget more, so movement can sometimes signal a mind gone elsewhere. But the finding cuts both ways. Plenty of drifting happens in perfectly still bodies. A child can sit like a statue and be in her grandmother’s courtyard. Stillness, on its own, is evidence of nothing except stillness.
Where the shape came from
The folded arms are not ancient wisdom. The French thinker Michel Foucault showed how the schools, barracks and hospitals of eighteenth-century Europe learned to work on the body itself, timing its activity, fitting each gesture to its task and correcting its posture. He called the result a docile body, one that can be “subjected, used, transformed and improved”. The rows, the bell and the folded arms in our own schools belong to that family, and they make up much of the hidden curriculum of the body. They were never designed to show whether a child understands.
What moving bodies are doing
When researchers look closely at children rather than at their posture, the picture changes. Dustin Sarver, Mark Rapport and their colleagues filmed 52 boys aged eight to twelve doing a demanding memory task. Boys with ADHD did better when they moved more, while typically developing boys did slightly worse. The study shows a link, not a cause, and covers one kind of task. For some children, movement is part of how the work gets done, and stopping it can make the work harder.
The hands carry thought too. Susan Goldin-Meadow, Martha Alibali and Ruth Breckinridge Church found that children whose gestures said something different from their words, while explaining a problem, were often the ones most ready to learn from the next lesson. The moving hand was a mind in transition. A teacher who silences the hands can miss exactly that moment.
The arrangement of the day matters as well. Karrie Godwin and her colleagues watched children from kindergarten to Class 4 across dozens of American classrooms. Children were least on task during whole-group teaching, and drifted more as activities stretched longer. Anthony Pellegrini’s studies of recess found that children were generally less attentive before a break than after it. The arrangement was asking their bodies for something bodies do not easily give.
A claim about the child, not a technique
The usual answer to all this is the movement break. Let children stretch for two minutes so that they can sit still again for forty. It helps, but notice what it keeps. Stillness stays the goal, and movement becomes the medicine that buys more of it. This series, drawing on embodied cognition, makes a different claim. Attention is not a mental effort that the body must stop interfering with. It is something a whole body does, leaning in, turning towards, holding on and letting go.
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra speaks of ekāgratā (one-pointedness of mind) as a pariṇāma (transformation), something the mind grows into over time. You can command a posture in a second. You cannot command one-pointedness at all. It has to be cultivated, through breath, rhythm, interest and trust.
Go back to the boy with the pencil. What did “sit properly” teach him? Perhaps that thinking with his body is a kind of misbehaviour. Perhaps that looking attentive matters more than being attentive. And the girl in the second row, so perfectly still, may have been with the water cycle or a hundred kilometres away. If you could no longer see your students’ straight backs and folded arms, how would you know they were with you?
Put it into practice: P12 · Changing position every twenty minutes; P14 · Standing to think: when to let children learn on their feet; P44 · Chosen silence versus imposed silence
Read next: R12 · Attention is a bodily act, not a mental effort; R47 · Sitting still: what a young body can and cannot do
Notes
- Carriere, J. S. A., Seli, P., & Smilek, D. (2013). Wandering in both mind and body: Individual differences in mind wandering and inattention predict fidgeting. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(1), 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031438
- Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (See the chapter “Docile bodies”.)
- Sarver, D. E., Rapport, M. D., Kofler, M. J., Raiker, J. S., & Friedman, L. M. (2015). Hyperactivity in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Impairing deficit or compensatory behavior? Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-015-0011-1
- Goldin-Meadow, S., Alibali, M. W., & Church, R. B. (1993). Transitions in concept acquisition: Using the hand to read the mind. Psychological Review, 100(2), 279–297.
- Godwin, K. E., Almeda, M. V., Seltman, H., Kai, S., Skerbetz, M. D., Baker, R. S., & Fisher, A. V. (2016). Off-task behavior in elementary school children. Learning and Instruction, 44, 128–143.
- Pellegrini, A. D., Huberty, P. D., & Jones, I. (1995). The effects of recess timing on children’s playground and classroom behaviors. American Educational Research Journal, 32(4), 845–864.
- Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra III.11–12, on ekāgratā-pariṇāma. Translations by Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Barbara Stoler Miller and Swami Prabhavananda compared at https://www.sallykempton.com/innerpath_yogasutra_book3_translations
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