“Find My Eyes”: The Significant of Eye Contact in the Grammar Years

During my first year teaching kindergarten, a parent expressed concern over our school’s practice of prompting children to make eye contact during lessons and interactions. She expressed her concern this way: “Children should never be told to look at someone. Instead of requiring their eyes, why don’t you instead ask them to give you their heart? Wouldn’t that be better than prompting them to physically look into someone’s eyes? Shouldn’t we give children the freedom to look wherever they wish to look?”

A day in a kindergarten classroom is full of joyful learning, reading, reciting, painting, playing, and so much more. Mingled through it all, we are training and guiding little lives in the way that they should go. With so much to complete each day, with all of our curriculum goals, and with so many important habits to instill, was this parent right? Was eye contact really a habit worthy of our time? Moreover, were we requiring too much of our students or even wrongly burdening them?

I was thankful for that parent’s question, for it prompted deeper reflection and ongoing study. Now, years later, I remain convinced that if there was ever a time to offer children the lifelong gift of the habit of focus, it is now.
Charlotte Mason, the British educator and philosopher from the turn of the twentieth century, known for her enduring work on education and the formation of habits, writes this:

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this habit of attention. It is, to quote words of weight, “within the reach of everyone, and should be made the primary object of all mental discipline”; for whatever the natural gifts of the child, it is only so far as the habit of attention is cultivated in him that he is able to make use of them.¹Charlotte Mason, Home Education (Lawrenceville, GA: Simply Charlotte Mason, 2017), 146.

Over a century later, her words ring truer than ever. In our present age of distraction and disconnection, we honour our students when we teach them how to focus their minds, whether that be on a lesson or, more importantly, on a person. And while Mason’s habit of attention is broad and instilled over a lifetime, this essay will specifically consider how eye contact in the early years helps children focus on learning and connect in relationships.

What does this training practically look like in the classroom? Ranging from children who naturally and regularly look into the eyes of another to children who struggle to make eye contact at all, there is an organic and fluid quality to training this habit of eye contact in the early years. In the kindergarten classroom, this training looks less like a formula and more like an impulse toward connection and focus.

For a student who struggles to still his or her body long enough to look into the teacher’s eyes, the earliest form of training can be simple and lighthearted. During a time of free play, the teacher, bending on a knee, might take the hands of her student and help the child to still his roving eyes by asking, “What colour are my eyes?” No 4-year-old can resist demonstrating his or her knowledge of colours. And this could be followed by a silly eye-to-eye conversation about looking for alligators in the teacher’s “murky, swamp green” eyes, leading to connection and warmth between the teacher and student, upon which the teacher builds another layer: “Do you see how you’re looking right into my eyes as we’re talking right now? This is how we’re going to try to look at each other every time we have a conversation.” In other words, through many ordinary moments, the initial work of training does not feel like training at all—for the child, the experience is calming, sweet, and fun.

Indeed, far from being rigid or austere, the teacher trains the eyes of her students through warmth and an ever-ready smile. “We’re not going to begin our math lesson until each student is looking at me,” the teacher explains, quietly waiting for eyes to lift from the allure of a thousand visible and invisible distractions. But then the moment the student looks up and makes eye contact, the child is met with the warm, smile-crinkled eyes of her teacher, and the unspoken assurance that looking to her teacher will be good for her heart.

One of the joys of teaching kindergarten is observing, over the unfolding months, the progression and ability of students to refocus their gaze on their teacher when asked. “Find my eyes,” are three simple words the teacher says with warmth and, sometimes, seemingly on repeat. It is less of a command and more of an invitation. But over the course of days turned to months turned to years, students learn the importance and even the joy of finding the eyes of the one to whom they must look. “Find my eyes” transitions from the oft-spoken reminder to the unspoken habit of the heart.

The above examples are but a few of many practical tools. Children are unique, and so training them may look different from child to child. Over the years of training children in this habit, I have watched the restless child become more still and connected, the timid child grow in self-assurance and confidence, the distracted child begin to focus and learn, and the disconnected child begin to participate and flourish.

Training in eye contact blesses our students because it lays the foundation for the broader mental discipline of the habit of attention. But for a Christian teacher, there is a deeper reason at the heart of this training. It is not just for mental discipline that we are teaching children to slow down and put aside their momentary instinct in order to look into the eyes of another human being. We are teaching them to look into the very reflection of God’s own image as found in the eyes of other image bearers. We are teaching them that another person is worthy of their eyes, their focus, their heart. Showing Christian love and giving someone our heart is about much more than simply giving them our eyes, but giving them our attention is surely where giving them our love begins.

In classical education, we often reflect on the portrait of a graduate. When a boy grows into a young man, what do we hope that he looks like? It is a sorrowful but helpful contrast to also consider what we hope that he does not look like. But it is with the end in mind, with the portrait of an ideal graduate in mind, that we then work backwards and train our youngest students. For indeed, by God’s grace, the 4-year-old boy who learns to focus his eyes on his teacher becomes the 13-year-old adolescent who respectfully looks his father in the eye when receiving instruction, who becomes the 18-year-old young man who walks into a Sunday morning gathering with his church family and uses his eyes to see—to really see!—the people around him. For his eyes have been trained, and the training of his eyes has also influenced his heart. This young man, our graduate, looks to serve rather than to be served, and his eyes scan the room to find the eyes of someone who needs his attention, his focus, his heart.