Improving the multi-tasking skill in children

Introduction

Is your child filing to focus on writing while listening or vice-versa? Are you feeling difficulty to train such child? You are not alone as a parent of such child, in fact 50% of the children remains laggards because of their poor abilities to do multi-tasking.  This is not only a time consuming aspect from the teacher and the parent but also demands immense patience, skills, knowledge about the cognitive levels of kids, personality of the kids, and the ability to diagnose the neuro-psychiatric issues. Gone were the days where teacher use to simply suggest and facilitate while the student use to take the complete responsibility for his/her learning,  the concept was good because the education was teacher-centered where he is the central figure dominated the process. As the pace of and the depth the education process is evolving, the whole process has gradually shifter into student-centered from the teacher centered demanding more efforts from the student as pupils are the dominant figures. This not only requires hard work but what is known as the multi-tasking abilities.  

Conceptual idea of multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is a very broad concept, in fact many of us tend mistake it simply looking at the broader perspective about the phenomenon. We cannot merely infer that, a student is good at multi-tasking if he can listen to music while talking to others!  Let`s not diverge ourselves from the point of view of education into something else which is beyond the scope of this article. In other words, multi-tasking involves not hundreds of things to be carried out at once, rather a student must be able to flourish in at least 3 -4 skills at once. When it comes to education, it includes, the ability of a child to stay on the topic while performing listening, understanding, writing, and responding to the teacher, this is what a student ideally requires to understand a topic. Another example, a multi-tasking student can refer 3-4 books at once while taking down the essential points aside googling some doubts to make things clear. In reality, many students fail to anchor all these tasks to make into a package, instead they fail to perform in one or more of these. In order to acquire such skills, kids require training, discipline, motivation and on the whole a comprehensive interventions by the efforts of both parents and teachers. 

Multi-tasking, whether it is good or bad?

Multi-tasking sometimes takes a form of over-feeding the brains which is what an academician doesn’t expect to happen .However, weighing the pros-cons of doing and not doing multi-tasking is really important. Many surveys suggest that, kids are reluctant to carryout 2 or more useful tasks aforementioned, rather they take it in a wrong sense which indulge them in the darker side of the phenomenon. For instance, children enjoy Mobile games aside writing notes, which though looks good but not advisable because   they are not aware of the drawback of playing games while they thinks he has successfully finished writing in a relaxed way.  In this case they are happy about the ease of writing while ignoring the consequence of the bad habit-gaming. On the useful side, multi-tasking simply makes things easier for both the teacher and the learner in many ways. Despite some studies suggest that it damages brain as kids to rush through many things at once, I strongly believe a methodological approach towards training kid`s brain to do multi-tasking saves a lot of time, while improving the cognitive skills. In the long run, kid`s brain simply becomes the super-power in a way that a brain can be so productive that it equals 2 brains. 

How to boost multi-tasking?

It is important to make the child understand, multitasking is not actually doing two or more things at once, rather it is shifting one`s attention from one thing to another, while not losing the grip on the previous one. For instance, when a student start writing notes, he must not take away his sense of hearing though his eyes focus on notes. This infers that our brain can focus on many works at once while helping each sense organs individually. However, not to forget,  when multitasking, kids tend to make up to 4 times more errors than normal, however it can be managed by slowly training them. As a teacher, asking his students to explore their limits on multitasking in addition to create a plan for themselves while studying is good.  Let us understand how to train kids for multi-tasking.

Divide tasks into chunks of to-do lists and give a brief idea on what is the whole assignment is about and what are the individual tasks required to fulfill it. Streamlining helps them understand what they would do in a given time period and which one comes first while which task goes to last. Train and improve the listening skills first by providing an audio clips, followed by this, ask him to explain what he understood. Over a period of time, say after 20-30 exercise, ask him to write while listening instead of passively listening. It is good to increase the speed of audio clip at this stage.   Similarly, for writing, provide a simple literature at the beginning while slowly increasing the depth of the literature and set him a flexible duration within which he need to copy the literature. Gradually, set a narrow time-limit within which he must finish writing. In the next phase, ask him to listen while he also focus on some text book and he must writes down his own points by concentrating on both the Audio and literature.

Advice kids to work in a quiet place whenever they can as it is easy for a child to get distracted by people and noises around. A study room ideally meant for him is a good choice where it is well organized, with no clutter around. Maintaining a positive vibe with proper lighting, correct posture while studying, maintaining cleanliness of room, brightly painted walls are some of the ways that can speed-up the tasks.

It is done by understanding the capacities of individual. It is significantly important for the student to be aware of the fact that , in moderation, multitasking is perfectly normal awhile it becomes unproductive and dangerous in extremes.  Never ever force things because after all our brains have something that they do not like, that is forcing things.

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