I am presently home-tutoring my 12-year-old Taiwanese daughter. She is two years new to the United States and to the equally new experience of living in an English-speaking world. She is very bright and apt to get very bored as Mom plows through daily lessons with her. So, after reading about a unique strategy for helping highly distractible children to focus better, I adapted some of the suggestions into a 15-minute teaching session for my daughter.

We both stand together at a high desk during the learning session. Since she is a very active girl, the added task of standing and balancing while doing her work is a positive activity during learning.

We set a time for 15 minutes and begin the lesson. We might be involved in a large variety of different tasks: research, reading, writing, listening, map-work, computation, artwork, etc. We work together through the lesson: I as translator/reader, she as active learner.*

*By active learner I mean this: I am not permitted to “read through” the written material uninterrupted. She is constantly commenting (sometimes off-subject), questioning and interjecting her insights or knowledge on the subject.

Our learning time together is a kind of dance. We do want to “get through the material”, but it is very enriching to my daughter’s learning if I respond to the interruptions instead of trying to squelch them. This is very different than teaching “a subject” – it is an active interchange between teacher and student; it is teaching “a student”.

Here is an example of this “learning” dance. Yesterday I read a short, interesting factoid about the United States. This was the statement: “The Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., sinks into the earth six inches every year.”

“What?” My daughter stopped my reading with her question. Then she had me repeat the statement. “How can that be?” She asked. “What is the Washington Monument?”

One (insignificant?) fact in the middle of a much larger reading; yet this was interesting to my daughter and this is where we paused. First, I tried to sketch the Washington Monument; she didn’t recognize it. Then, out came the encyclopedia (her idea) and she excitedly told me how she just “happened” to open right to the pages on Washington D.C.! And there we found a lovely picture of the Washington Monument. That led to more questions: “What’s inside of it?”, “Why is it sinking?”

And so it went – for 15 minutes. At the end of 15 minutes, I dismissed her to “go play” – for 15 minutes. During this free-time away from the lesson, she chooses something to do. She has chosen several occupations over the last few days: computer games (of course!), snack, read, play card games, work on puzzles and paint pictures on canvases. (This last choice really surprised me!) She set up a whole art studio on the dining room table and produced two paintings using 15 minute increments of time. This was inspiring to me and I joined her at the table to produce some artwork of my own!

15 minutes lessons, 15 minutes play: so we volley back and forth, from school work to free choice all through the morning, and sometimes through the afternoon. I see many benefits in this 15-minute strategy. There are benefits to my daughter.

First, she is not confronted with an impossibly long list of tasks that need to be done before she can have free time.

Second, because she is receiving regularly scheduled breaks, she has greater endurance to work through all her lessons with excellence.

Third, she is a able to manage 15 minute increments of free time much more productively than a longer time at the very end of things. When faced with a large amount of undirected free time, she can sometimes feel quite adrift.

The short intervals of lessons/play are also a benefit to me as her teacher.

First, it’s much easier for me to be committed and fully engaged in teaching for the shorter periods of time. (Mom gets weary too, slogging through a long list of assignments needing completion.) Breaking the lessons down into 15-minute pieces takes the burden of accomplishing the whole day’s work largely off my shoulders. I am willing to work for 15 minutes together with my daughter. Then after that, we stop.

Second, the short intervals helps me to realize that I am teaching “a student” – a person – not a list of subjects. When we work non-stop through the morning, I tend to lose my focus and transfer my teaching energy to the less vital task of working through an assignment list in order to check off each subject as completed. The short intervals help me to realize that my involvement and commitment is to this young person that I am teaching: not to the accomplishment of a certain number of pages in a book. The short intervals help me move at the pace of my daughter: not cramming information into her, but teaching, listening and learning together.

If we do get “side-tracked” on a minor point – no worries. I don’t have to “get through” the material in one 15-minute sitting; I cannot “get through” the material in one 15-minute sitting. If we run out of time, we simply pick up where we left off during our next session together.

A third benefit to me is that if I am on the wrong track in my teaching: not connecting with my student, unreasonably rushing things, getting irritated with mental detours, – then the 15-minute break in-between work sessions gives me the opportunity to evaluate, to change my thinking and to “reset” for a more profitable and relaxed teaching session the next time around. I really love this benefit! Instead of begin “off track” for a whole day of teaching, I can change my course, and the course of the teaching day, after one or two muffed opportunities.

I’m just at the beginning of this experiment; the whole years stretches out before us. So far, the results have been very encouraging. We will take this school year one day at a time, one 15-minute session at a time.