Let’s Talk about Walk and Talk

By Ben Farrell, and Noah Friesen

If you told Ethan Zander who at the start of the year he would be more productive after taking a break and messing around he would have called you crazy. 

This is exactly what happened. 

This is because breaks help reduce stress according to ccaeducate.com.  Sitting in a classroom for an hour and a half straight while maintaining focus can be challenging. With a break it will increase productivity and focus in the whole classroom.

According to learninglift.com it helps burn off energy built up from just sitting in class. This is especially true for Ethan Zander. 

“I love walk and talks because It lets me clear my head and I like to take a break,”

Said Ethan Zander.

According to health.cornel, taking breaks anywhere from 5-60 minutes a day increases your energy, productivity, and ability to focus. This shows that just a 5 minute break for a walk and talk will still have the same positive effect on a students learning ability as a 60 minute break.

Taking the 5 minutes out of your class to help students reduce stress, focus and increase productivity/accuracy. 

Some teachers do not walk and talk with their students because they don’t think they are useful or that they take away from useful class time. Although Walk and Talks take away time from class it is only a minimal amount of time. About 3-5 minutes and in those 3-5 minutes students can feel refreshed and ready to learn.

Ethan Zander, who is a 9th grader, has to go to a class at 2:00 at the last period of the day and he and everyone else in the class are already understandably restless. In Ethan’s  Spanish class they do not go on walk and talks

“It makes the class feel like it’s going really slow without a break in the middle,” said Zander.

He also talks about how without the walk and talk it makes learning harder and things in the classroom become more distracting. He says that in classes that he has walk and talks in that he performs better in those classes.

In a 2016 study, psychologist Karrie Godwin and a team of researchers measured how attentive elementary students were during class, and discovered that they spent over a quarter of the time distracted, unable to focus on the teacher or the current task.

Although this is an elementary school, they naturally don’t concentrate on school very much. The breaks are still shown to have a positive effect on students.

In a groundbreaking 2012 study, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues at USC and MIT used an fMRI scanner to examine neural activity during the brain’s “default mode”—a state of rest that’s usually associated with taking a break or letting our minds wander. In this state, the brain is still highly active, with a different set of regions lighting up than when we’re focused on the outside world.

When your brain is relaxed it gives time to think in other ways that may not necessarily be activated in the classroom. 

Success heavily depends on the class, and how well you understand what you are doing but overall walk and talks are beneficial no matter what. 

Walk and talks are definitely worth taking 5 minutes away from your class to make sure your students’ productivity, focus, and overall learning skyrocket.