The understanding for being “Sensitive in Awareness” is what is and always has been missing in all ideas to improve learning. Failure to know of this and just as important to know how to be effective with it, lies in a basic ignorance of how the brain learns through the mind. This we shall come back to later.

For now, let me share insight into how to actually develop the ability of your students, with nothing more than learning to be aware to be sensitive in awareness. Let me give examples to this:

In this example, we have a teacher teaching her students how to write the letter “a.” This is only an example, and it could be any learning experience. We see the little girl happy. She adores her teacher and by this wants to be like her, and so writes her “a” the best way she can and as near to the example given her. Now, the boy is happy too, but he wants to go and play football in the break. So, his mind is thinking about how to write the “a,” but he is also thinking about his friends, the bell to ring and who is looking after the ball. In other words, his mind is drifting. He is not concentrating on what he is doing. By their degree of concentration we can see how the girl’s “a” is closer to the model given to them by the teacher than that of the boy’s.

At the end of the lesson, the bell will ring and the teacher will regard each student as having written the letter to the best of their ability, and so will notice a variation in understanding and effort. The teacher has done her job, and in the following lesson she will move to the next stage in the learning process — how to write a “b” or whatever this happens to be.

As we can see, the boy’s effort was disturbed by other factors on his mind, and so his degree of sensitivity in what he was doing was much less than that of the girls. This factor of sensitivity is really the driving factor behind school performance and what we call intelligence.

However, the problem for the boy is that in the next lesson and so the next year, this “a” will be taken as “his ability.” With this being thought to be so, his effort will be more readily accepted by future teachers, rather than them wondering how to retrain this skill — which simply developed through earlier learning experiences. When the principle of this is not truly reasoned by educationalists, the idea of an inherited or genetic ability comes to the forefront of their thinking, with the consequence that the ability of all students fail to be better developed.

This example of the little boy here is actually built upon a real-life experience, which we would like to share with you. The story of Mathew will help you to understand not just how students develop poorer skills, but more importantly how you can dramatically improve their ability in these through understanding how they came about.

This will help you to understand the importance of “sensitivity in awareness,” both from the ways you introduce and guide the development of information in your students, to how you can better encourage them to be more aware of the need for sensitivity in the interactions and explanations they make. The following account was taken from our book “For Parent For Teacher: Mediation: Crafting the Ability of the Child for School.” In this and other books where we discuss Mathew (this is not his real name), we did not discuss another problem he had, which we want to bring out here. He was said to be dyslexic.

The section you are about to read will give you a hands-on understanding of the meaning and the value of the art of sensitivity in awareness, when it fails and the value of it when it is developed in the student. …….