Making Contact: An Exploration of Focused Attention between Teacher and Students

ABSTRACT

In a study I conducted on Waldorf education, I found that teachers practiced a number of activities that were seemingly important but nameless. While some may consider the kinds of activities I explore in this paper as time-off-task or as incidental, I suggest that activities like shaking hands with students each morning and afternoon, or singing attendance, have important educational ramifications. I call exercises such as these and others focal activities or conditions, and I suggest that they are used specifically to create occasions where teachers can establish, confirm, or discontinue contact between themselves and students.

The implications of focal conditions are several. In this paper I argue that focal conditions provide routine contact between teacher and students, can be used as a diagnostic tool, personalize teacher-student relations, create classroom feelings or moods, and, at times, prepare students for the next activity by capturing in an expressive form its essential character. The term focal condition is foreign to Waldorf education, but I believe the concept captures Waldorf teacher practice. I end this article by encouraging researchers, administrators, and teachers to take these activities seriously and not relegate them to a subordinate educational category.