Building in Learning Downtime
Humans are natural meaning-seeking organisms, but excessive input can conflict with that process. . . . You can either have your learner’s attention or they can be making meaning, but never both at the same time. The brain needs time to “go inside” and link the present with the past and future. Without this, learning drops dramatically. We absorb so much information unconsciously that downtime is absolutely neces- sary to process it all. The brain has an automatic mechanism for shift- ing (internal and external) and for shutting down input when it needs to. (Jensen, 2000, p. 123)
When students are taking in information from any external source—for exam- ple, by listening, reading, seeing, or doing—pauses must be built in systemati- cally to give the learner time to absorb and organize, reflect and process the in- formation, make connections, and construct personal meaning. If teachers don’t consciously attend to this, the learner will do it anyway out of necessity and will appear to have stopped paying attention. In Chapter 11, “Clarity,” we discuss guidelines for how often and how long the pauses for processing should occur.