IN “FROST AT MIDNIGHT,” nineteenth-century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes sitting in the schoolroom as a young child, his head filled with dreams from the previous night, his attention everywhere but on the task before him:
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!
We see in this short passage echoes of everything we have learned thus far about our attention, thrown into the particular atmosphere of the classroom. The young Coleridge carries into school the trailing distractions of his dreams, which swim about his mind when he should attend to his textbook. On top of his internal distractions, challenges to his attention come in external forms, as the classroom door opens every now and again, building the expectation that a neighbor or relative will rescue him from the dullness of his study. In the meantime, a “stern preceptor” does what teachers have been doing for as long as we have had schools: he stands at the front of the room and uses his stern looks (and, one assumes, words and perhaps even a paddle) to force the attention of his students on their books—mostly unsuccessfully.
But we don’t need to reach back centuries to find unsuccessful attempts to capture the attention of schoolchildren; we can see it everywhere today, including in the kindergarten classroom of my wife, Anne. I spent one morning there in late May observing children on the training grounds of school-based attention. I remember kindergarten as a place filled with play, and you’ll still find that in the kindergarten classroom. But early-twenty-first-century kindergartens have taken on responsibilities that used to be reserved for later grades. Although not quite all of them will succeed, every child is expected to graduate from today’s kindergarten classroom knowing how to read, which means that the balance between academic work and play time, especially by the end of the year, has tipped significantly toward academics. To achieve the academic learning that prepares students for first grade, and to master the behaviors that will govern students through the rest of their formal education, students need to use their attention—which comes in pretty short supply among thirty five-year-olds.
I arrive as Anne is preparing the children for “center time,” which means they move in small groups to different tables, each of which holds a different a task. Instructions for center time are delivered by Anne from a rocking chair, while the children are bunched onto a multicolored rug in a corner of the classroom. She slowly and patiently reviews the tasks at the various centers—most of them involving simple math or letter-oriented activities—as the children listen to her instructions. Or, perhaps more accurately, attempt to listen. But even that’s a stretch. As I scan my eyes across the rug, I see twenty-nine bodies in constant motion, like a swaying sea of bobbing heads and flailing limbs. Hands shoot up in the air whether a question has been posed or not. Fingers probe mouths and noses. At least a few children are always looking curiously over at me, no matter what my wife is doing to draw their attention up front. Some are talking, some are whispering, some are staring dreamily off into space. Anne issues a continuous string of brief reminders to individual children: Sit back down. Stop touching your neighbor. Wait your turn.
“What are the three rules for center time?” she asks as they prepare to scatter to the tables. “Work quietly,” says one child. “Stay in your seats,” says another. They are repeating back rules they have obviously heard many times before. Anne waits for someone to articulate the third rule, but in spite of twenty waving hands and many guesses, nobody can come up with it. At last, a young girl offers, “Work the whole time?” That rounds out the formal rules. As they stand and begin to scatter, a little boy ventures a fourth suggestion: “Concentrate!” Anne nods her head. “Concentrate. I love it.” After she dismisses the children to their tables, a heavyset young boy with no front teeth comes up and says to her quietly, “Don’t distract other kids.” Never mind that he should have been at his center already; he’s got the right idea.
At the centers, the chaos continues but is dispersed into smaller groups. No matter the task, the children alternate working on it with looking around, bouncing in their chairs, whispering to one another, and exploring off-task ways of using their materials: coloring parts of the worksheet that weren’t meant for coloring, cutting papers in the wrong places. One table of students puts on headphones and works on a phonics program on iPads. I wander over to them, expecting at last to see children paying attention to their assigned task, absorbed by the shiny technology of the tablets. The kids these days love their screens, after all, and are addicted to them from early ages (or so I have read). But these screen watchers are no better than the rest, alternating brief periods of absorption with jumping up and down in their chairs, fidgeting, staring at me, and bothering one another. Across the whole room, only two children actually pay attention to something for a sustained period of time: the ones who are sitting and reading aloud to Anne or her aide, slowly working their way through simple storybooks—sounding out words and struggling to make sense of sentences and short paragraphs, listening to the feedback and trying again, rewarded by encouragement and praise when they get it right. They—and they alone—seem wholly absorbed by their task, under the watchful eye of a single teacher.
My wife told me later that while of course students can and do learn during center time or whole-class activities, they make the greatest progress in their reading when she or her aide can work with them individually or in small groups. In those contexts, the students are pulled away from the distractions of the full classroom and into a focused encounter with the teacher and the words on the page, with their attention playing the role for which it was born: as a driver of learning.
To understand the crucial connection between attention and learning, whether in a kindergarten classroom or a university lecture hall, consider the three phases we must pass through in order to have learned something.1 First, we must attend to the item, whatever it might be: object, experience, fact, or idea. Our attention might take the form of simple visual perception, or a meeting between any of our senses and an object or experience. It could also take the form of sentences and paragraphs in something we are reading, or a child’s simple encounter with a letter of the alphabet. Second, we must process what we have been attending to (sometimes also called encoding) and incorporate it into our existing knowledge frameworks. In some cases, we slot new experiences in neatly (this is an example of X, and I have seen X’s before, and I know all about them). In other cases, our experiences change those existing knowledge frameworks (this seems like X, but has some new features, so now my idea of X must change). In educational contexts, we help students process new knowledge by asking them to write or speak about it, to use it to solve problems or answer questions, or to expand their thinking or actions. Finally, for true learning to occur, we have to be able to retrieve the newly learned item from our memory after the initial apprehension and processing. We invite students to engage in retrieval of material when we ask them questions, give them assessments, and provide opportunities for them to apply their learning in experiences outside of the classroom. When a student can retrieve newly learned material in multiple contexts, and transfer it from the classroom to the world beyond, we know she has truly learned it.
In Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning, Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain argue that educators spend most of their time working on the processing part of learning, the second stage, which represents only one part of what students need. They point educators to the importance of balancing the second and third stages: processing and retrieval. “We tend to think that most learning occurs during the encoding [processing] stage,” they write, “but a wealth of research demonstrates that learning is strengthened through retrieval.”2 We do indeed have more than a hundred years of research demonstrating that engaging in retrieval practice—activities that require us to draw newly learned material from our memories—has significant benefits for our long-term learning. (You can read their excellent book for more on how to put retrieval practice into action in the classroom.)
In this book, I am going to recommend, in parallel fashion, that we likewise need to expend more time and energy thinking about the attention stage of learning, or how we initially focus the attention of our students on what we want them to learn. Our attention helps us notice and prepare experiences for processing, and we will not learn what we do not attend to. Neither Agarwal and Bain’s argument nor mine is meant to downplay the importance of processing; in both cases we are contending that the traditionally near-exclusive emphasis on helping students process new material—in support of which teachers make beautiful slides, or deliver a terrific lecture, or develop active-learning strategies—gives short shrift to two equally important stages of the learning process, the before of attention and the after of retrieval.
I would further emphasize the importance of attention by arguing that while all three of these stages—attention, processing, and retrieval—are essential for learning, the latter two won’t happen without attention. We won’t learn anything that doesn’t hold our attention for at least a little bit. In Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian define attention as “a selective processing mechanism (or rather a group of mechanisms) that enhances and selects perceptual information for executing actions and higher-level cognition” (italics mine).3 Attention, in other words, precedes and underpins the kind of cognitive work we expect students to undertake. Attention holds the object, word, or thought up to our minds—puts a spotlight on it, as attention researchers like to say—for some definite period of time, and prepares it for potential processing. Once processing begins, attention still matters, albeit in a different form. We process new experiences, knowledge, and skills in our working memory, which has some significant limitations: we can only hold a small number of items in there at once. We test those few items against one another, consider relationships and hierarchies, see new connections and abandon old ones, slot new knowledge into existing structures or use newly learned knowledge to transform existing structures. Again, one could argue that the items we hold in our working memory at any given time, as we are thinking, are the ones to which we are attending in that moment.
Finally, in order to engage with previously learned material, we have to retrieve it from our long-term memory, draw it back into our working memory, and put it in dialogue with some new context that now occupies our attention. Retrieval thus also depends on attention, as we search in our brains for what we need and apply what we have recalled to a new context. The specific kind of attention required for each of these three stages of learning will differ, but the general concept of attention still seems useful in describing a fundamental and shared component of all stages of learning.
As these crude explanations will indicate, teachers are correct in taking the attention of their students seriously. We need their attention if we wish them to learn. “Without attention,” explains cognitive psychologist Michelle Miller, “much of what we want students to accomplish—taking in new information, making new connections, acquiring and practicing new skills—simply doesn’t happen. And thus, gaining students’ focus is a necessary first step in any well-designed learning activity.”4 Unfortunately, what we too often get from students is divided focus, as they combine the work of learning with other activities that hold their attention, everything from their phones and laptops to their daydreams and their neighbors in the room. Most students today, like many adults, seem to believe that they can manage the trick of learning while attending to other things, otherwise known as multitasking. They can do more than one thing effectively, if one of the activities requires little conscious attention and can be performed on automatic pilot: folding laundry while watching TV, for example, or completing simple administrative tasks while listening to music. When a task or activity becomes familiar to us and requires little thought, we can effectively pair it with unrelated tasks.
But doing the hard work of learning while also attempting to answer your e-mail simply does not work. If both tasks require your attention, or if they operate in similar regions of the brain—such as attempting to read while someone speaks to you, which both involve language—then the limited capacity of our attention interferes with our apprehension and processing. As cognitive scientists Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki explain it in their book Understanding How We Learn, “When you feel like you’re multi-tasking, or paying attention to two things at once, you’re actually switching back and forth between the two things you’re trying to pay attention to, and… going back and forth between two different tasks involves switch costs that decrease efficiency and slow down reaction speeds in both tasks.”5
The notion that we can multitask, and even that we should multitask in today’s connected world, has become so pervasive that it can be difficult to convince people of its inefficiency. But I suspect most people will have had the experience of trying to do something with their phone while driving, and looking up from their device after what seemed like just a moment to find themselves drifting from their lane or rapidly approaching a stopped car. The brief burst of panic you feel in those moments is your brain reminding you that you—like your students, and like most other humans on the planet—don’t multitask very well.
The stakes in our classroom, and the consequences of multitasking while learning, will never be as dramatic as that panicked application of the brakes—which helps explain why we see so many students attempting to divide their attention, not only in the physical classroom but also while they are studying or learning online.
My campus has done an excellent job of providing informal spaces in which students can study individually or in small groups. As I stroll through the primary academic building, or the library that houses the Center for Teaching Excellence that I direct, I observe students doing the work of learning in a variety of ways: writing on their laptops, reading and highlighting textbooks, reviewing and reorganizing paper notes, flipping through flashcards, and taking practice quizzes and tests. With few exceptions, though, I almost always see those studying students doing their work in the presence of multiple distractors. The ones I see are in public places, with plenty of passersby and ambient noise. They of course always have their phones at hand, and pick them up frequently to respond to texts or other social media prompts. When they have their laptops open, they might have a dozen or more browser tabs ready for quick checks of whatever else has captured their interest lately. I see these exact same behaviors in my own children, who range in age from recent college graduate to early high school. All five of my children would be able to report at least one incidence of me discovering them doing homework with the television on and receiving a mini-lecture about why such multitasking was not allowed in the Lang household. Yet, in spite of the obviously cogent and convincing nature of that lecture, some of my children have had to receive it more than once.
These experiences with my own children and the students on my campus reflect what the research has found about the increasing interference of digital distractions on student study behaviors. A study published in 2013 observed more than 250 students at multiple levels of education, from middle school through college, studying in fifteen-minute time blocks. On average, across all levels, students spent around six minutes focused on the material before they switched tasks, usually turning to social media or texting (and remember what we learned above: such rapid task switching diminishes our effectiveness in completing tasks).6 Another report used an array of technologies to observe the study and distraction patterns of college students over the course of three hours. With the help of cameras and eye-tracking devices, the researchers found that students engaged with their digital distractions more than thirty-five times during that three-hour period, which meant that they—similar to their counterparts in the first study—were distracting themselves every five or six minutes.7 Studies like these document only the external distractions of students, of course, and don’t take into account the number of times their minds might have wandered without the help of their phones and laptops.
These same distracting devices, as will be no surprise to any teacher today, have infected the classroom. In 2015, Bernard McCoy, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska, surveyed more than six hundred students at institutions across the United States about their use of digital devices in the classroom for purposes unrelated to the course. On average, students reported straying off-task on their devices more than eleven times during the course of the day’s classes. Around a third of the students in the survey reported fairly light usage of only one to three times; another third reported four to ten, and the final group reported either eleven to thirty times or more than thirty times. Only 3.3 percent of students reported never succumbing to the temptations of digital distractions in the classroom. What students were doing in those distracting moments will likely come as no surprise: the most popular activities were “texting” (86.6 percent), “e-mail” (76.2 percent), “checking the time” (75 percent), “social networking” (70.3 percent), and “Web surfing” (42.5 percent). Checking the time seems to me like a pretty benign form of digital distraction, but quite obviously this survey found plenty of other more significant forms. McCoy had conducted an initial survey in 2013, which showed results very similar to these numbers, with only the slightest uptick in the averages from 2013 to 2015.8
Because learning depends so heavily on attention, a rash of research studies have demonstrated that frequent interruptions of student attention while they are attempting to learn—whether those distractions are self-created or externally imposed—will reduce the quality of learning. An early experiment tested a group of around sixty business students in a college accounting class. Upon entering the class, the students received written instructions either to turn off their cell phones for the duration of the period or to send three text messages to the professor during class. Not much, three text messages—even in 2010, when this study was published, it would not have required much time or effort from students to send three text messages to a person with whom they were not having an actual conversation. At the end of the class period, all of the students were given a twenty-question multiple-choice quiz on the material from the lecture. The ones who had their phones off averaged around 58 percent on that quiz; the ones who texted averaged around 42 percent. The significance of this difference existed even when student GPAs were taken into consideration; both high-GPA and low-GPA students performed worse if they texted during class.9
This study occurred before the widespread adoption of the smartphone. More recent research on device use in the classroom shows similar results. One such study, published in the journal Educational Psychology, offers two interesting twists on the usual finding that digital distractions interfere with learning. Students in two sections of a psychology course at a university in the Midwest were given open access to their phones and laptops during half of the class sessions and restricted access during the other half. The classes were taught as interactive lectures, with content presentation alternating with opportunities for students to answer questions on their devices through electronic polling (during the restricted-access days, a proctor monitored the students to ensure that they used their devices only for the polling and put them away afterward). The researchers found that access to devices made a significant difference at the end of the semester: on the final exam, the students scored around half a letter grade better on material from the restricted-access days than they did on the open-access days. A secondary and equally important finding was that this difference persisted even for students who reported in surveys that they had not used their devices on the open-access days. In other words, even when students did not succumb to digital distractions, their learning was still harmed by observing distracted peers around them.10 I saw this phenomenon repeatedly in classroom observations of my peers. Whenever I could see a student doing off-task work on a laptop, especially when it involved video or social media, I could also see nearby students swiveling their heads regularly toward that screen. The enticement of those flashing pixels a desk or two over proves incredibly difficult to resist, even for the most well-intentioned student.
Students are distracted by their devices (or the devices of their peers) while studying on their own and while sitting in class. When they are taking online courses, they are even more likely to divide their attention. In 2019, a group of researchers published the results of surveys of a few hundred students at Kent State University, asking them about their habits of engaging in off-task behaviors in face-to-face versus fully online courses. The students were asked to report how often they engaged in behaviors like texting or using social media in these two different types of courses. The results revealed that students were 25 percent more likely to multitask in their online courses than they were in face-to-face ones. The problem was worse for students who reported frequent multitasking behaviors or high internet use outside of school. “Students who have positive attitudes about multitasking and prefer to multitask,” the authors explain, “appear to better control this academically disadvantageous behavior in face-to-face courses. To the contrary, they do not appear to control this behavior as well in online courses.”11 The results of this survey, and others like it, suggest that we need to think carefully about the problem of distraction and divided attention in our online courses as well, especially as higher education continues to embrace and expand this teaching modality.
Before we begin to consider the practical implications of all of this research for ourselves and our students, I want to note one important limitation in research studies like the ones I have cited above, because that limitation can help us think more expansively about the relationship between attention and learning. Most studies of divided attention in the classroom measure its impact through the use of assessments like multiple-choice tests. While such tests certainly can tell us about some aspects of student learning, they are of course narrow measures that leave little room for the kind of creativity or reflection that might emerge from more comprehensive or challenging assessments, such as essays, presentations, or group projects. And it may well be the case that the occasional sideline from directed attention in the classroom could benefit a student’s creative thinking. A professor might throw out a cultural reference that a student doesn’t catch, so she does a search for it on her laptop, follows a link in the article to a related site, and suddenly she emerges from her few minutes of distraction with an idea for her paper. Sometimes the enticing and forking paths of the internet can lead us into meaningless distraction, but sometimes they can lead our thinking in creative and productive new directions.
Examples like this one, and some of the classroom activities that we will consider in the coming chapters, offer helpful correctives to our most fearful or reactionary thinking about students and their short attention spans. We limit our thinking about attention’s role in teaching and learning if we confine our understanding of it to the kind that we observe in people who are concentrating on a goal-based task for fifty or seventy-five consecutive minutes. Attention can look like a student seated in a chair, mesmerized by a great lecturer for an entire class period. But it can also look like a conversation between students working collaboratively on a task, or a student using Google Scholar to skim abstracts and find articles for a research project. It can take the form of someone having a stubborn but meaningful problem in the back of her mind, and taking a walk down the hallway to see if a little movement and change can stimulate new thinking. It can be a series of encounters with some content over an extended period of time, with many gaps and distractions in between that allow for new stimuli to connect to that content and help generate innovative ideas, solutions, and theories. A hundred times during the writing of this book, I got stuck somewhere and decided to leave my desk and complete some household task. While I was doing so, an experience or person or conversation would come up and knock on my brain, announcing its presence, and then rush me back to my laptop to write my way to the solution and into the next problem. Examples like these can expand our understanding of attention and its role in student learning, and help us recognize that we can find student attention in unexpected shapes and places.
But that expansion of our understanding should be precisely that: an expansion, rather than an eclipse. Some writers have posited in recent years that we should abandon entirely the student-concentrating-in-a-chair model of attention, and celebrate instead the new and divided forms of attention created by the internet. N. Katherine Hayles, a literary critic turned education theorist, argues that teachers of my generation and older were trained to prioritize “deep attention,” while students today practice “hyper attention.” Deep attention involves sustained focus on an object of study; hyper attention features constant shifting between objects of focus.12 The digital environment in which we all live prioritizes hyper over deep attention, Hayles argues, and the brains of our students are busily adapting to it. We should therefore stop worrying about traditional attention and instead consider how we can help students embrace today’s brave new world of distraction, multitasking, and hyper attention.
Such arguments are as limiting as the ones that equate attention exclusively with traditional acts of extended concentration. The most important learning task in the kindergarten classroom of my wife, over the course of the entire year, is learning to read. The children make their greatest progress toward that goal when they are seated by her side, slowly working their way through letters, listening to her patient corrections, and turning each new page with satisfaction and expectation. The children I observed in those moments were paying close and extended attention, and that attention was helping them learn to read. Your students are likewise capable of using this form of attention in support of learning, in acts of extended concentration, when the circumstances are right. They might be studying with multiple screens in view at the same time, but they can still stop and focus when they need to complete a lab or take an exam or give a presentation or sit for a job interview. They harness their attention in tutoring sessions, or when they come to the office for academic advising. They can also shut out their external distractions for hours at a time as they play sports or act in plays or write articles for the student newspaper. A couple of years ago, I was on campus in the early evening hours and saw a student of mine sitting in a classroom with a few others, all circled around a conference table and staring intently at a board game. I popped in to say hello, and asked them how long they would be playing that evening. “Until at least midnight,” one of them responded without looking up from his board. It was 7:00 p.m. There were no phones on the table. These were students who were perfectly capable of focusing their attention, sustaining it, and blocking out annoying distractors like me.
In the many models of attention-cultivating strategies I present in the chapters of Part Two, you will find ones that support all of these different forms of attention, from traditional acts of concentration to collaborative and creative activities that will bear a suspicious resemblance to the pursuit of distraction. If the real objective to our thinking about attention in education is the promotion of student learning, we should think as expansively as possible about attention. We need to cultivate it in its traditional forms when students are working to master a difficult concept, or when the development of a new skill will only emerge from sustained repetition and practice. We need to cultivate it in its more expansive forms when we want students to devise creative solutions to challenging problems, working in collaboration with one another, connecting and comparing ideas or resources from multiple sources. We want attention because it supports learning—and just as learning can manifest itself in many different ways in the classroom, so can attention.
But before we turn to the practical strategies that will cultivate student attention in its many forms, I want to make one last pitch for the continued value of attention in its most traditional forms, one that I hope will resonate with your desire to make a positive difference in the lives of your students.
Several decades ago, a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a very simple experiment he called the “experience sampling method,” which consisted of giving pagers to people and asking them, at random periods throughout the day, to pause and describe what they were doing or thinking and their current mood state. Most of us expect that we will be happiest when we have nothing to do, lying in our backyard hammock or sunning ourselves at the beach or just vegging out on the couch. Csikszentmihalyi’s experiment revealed that the exact opposite was true: “Optimal experiences” for humans, he discovered, “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”13 These optimal experiences, which he labeled as “flow” states, are intimately connected with learning: they involve pushing ourselves to the edge of our knowledge or skills, or just beyond, in ways that enable us to bring new order and growth to our minds. They are also, as Csikszentmihalyi describes them, characterized by deep and full attention. When they are in flow states, he explains, “people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.”14 They block out time and distractions voluntarily, so captured are they by their absorption in the task.
From many years of conducting this research, Csikszentmihalyi argues, as I have argued above, that the mind caught in the throes of wandering and distraction is the substrate from which periods of optimal experience occasionally arise. “The normal condition of the human mind,” he explains in his book Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, “is one of informational disorder: random thoughts chase one another instead of lining up in logical causal sequences. Unless one learns to concentrate, and is able to invest the effort, thoughts will scatter without reaching any conclusion.”15 Yet, in spite of this normal condition of the human mind, we do have these moments of optimal experience, in which our attention has been harnessed and focused. They can happen in many aspects of our lives, often in hobbies or leisure pursuits: reading, playing golf, birding, reenacting battles, painting, and more. Teachers might find themselves regularly experiencing flow in the classroom, as they are deep in the throes of a great presentation of a new concept, orchestrating a complex group activity, or leading a meaningful discussion with their students. These are the classroom experiences in which time seems to fly by, the hour has passed long before you wished it would, and afterward you walk back to your office with that sense of elation and satisfaction that keeps you coming back for each new semester.
Whether they were teachers or welders, the thriving individuals Csikszentmihalyi studied were people who are “open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live” (italics mine).16 A continually learning person, according to Csikszentmihalyi, lives a flourishing life. Subsequent researchers in positive psychology, who study human happiness and well-being, have elaborated on this argument by suggesting that the more time we engage in flow activities, the greater sense of overall well-being we have in our lives.17 Your life flourishes in the classroom when your teaching goes well and holds your attention entirely, even if this only happens a few times a week. Teaching brings us joy for many reasons, but one of those reasons is because of the way it sustains our attention in the challenging, ever-changing, and meaningful environment of the classroom. When attention has been achieved and our minds have been raised like an island from the ocean of distraction, even for short periods of time, we are paving the way toward a meaningful, flourishing life.
You should think carefully about how to design experiences in the classroom that will capture and sustain the attention of your students because such experiences will contribute to their learning. But the research of Csikszentmihalyi and others suggests that such experiences also have enormous power to transform the lives of your students, both in school and in their world beyond it. When we create opportunities for students to use their attention to achieve their goals, think creatively, and engage with one another in meaningful ways, we are providing them with experiences that can enhance their learning and improve their lives. I trust that you wish for such happiness and success for your students, and hence I encourage you to consider how you can create a classroom environment that supports and sustains their attention.