Page 221 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

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CHAPTER

Your Assumptions and Beliefs

he classroom is an extremely busy place with dozens of moving
parts, dozens of personalities, and hundreds of demands on our
T time in any given day. There are just too many pieces of information
for us to process or even notice them all. In many ways, the classroom is
an example of the selective attention principle (Simons, 2010) at work. The
effects of selected attention are illustrated in Daniel Simons and Chris-
topher Chabris’s famous “Gorilla” video (bit.ly/DiveIntoUDLCh4a): When
instructed to count the number of times the players in white pass a basket-
ball during the video, viewers become so focused on the passes that they
fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk through the game.

Our focus becomes a filter.

For many of us, our assumptions and beliefs about learning and learners
become our focus and our filter. We expect to see certain behaviors: for
certain students to succeed, for other students to struggle. We count the
passes, but counting the passes reinforces our expectations so we fail to
see the gorilla walk across the floor.
It’s only when we consciously look for the gorilla—when someone points
out that we should look for the gorilla—that we see it. If you are lucky
enough to have experienced the Simons and Chabris video without prior
knowledge of its intent, it is an eye-opening moment. You can’t believe
you missed the gorilla. It’s so obvious! However, some will insist the video
was doctored. There is no way they missed that gorilla! The gorilla wasn’t
there. If you want to give the test another try, take a look at “The Monkey
Business Illusion” (bit.ly/DiveIntoUDLCh4c) or “Movie Perception Test” (bit.ly/
DiveIntoUDLCh4b), which illustrate the same concept.

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