What do you see in the picture above? I first saw a young woman with her head turned to the side. Did you see her too? If I told you that there is also another woman in the drawing can you find her as well? If you haven’t yet found her, look for an old lady.

The picture above is an optical illusion that dumbfounds many. However, once a person is told what to look for in the picture, the brain (the true seeing organ) is aware of what to find and can easily find it. Thus, awareness removes the blindfolds.

In learning, awareness is an important milestone for the student to accomplish. For this reason, awareness has been incorporated into the 2learn® Bank. A student who is aware of new things, is now able to see much more in her learning. She can take her learning to a more profound level because the blindfolds of ignorance have been removed from her mind.

Awareness leads to a ripple effect of new awareness in the sense that once a student is aware of one thing, the student can see a lot of new things and thus can become aware of more things. For instance, in the drawing above, when you are not aware of the young and old lady in the picture you probably just saw one woman. Then, once you were aware of the other woman, you found her as well. But now that you know that two women are in the picture, you can see so much more in the picture. For example, you now know that the young woman’s left ear is the old woman’s eye, the old woman’s mouth is the young woman’s necklace, the young woman’s nose and left eye is the old woman’s right eye, etc. Thus, like a pebble thrown into the water, the ripples of awareness continue to grow ever so largely as one situation of awareness leads to another.

So what is awareness in learning? Awareness in learning is the student being aware of a new aspect of her learning. Thus, if the student is playing the drum set with the metronome but cannot tell whether or not she is going too fast or too slow, she is not aware of the metronome and her lack of awareness hinders her ability to play with the metronome. However, if the student again plays with the metronome and plays out of time but when you ask her if she was playing too fast or too slow, she responds with too slow, she deserves an increase in her 2learn® Bank because now she is aware of the metronome’s presence while she plays the drum set.

Now the best time to provide a reward for awareness is when the student does not succeed in executing her task or solving her problem but makes progress in reaching the goal because she is now aware of something that she wasn’t aware of in the past. The reason for rewarding the student for awareness in this case is that it provides the student with a reward for not accomplishing her goal, but at least getting close. Because the student is usually very goal oriented and has a hard time seeing a reward in any other way besides the finish line, rewarding the student for getting half-way to the finish line will help give the student the emotional boost of confidence that she needs to persevere to the finish line.

You can reward the student for her awareness if the student is aware of substantive or critical thinking abilities that she wasn’t previously aware of. But try to use awareness as a half-way to the finish line reward system because in its truest since, that is what it is.  However, because patience and perseverance seem to be heading in the opposite direction of impatience and laziness in today’s society, keeping the student’s emotional investment in learning becomes a little easier when the student can at least be rewarded for awareness.

© Megan Prats 2014