Cultivating Student Attention

Why So Distracted?

If you are like most people, you sometimes find yourself distracted. Whether those distractions come from our external environment - workplace, other humans, technology - or our internal environment - stress, physical and mental health, they limit the cognitive bandwidth we have available to think, work, and interact with others. Students are no exception. One of the most foundational principles of learning is attention, and without the ability to focus that attention, no one succeeds.

Like the image below, having too many connections, ideas, or responsibilities is simply too much for the human mind. Multitasking is a myth. 

 

This module draws on some lessons from James Lang's series in the The Chronicle of Higher Ed as well as his book, Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It (available for checkout from the TLC). 

Lang begins by reminding us all that there are good reasons for distraction. This short video provides an overview about distraction and the book's main points. 

 

Strategies for Cultivating Student Attention

The two main messages of the book are that “attention is an achievement” and “when it comes to attention and distraction, we need to treat ourselves and our students with compassion” (227).  If we want to engage students, we have to design learning and activities around cultivating attention, not simply expecting that students bear all the responsibility for avoiding distraction. 

Lang’s six suggestions fit into the following categories:

  • Communities of Attention
  • Curious Attention
  • Structured Attention
  • Signature Attention Activities
  • Assessed Attention
  • Mindful Attention

Below, you will find a short summary of each of the approaches, with Lang's signature practical classroom applications of the concepts. (You can also access this material as a printable list: Summary of Selected Information from James Lang’s Links to an external site.Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2020-2021 series on distraction). 

 

1. Communities of Attention

A key component to developing a classroom focused on attention - not just avoiding distraction - is developing an authentic community of learners. Get to know your students and what helps them learn in the classroom. Invite people by name to contribute to discussions. Set high expectations. Find ways to use the power that social interactions have on human attention. It’s not enough to have an icebreaker on the first day of class - community takes intentional effort over time to develop. Here’s Lang’s list of key practices:

    • Begin your course with attention to students’ values and strengths, encouraging them to gain academic confidence and commit to learning. 
    • Learn and use student names. If needed, use name cards early to help you connect faces with names.
    • If possible, use the classroom space to encourage community building. Advocate for flexible classroom furnishings (like movable tables and chairs, portable whiteboards, etc.) that enable you and students to interact in a variety of ways.
    • “Break the symbolic plane between the front of the room and the students in the seats” (121). Only lecturing from the front of the room creates barriers between you and students. 

 

2. Curious Attention

Many faculty suffer from the “expertise gap” - we are experts in our fields teaching novices. Our own passions and knowledge can make us blind to the fact that students don’t always share those same passions. What is interesting to us may or may not be interesting to them. But, we can communicate our passion and inspire curiosity in our students. Here’s Lang’s list of techniques to inspire curiosity in our students:

    • Revise your syllabus to share the big questions of your discipline and field. Reflect on your own interests and invite students to share those. 
    • Use first-day activities that encourage student engagement, like disciplinary puzzles that need to be solved or major questions driving scholarly debates. Before your share your syllabus, have them get curious.
    • Tap into the power of questions, problems and stories to re-engage student interest at transition points during the class. 
    • Assign students to develop questions about course material to improve learning and to provide you with future ideas. 

 

3. Structured Attention

Drawing on techniques used by creative artists like classical musicians and playwrights, Lang promotes a teaching tempo that unfolds like movements or acts with intermissions, aware that attention ebbs and flows for students and not necessarily for instructors. 

Limits of Attention: There is no specific time limit on student attention, but the research does show that student focus “alternates between being engaged and non-engaged in ever-shortening cycles throughout a lecture segment” (150). Instructors who are aware of the need to renew attention regularly use a variety of instructional approaches, including techniques as simple as posing a question. Change and variety is the key, not tech tools or elaborately constructed active learning opportunities.  

Make it Modular: Develop a comprehensive list of the kinds of activities (your “patterns” that you use in class. Lang, a literature teacher, created a list that included these modules: 

    • Opening writing exercises
    • Closing connection notebook-writing exercises
    • Discussions of writing exercises
    • Group worksheets on literary texts
    • Lectures on historical biographical context of authors
    • Review of key passages in literary texts (teacher directed)
    • Creating story or poem “maps” on the board (student directed)
    • Open discussions of meaning and theme
    • Poll questions with peer instruction
    • Opportunities for student questions
    • Short videos connected to course content
    • Slides on effective writing techniques
    • Overview of assessments or assignment sheets 

Once completed, design a 50-minute class session with three or four different modules, varying the patterns over a few weeks. 

Signposts and Structures: Provide written and verbal cues to provide mental roadmaps of the day’s topics and activities 

    • Write an outline of the day on the board or in your slides
    • Speak about what topics are yet to be covered and how much time/how many topics remain
    • Create guided notes that include some structure and main ideas along with blanks for students to complete to map out the topics to be covered 

Pentacostal Pedagogy: Borrowing a term from Christopher Emdin’s book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y’all Too, Lang promotes the “continuous restoration” of attention used by pastors in black churches. Using “call and response,” read something out loud (or have a student read), pause and ask students to write two or three sentences (following up by asking a few people to read their sentences), find a content-related reason to get people up and moving (like answering a question by moving to a different part of the room, or walking up to see any image connected to course content).

(Less Text, More) Images: Avoid text-heavy slides that either make students tune out or make them stop listening to copy all the info down. Also avoid images that have little to do with the content, and opt for “instructive” images that provide another way for students to understand the concept at hand and/or blends of images and a few words. 

 

4. Signature Attention Activities

When humans are presented with the same situations or routine over and over again, they can have attention blindness - a human survival adaptation that allows us to ignore distractions and selectively focus on the things that matter most. In a similar way, “change blindness” (becoming “blind to new features of our daily experiences” can make faculty blind to the unique needs of each class, after teaching the same class over and over. Lang presents Signature Attention Activities as one approach to presenting students with novel stimuli. These activities don’t require much time, but varying and spacing them is key to capturing student attention.

Focusing: Invite students to look carefully at one part of your course materials and practice the art of focusing. Examples include:

    • Slow Reading: have students slowly read out loud course material, as a class or with a partner
    • Object analysis: this object-based teaching approach presents students with an object and asks questions including 1. What? (encourage looking for new perspectives and angles) 2. So what? (students write questions based on their observations and then pass them along to other students) and 3. Now what? (this whole-class discussion focuses on identifying still unanswered questions or connections to research or readings)

Creating: Harness the power of creativity for learning. Examples include:

    • Worksheet: provide structured questions or activities to direct student attention
    • Concept Maps: use these visual representations to make connections between ideas, create schemas, or draw lines between ideas and support
    • Short-Answer Polls: use polling tools (like PollEverywhere or Kahoot) or simple color-coded notecards to check learning or answer questions researched on phones
    • Memes, Tweets, Instagram & More: Task students with finding the best words or images on key course topics from social media 

Connecting: The research is pretty clear that people are able to focus on things that really matter to them, so invite students to make personal connections between the course material and their own varied interests. Quoting author S. McGuire on the topic: 

“We don’t have to make the connections for them; in fact it is much better if we don’t. We can just throw a concept out there, like a ball, and ask, ‘What does this remind you of that you’ve encountered in your everyday life?’ When students hit the ball back, they come up with the most wonderful examples and ideas that give them not only an efficient path to learning and mastery, but also the most efficient path for them.” (qtd in Lang 191). 

Examples include using a blue book once or twice a week write on a topic including:

    • How does something that we talked about/read for today’s connect to an experience you have had in your own life?
    • Can you think of a film, television show, or book that illustrates an idea that we have talked about thus far today?
    • Can you connect something we have considered today with something you learned in another course? How did our discussion add to or change what you learned there?
    • How could something we learned today be of use to you in whatever career you are envisioning for yourself right now? Or in a future you might take here at the college?

These reflections are collected a few times during the term, worth only a few points, and given minimal comments. Strong responses may be shared in class with student permission. 

 

5. Assessed Attention

Lang posed the question to faculty, “When are students most engaged?” One physicist replied, “When they are taking an exam!” Grades can be a powerful motivator for student attention. This doesn’t mean that students should only be motivated by course points - a mindset that actually decreases motivation - but these approaches can be combined to support learning. 

    • Low-Stakes Assessment - well aligned assignments and activities provide exploration and rehearsal of key learning support student focus on KSA assessed in higher-stakes assignments
    • The Testing Effect - long-term and applicable learning is reinforced with repeated retrieval opportunities; provide low-stakes practice and collaboration with students on exam and assignment design
    • Attention-Getting Assessments - create assessments that offer students real-world and authentic applications for the learning that captured their attention

 

6. Mindful Attention

To date, there is little evidence that mindfulness practices improve student learning, but Lang advocates faculty use of connected habits that encourage student learning:

    • Share with students: “distractibility is an architectural feature of the human brain, and have compassion for yourself and your students.” Assume the best of your students, and communicate support instead of punishment. 
    • Develop a daily attention-getting arrival ritual or activity for the start of class. Connect that work with class discussion, and provide a way for students to get into the best mindset for class work. Consider similar rituals for mid-class or wrap-ups. 
    •  Commit to continuing your own exploration and learning on this topic, as well as to experiment with teaching strategies that engage students and promote learning. 

Conclusion

To wrap up the discussion, Lang considers what he wants to communicate with his class about distractions. He sums it up this way: 

“I know your lives are complicated, and distractions are ever at hand, but here is a space in which we can do our best to put them aside and focus on learning. Every moment of this experience might not be a joyful one, but the more you are able to give your attention to your peers and the course content, the more pleasure and satisfaction you will gain from the time we spend together. I pledge my attention to you, and I hope you will pledge it back to me and to your peers.”

He also recommends Esteban Loustaunau’s essay “The Classroom as Retreat Space Links to an external site.” to remind faculty that classrooms can be a place of significant growth, based on solid faculty-student connections.