The Pomodoro technique is a simple, yet efficient study method, developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. This method consists of alternations between 25-minutes of work with five or ten-minute breaks.
First, we turn off all distractions (phones, blocking sites on computers, etc). Then we set a timer for about 25 minutes. Cirillo used this method with a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (Pomodoro means “tomato” in Italian). Next, we focus as intently as possible for those 25 minutes.
Naturally, our mind will wander, but we will gently guide it back to our work. Finally, when the timer rings, we get a five-minute break (stretching, talking to family or colleagues, having a beverage, etc.). After three or four Pomodoro cycles, we should have an extended break, varying from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.
I use Pomofocus in my day-to-day job (I also wrote this article in Pomodoro cycles combined with the Cold Turkey website blocker).
How to adapt the Pomodoro Technique to children?
According to the Uncommon Sense Teaching MOOC course developed by Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky and Dr Terrence Sejnowski:
The best way to [teach students about the Pomodoro technique] is to have your students use the technique occasionally in your class. You may wish to shorten the period of focus to something less than 25 minutes.
The rule of thumb for the number of minutes of focus for younger students is their age plus one. But by the time students are about 15, they should be able to move into a full 25-minute Pomodoro.
Having your students use this technique occasionally in class teaches them how to use the technique properly and helps them get into the habit of using the Pomodoro to help them concentrate.
Remember, you can teach students how to learn all you want, but unless you and they practice with these better techniques, bringing their procedural systems into play, those techniques won’t become a habit. Instead, they’ll be forgotten.
A last thought about the Pomodoro technique involves the short breaks between Pomodoros. The 25 minutes of focused work involves the use of the focused mode. The break between Pomodoros involves the diffuse mode. In fact, that built-in use of the diffuse mode during breaks is part of Pomodoro’s power. How students handle those breaks is especially important. When students are first practising with the technique, it’s a good idea for them to aim at any kind of rewarding activity for the break.
Texting, a little bit of gaming, chatting with their friends, any of these will do. The rewarding activity begins to train the brain that focusing intently for a little while will result in some rewarding fun. If students struggle to return to focus after the break, it can be a good idea to set a timer for their break period as well.
How to do study time with younger children?
About an hour or so after our 5-year old daughter comes back from school and she is relaxed, I prepare her mentally for some study time. We get everything we need, crayons, papers, pens, a glass of water, some snacks, and then I set a timer for six minutes.
We either do some jolly phonics exercises from Sara Wernham and Sue Lloyd, who developed this method of teaching phonics or some numbers activities from the Khan Academy Kids mobile application.
Before we do any new letters, sounds or numbers activities, we recap what we previously learned, so that we don’t build knowledge on quicksand.
I try to maintain a relaxed atmosphere during the timer period, with rhymes, songs, and encouragements. Studying time should be an enjoyable experience at younger ages, not a dread time.
Here are some tips I picked from Dr Wright’s Kitchen Table Math: Book 1:
Try to avoid saying things like, “Here comes the tricky part”. You will be amazed at the number of times your child will be able to do things easily that you thought might be hard.
If you do not have fond memories of working with numbers, please resist telling your child about it. If you say things like, “That’s OK; I was never very good at math either”, you are tempting your child to follow your lead. Imagine if someone said to a child, “That’s OK; I was never very good at reading either.”
When your child makes mistakes, use that as an opportunity to see which concepts have been confused, need reinforcing, or have been forgotten, and use it to direct your teaching. If something hasn’t been grasped after repeated tries, don’t look at it as your child failing. Either your child is not ready, the approach needs to be changed, or some background is missing. Use the situation to gain insights on how to teach better, never as a reason to be hard on your child.
Another tip I picked from reading about deliberate practice is the constant feedback children need to receive about their attempts. For example, if my daughter is practising writing letters, she has a pattern she follows and then she will do that letter on her own.
I noticed that she is much eager to correct herself if she, and not me, is the one that marks the letters that are not quite right. My role is to guide her when she is too enthusiastic about overlooking her mistakes. After receiving feedback in this way, she is eager to redo those letters that need more practice until she is happy with the results.
Praising is a contentious topic, so what I do is that I keep it simple and to the subject. If there is something that is indeed good, I wouldn’t say “bravo”, “clever girl”, “you are so smart”, but something along the lines of “wow, that letter looks really good” or “see, you just needed more practice”.
I aim for one, maybe two, Pomodoro sessions of six minutes during weekdays. On weekends, I aim for two, maybe three, Pomodoro sessions.
The goal is to stretch study across days and not end up studying for hours in one day. So, instead of one-hour sessions over the weekend, we split study time into sessions of six minutes daily. In the end, we reap the benefits of distributed practice (a little bit of study every day), which is the opposite of cramming. The focus in distributed practice is on studying less in each session but more frequently. After all, practice makes it per… manent.
There is a quote about meditation that goes like this: if you don’t have five minutes to meditate, then you need two hours to meditate. If I didn’t show my daughter how to focus for a few minutes in her first year of school, is it realistic to expect she will be able to focus for one or two hours when she will be nine, ten years old? Possibly, but it might come at the expense of much more challenging times for our family. Better to start with small enough Pomodoros of just a few minutes, but done frequently.
The purpose is to make study a consistent practice that will visibly improve the child’s proficiency, spiralling into accomplishment and enthusiasm. Also, by integrating study time into our lives, we will not be particularly anxious about study time, as it’s just another routine that we have to finish.
Other related articles about learning and child education can be found here.