ON A SUNNY day in early June, I stepped into the classroom of Stephanie Yuhl, a professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross. Yuhl was the inaugural recipient of the Burns Career Teaching Medal at Holy Cross, an award for which she was nominated by both colleagues and her current and former students. She teaches high school teachers through the US Department of Education’s Teaching American History program, and she is a sought-after public speaker for adult education programs like One Day University. On the day I observed her, she was teaching a summer course on the American civil rights movement, an upper-level history seminar that took place in two-hour sessions, four days a week, for six weeks. These kinds of time-intensive seminars strike me as one of the most challenging types of environments in which to hold students’ attention, both because of the extended time period and because of the heavy cognitive demands these seminars place on student brains. I feel pretty confident that I can shepherd students (and their attention) through a fifty-minute class session, but I always feel challenged when I am pushing through the second half of a longer seminar period.
I had expected to see Yuhl, a decided extrovert, hold the attention of her students by sheer force of personality, and to a small extent that was true. She worked the room like a professional actor, maintaining eye contact with students and regaling them with fascinating stories, humor, and passionate invocations of the relevance of the history they were studying and their ability to make a positive difference to the world. But after observing her teach, and speaking with her about her philosophy, I realized that her personality was far less important to her success in holding students’ attention than the continued, deliberate efforts she made to build community in the classroom. This process began from the moment she walked into the room, five minutes before class began, when she immediately initiated conversations with students waiting for class to start. “How was your mom’s birthday party?” she asked a woman in the front row, who laughed in response and then briefly described the festivities. “Did you get the internship?” she asked another. As she held these conversations with students, she spoke to each of them by name. Although she was doing some quick preparations at the front of the room during these conversations, her students were the primary focus; getting her handouts in order seemed more like an afterthought.
Even though it was the beginning of the third week, two new students were joining that day, which gave me the opportunity to observe how Yuhl welcomed them into the room and the course. When the class period officially launched, she greeted the two new students, and said this: “My theory about teaching is that it all comes out of community. It’s really important that we all know each other’s name. When you refer to a point made by another student, you refer to that student by name.” This was all to prepare the new students for their baptism by fire. First, she asked them to introduce themselves. “Tell us something interesting,” she said. “What do we need to know about you that will help us remember you?” When they had finished, she asked one of the current students to stand and recite the names of the dozen or so other students in the room. Then, to much laughter and appreciation, she had the new students try repeating the names themselves. Surprisingly, and with just a little help, they both managed it. After they sat down, Yuhl explained to them that knowing and speaking one another’s names in class was a core value in her teaching, and that she would ask them to recite the names of their peers over the next few days until they had it down pat.
The other important thing Yuhl wanted the new students to know was that they would be regular contributors to the conversation. “Everyone speaks in here every day,” she said with a smile. As the class unfolded, she accomplished this—with the new students and with the rest of the class—by continuing to invite people into the conversation by name. She worked the room very deliberately, making sure everyone’s voice was heard. When two students near the front made several points in a row, she pointed this out: “You guys are talking a lot, which is fabulous. But I’m going to hold off on calling on you for a little bit so we can hear from some others.” This strategy of regular invitations to the conversation kept everyone attentive; students were actively engaged in the discussion, or writing in their notebooks, throughout the period. When the class took a break—“Go get some water and some sun,” she told them—and I had a chance to speak with her about what I had observed, she told me that her continued emphasis on students’ learning and speaking one another’s names, and the careful solicitation of commentary from every student, was not limited to the first day of the semester or the arrival of newcomers. “Community is not something you establish on the first day and then forget about,” she said. “It has to be continually reinscribed.” This value mattered to her more than anything else in her teaching, she said. Community came first; content followed.
With community comes attention, which is why Part Two of this book, which focuses on practical pedagogies, begins with a consideration of how we pay attention to one another in the classroom: students to teacher, teacher to students, and students to students. The least distracted classroom I observed, in the dozens of observations I made during the writing of this book, was Stephanie Yuhl’s. That had much less to do with any specific teaching practice and much more to do with the way her classroom was a place where her students learned in community, attentive to her and to one another, as she was to each of them. No matter how many students you have, all the teaching strategies I will recommend in the chapters that follow will be more successful if they are used in a room in which you have built a sense of community—one founded on a shared commitment of attention to one another.
We are built to pay attention to other human beings, whether we are using the cerebral machinery dedicated to recognizing individual faces or managing the complex web of relationships that we form through our social media accounts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes one of the developmental milestones for infants at the end of the second month of life is “pays attention to faces.”1 Research on the development of attention in infants has documented a bias toward human faces almost from birth; that bias intensifies over the course of the first year of life.2 From the simple focus on faces in infancy, we continue to grow and develop in terms of the extraordinary value we place on our relationships with other human beings. This truth has been recognized by our earliest philosophers and our most contemporary social scientists. In the Ethics, Aristotle notes that “a human being is meant for a city and is of such a nature as to live with others… It is necessary for the happy person to have friends.”3 In her book Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World, psychologist Sarah Cavanagh argues that we are so fundamentally tied to one another that we unconsciously synchronize thoughts and behaviors with the people around us, which helps explain mysterious social phenomena like mass hysteria or the sudden explosion of trending topics in the news and social media. Our attention orients itself automatically toward other humans, and toward what those other humans are paying attention to.
This is one of the reasons both you and your students find social media accounts so appealing: because they are social media accounts. They help us keep tabs on our many levels of social connections: from siblings or parents in other cities to classmates from ancient school days. Facebook connects us with people we might otherwise lose touch with, or friends we perhaps don’t see as regularly as we might like. For many of us on academic Twitter, that platform reveals the people and personalities behind the bland research profiles we might read in a bio statement. Instagram shows us pretty pictures, but we link those pictures to the humans who take them, and we feel more connected to them through the images they choose to share with us. The fact that your students scroll obsessively through their social media accounts before class, and sometimes during class, testifies to the extraordinary power that other human beings have over our attention.
Our social media accounts amplify that power, as they give us unfettered access to the social networks of friends and strangers alike, at every moment of the day. The pull of digital social connection is so strong that it can draw us away from our immediate surroundings, including the physical social connections around us. In A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age, author Matt Richtel describes his observation of an experiment in which a subject in a driving simulator has been asked to follow and respond to two streams of texts: one that offers driving directions to a party, and one that provides updates on the (imaginary) people at the party. The subject’s driving suffers from having to respond to the texts, just as we might expect. But a second fascinating finding emerges, as Richtel describes it: “At the end of the simulation, [the subject] takes a quiz. What does she remember about the drive? What she recalls are the names and details of all the fictional characters from the party: Michelle and Gendry and Michael. What she misses in the quiz: everything else. The driving directions, the number of interchanges she passed, the buildings she passed.”
The pull of social interaction, coupled with the attention-grabbing power of our devices, is so strong that even imaginary people have the power to draw our attention away from our surroundings, including our (simulated) driving. The problem for educators arises when the prospect of interacting with other humans through our phones and laptops tempts us away from our immediate environment, away from the people in the room we are there to learn with.
In recent years, we have seen welcome attention paid to the idea that the classroom represents a community in which learners should feel connected to one another and to the instructor. We ask people to take risks in the classroom; to try at things, fail, and try again; to do hard cognitive work with little immediate reward. For most people, our willingness to engage in those kinds of activities, and the quality of our efforts, will improve when we are attempting them in the company of a supportive community. Community with classmates and instructors not only empowers students to take the risks that learning requires, but it also enhances the experience by expanding the source of ideas and insights to the full range of diverse minds in the room. In Connected Teaching: Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education, Harriet Schwartz argues that “through connection with others we become our most authentic, creative, and productive selves,” and that holds as true in the classroom as in other aspects of our lives.4 We thus should be concerned that getting lost in their devices can prevent students from becoming their better selves in the classroom, as they choose their social media networks over the physical social network around them. We have likely all noticed that distracted students don’t participate as much in class discussions. They don’t give the comments of their peers the kind of attention that would enable them to respond thoughtfully. When their fellow students are giving presentations, they might tune out completely. If we don’t want these things to happen, we have to cultivate community in our classrooms.
To create learning environments that are supported and enhanced by a sense of community, we need to pay attention to one another, students and teacher alike. A group of people sitting together in a room does not constitute a community. A group that has completed an icebreaker on the first day of the semester is also not a community. To create a community, people in the room need to be present to one another, week after week. Communities need continuous tending, in the same way that marriages and friendships do. They need to be, in the words of Stephanie Yuhl, “continuously reinscribed.” In the three practical pathways that follow, I will make recommendations for how we can help build community in ways that make us attentive to one another and lay the foundation for attention to the course material.
We tend to make quick and easy assumptions about distracted students in the classroom: they are not taking our courses seriously; they are texting their friends about the coming weekend; they are watching nonsense on YouTube. But now is the time to acknowledge that students might be distracted from our teaching for very good and understandable reasons. During the semester in which I was finishing this book, I had a student who let me know in the first weeks that her mother was dying of cancer. There was no chance for a cure; they were simply hoping that she would survive through Christmas. You can rest assured that this student was occasionally distracted, and you can be just as assured that she had every right to be. Any attention she paid in my classroom was, as far I was concerned, a pretty miraculous achievement. In every class you teach, every single semester, you will have students who are distracted because of family tragedies, health problems, mental-health challenges such as anxiety or depression, fights with their boyfriends and girlfriends and roommates, a few nights of terrible sleep, an upcoming series of job interviews, the prospect of a failing grade in another course, and much more. The distracting behaviors of these students might have much more to do with trying to manage their lives during your class than with trying to view funny memes on Reddit.5 That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try to cultivate and sustain their attention; it means that we should not jump so quickly to the assumption that a distracted student is a poor or inconsiderate one.
We should especially take this more empathetic approach toward distracted students who might be questioning their place in your classroom, or in higher education more generally. The increasingly diverse student bodies we have seen in recent decades—diverse in almost every demographic we can imagine—mean that more and more students are coming to our courses with questions about whether they belong in college, whether they fit in with their peers, and whether they have the preparation and skills to succeed. We might think here of first-generation students or traditionally underrepresented students, but really any student can feel overwhelmed and underprepared in certain contexts. These students might be sitting in a classroom in which they have lost the thread of the lecture or activity, and they are looking around and (mistakenly) assuming everyone else gets it. They are wondering what they are doing here, why they are so stupid when everyone else is so smart, and how long it will be before they flunk out in shame. When those feelings become overwhelming, they might do what all of us are inclined to do in moments of anxiety or frustration: turn to the easy comforts of digital devices.
To help these students, we can take an initial step to build community in the classroom, help them feel secure in their seats, and lay the foundation for their attention by beginning the semester with a simple first-week exercise: the values affirmation. The core element of this activity is to ask individuals to identify or articulate values that are most meaningful or important to them. Multiple research studies have shown that this simple exercise has the power to make a positive difference to students, especially those who might feel concerned about their prospects of success in a particular course: women in STEM classes, for example, or first-generation students in introductory college courses. In one study conducted in introductory physics courses with close to four hundred students, researchers used a values-affirmation exercise to try to address a previously documented achievement gap between males and females in the course. Students in the experimental condition viewed a list of potential values (such as family or friends), identified the ones that mattered most to them, and wrote explanations for their choices. They did this twice during the beginning of the semester, once at the beginning of the course and once a few weeks later. Students in a control condition wrote about those values in relation to other people (that is, why the values on the list would be important to other groups of people). Female students in the experimental condition significantly outperformed those in the control condition in the course, raising their modal grades by a full letter.6 Different versions of this experiment have shown similar results. One study of close to eight hundred students in gateway biology courses showed that first-generation students who completed a values affirmation twice during the semester (early and midway through) not only raised their course grades, but were more likely to continue into the next course in the biology sequence.7
Various theories have been proposed about the mechanisms by which values-affirmation exercises produce such significant results in terms of student learning and success. The authors of a third study argue that when students feel isolated or threatened in the classroom community, part of their mental resources—including their attention—is being siphoned away by negative emotions. The values-affirmation exercise reduces the impact of those negative emotions and helps the students recover space in their brains for learning. “By reflecting on their core values in a brief writing assignment,” the authors argue, “students can bolster their self-integrity, making identity threats less salient and enabling students to dedicate more cognitive resources to the relevant academic task.”8 Remember that attention is a limited-capacity resource. When some of that capacity is being used up by worry about whether the student belongs or has the ability to succeed in the course, it diminishes what is available for attention to the material. The values affirmation tips the scale of attention away from negative emotions and back toward learning.
More philosophically, a values affirmation establishes that students are individuals in a meaningful community, rather than faceless numbers in a crowd of seats. Students carry their own unique perspectives, ideas, backgrounds, and strengths into the classroom. Each of them thus brings something special to the community, something that might help shape what happens in that space. In this sense, values-affirmation activities are part of a more general shift we can make in education, from a deficit perspective to an asset perspective. In other words, we can view students primarily through a deficit lens: they lack the knowledge and skills we have to offer. But students also come into our rooms with assets: they have prior knowledge that they can bring to our courses, skills in communication or leadership that they can apply to assessments and classroom activities, and life experiences and diverse backgrounds that can help inform discussions and expand the teacher’s and students’ perspectives. Similarly, students have values that they can express in our courses, and those values might inform the way we teach, the connections they make with their peers, and how they choose to learn and respond to the course material.
The first step you can take toward building a community of attention in your classroom, then, is to invite students to share their values or assets with you. You can do this through exercises on the first days of the semester or through your learning management system. You can do it in ways that are private, so that they are seen only by you, or more public, so that students can see each other’s contributions. The possibilities here are multiple, but to get you started, here are two simple sets of questions you could ask students at the start of the semester, in whatever form you choose:
• What are your most important values? Why do they matter to you? How might those values intersect with the subject matter of this course?
• What specific strengths do you bring to our classroom community? How could those strengths help support our work here?
With both of these sets of questions, you might need to provide examples. Most values-affirmation exercises in the research invite students to choose from a list of a dozen or more possibilities. Likewise, if you are asking about strengths, you might need to offer descriptions of possible academic strengths: I am a great team leader; I write very well; I participate frequently in class; I am an excellent notetaker. Have them choose, have them write, have them share, according to what fits best with your classroom context.
Questions like these provide a confidence boost to students who might need it, reduce the demands that negative emotions make on student attention, and support attention through the social connections they help create. They provide you with an opening view of your students as real humans who bring into your classroom their values, histories, and struggles, many of which might resonate personally with you. If students have the opportunity to share their affirmations with one another, they are also likely to experience connections with their peers that might otherwise emerge only from a random discussion comment—or never emerge at all. Those connections can make everyone more present to one another and help build a level of community that supports attention. It’s easy to disengage from a room full of anonymous strangers, as you can see from walking into any waiting room in the world, where people are all lost in their phones while they wait for the doctor or car mechanic. Disengaging from a room full of people who have become real to you through a values affirmation doesn’t come as easily (which is not to say it can’t and won’t happen). The ultimate point of a values affirmation, at least in terms of its potential benefits for attention, is to give everyone in the room the opportunity to make themselves known to both you and their peers as a fully-fledged person, and in so doing invite all of us to see and attend to one another more fully.
Stephanie Yuhl’s classroom modeled another effective strategy we can use to sustain community, and the attention of our students, beyond the opening values affirmations: learning and using student names. Our names have tremendous power to capture our attention. This begins as early as a few months into our lives. In 2010, an international research team published the results of a series of experiments that demonstrated the power of names to five-month-old infants. The researchers measured brain waves in the infants while they were exposed to different variations of word strings, including their names. Not only did the infants show increased activity at the sound of their name, but they showed that increased activity even when they heard approximations of their name (such as a name that began with the same syllable). What was even more striking was what happened after the infants heard their own name. Following either their name or random sound patterns, the infants were exposed to pictures of different objects. Their brains showed more activity as they studied these new objects after they heard their name. The researchers explicitly connect the infants’ attention to names to subsequent learning: “Hearing her own name prepares the infant to receive new relevant information.” Just as curiosity arouses our brains and opens it to new learning (as we shall see in the next chapter), so hearing their name seemed to brighten up these infants’ brains and caused them to pay closer attention to what they were observing.9
Our tendency to hear and respond to our names receives both affirmation and reinforcement in our earliest schooling. Returning once again to the kindergarten classroom of my wife, I learned there the extensive use that she and other kindergarten teachers make of names in order to help children learn to read. Anne creates cards that contain large-print versions of each child’s name and displays them on a grid in her classroom. As they are learning their letters and words, the kindergarteners are encouraged first to recognize their own name and then to compare the letters and syllables they see with those of the other names on the grid. James notices that his name and Jack’s begin in similar ways; Maria notes how her name concludes like Sophia’s. The children’s early lessons in reading are built around attention to names, and of course one of the first things that they learn to write is their own name. Our names are intimately tied not only to our earliest awareness of language, but also to our earliest efforts to read and write.
Studies have demonstrated the connection between names and attention in adults as well.10 Our names solicit our attention no matter how many distractions are whirring around us, a fact that has been famously dubbed the “cocktail party effect.” Envision yourself at a cocktail party, with all of its ambient noise, participating in a conversation. Even though your attention might be fully focused on that conversation, if someone within earshot speaks your name, you will hear it and tune your attention to that direction. I have witnessed the classroom version of this more times than I can count, when I have spoken the name of a student and watched him snap from a reverie, suddenly awake and attentive. Now we come to the happy crossroads at which we will find ourselves in every chapter of this book, where we recognize that a teaching practice that supports attention also supports other important pedagogical values. Speaking the name of a student will perk up her attention in the ways that laboratory experiments have demonstrated. But it also communicates that we are teaching individuals, and each one of them forms an essential part of the classroom community. We want students to feel recognized as people—with their distinctive histories and values and desires and names—and of course students want that as well. In the first days and weeks of the semester, we can invite students to share their values with us; in the days and weeks that follow, we can continuously reaffirm their individuality by learning and using their names.
That’s the essence of this section’s recommendations: learn and use student names. Some readers will have this as a standard practice in their teaching; others might not. Some of those who do not will attribute it to the fact that they are “not good at remembering names.” I have heard this from more faculty members than I care to count. While of course there are variations in people’s ability to remember names—just like some of us are better at doing math or throwing a football—the truth is that remembering names is difficult for everyone, and if we want to remember a name we have to make an effort to do so. With the exception of people who might have special cognitive challenges, the likeliest reason that you are not good at remembering names is that you are not putting in enough effort to learn them. Perhaps past experiences in which you have had difficulty remembering a name have convinced you that you aren’t good with names, and so you have decided to focus your attention elsewhere. But most people can learn names, even though it may require more effort from some of us than others. If we are expecting students to do the hard work of paying attention in class (which, likewise, will be more difficult for some than others), then we have to be willing to do some hard work ourselves, and mastering their names represents one of those areas in which our efforts will produce benefits for attention.
You can google plenty of strategies to help you better remember the names of your students, but I’ll just mention two. First, the reason that we have difficulty remembering names is because the connection between individual human beings and their names typically comes without the kind of context that helps us remember almost everything else we learn. Whenever we learn something new, we are usually building on or modifying our existing knowledge frameworks. You tell me a fact about China, and I will take that fact and try to fit it within my existing knowledge about China. If you tell me about an author I should read, your description of her work might remind me of an author I already know, and that will help me remember the new author.11 Names, though, are unique identifiers of unique individuals, outside of any meaningful knowledge framework. When I meet a student for the first time, I have no context for her name other than her unique face. So to remember somebody’s name, we either have to just memorize it like an isolated fact (“Tirana is the capital of Albania”) or we have to associate it with meaning. We can do the latter by putting the student’s name within the context of knowledge about him as a person—precisely the kind we might obtain from the values affirmations (or other icebreakers) we conduct at the beginning of the semester. Thus any invitation for students to share information about themselves—through the learning management system, index cards or information sheets, or icebreakers on the first day of class—will give us some context with which we can associate their names. You’ll remember how Stephanie Yuhl invited her new students to tell the class something about themselves that would help everyone remember their names. I usually ask students to tell me their hometown and one thing they like to do outside of class. Consider how you can gather such contextual information from students, and use it to help you learn their names in the first week or two of the semester.
Second, we can look to a very large body of research in cognitive psychology to provide us with another tool for memorizing names. As we will discuss more fully in Chapter Seven, that research tells us that if we want to remember something, we have to practice remembering it. The more times we retrieve a fact or idea—or a name—from our memory, the better we are able to retrieve it in the future.12 It might seem like a great idea to call roll every day, or have students tell you their names every time they walk into the room, but research on the power of memory practice suggests that it will be more effective for you to hear their names a time or two, and then try to remember without their help. I stumbled my way into this technique years ago, without knowing the science behind it, just by name-learning trial and error. I found that after my initial class or two with students, the best way for me to memorize names was to walk around the room at the beginning of each class and try to speak each person’s name. Each time I stand awkwardly in front of someone’s desk and try to draw a name from my memory, even when I’m unsuccessful, is paving the way for a long-term memory of that person’s name. This has now become one of the lighthearted ways in which I bond with students early in the semester. As I walk around the room at the beginning of each class, trying to remember names, they laugh as I stumble and fail, or try to give me small hints and see if they can help me succeed. It’s not an easy process, but it works: I know the name of every student in my class by the end of the second or third week of the semester. And it works for reasons that are easily explained by research on how our memories function.
A few years ago, however, I learned that I could still improve my work with student names. I was paired with another faculty member on campus in an observation exercise; she watched me teach and I watched her, and then we met afterward to discuss what we had seen. She pointed out something that I would never have noticed: while I obviously knew the names of all of my students—I was able to hand back writing exercises without asking for names, for example—I almost never used them in class. When someone raised a hand, I pointed to them or just said things like “Yes, go ahead.” I was stunned. Had I really memorized all of those names just so I could return their quizzes more efficiently? After my colleague noticed this, and I observed Stephanie Yuhl’s persistent use of her students’ names throughout the class period, I made a much more deliberate effort to use students’ names whenever possible. This quickened the pace of my learning; the more I invited students into our conversations by name, the more rapidly I was able to master their names early in the semester. But using their names also reinforced something I had experienced more sporadically in the past—whenever I called a student’s name, I had that student’s attention. This occurred not only when I was speaking to that student, but when I subsequently referred to student comments or questions: “That reminds me of something Lucie pointed out to us yesterday…” A comment like that not only brings Lucie’s attention fully into the room, wherever it may have been, but affirms that she has made a valuable contribution to our community.
To further support a classroom community in which names matter, you should also help students learn each other’s names. You don’t have to have students stand up at the front of the room and recite everyone’s name, as Yuhl does, a strategy that will only work in smaller classes. Learning one another’s names can and should be an ongoing value throughout the semester. We do a lot of small group work in my courses, and for the first half of the semester I mix up those groups in different configurations and begin each activity with this simple instruction: “First, introduce yourselves to one another.” When they refer to each other in class, I remind them to use their names. I always pause students when they say, “I agree with what she said” and ask them to specify the person they mean. If they don’t know the name, I help them and we move on. In doing so, I am continually sending the signal that it’s important for us to know and call one another by name—for the formation of our classroom community first, but also for the way that it keeps us all attentive to one another.
If you have classes of fifty or a hundred or more students, and several of those classes in a semester, you won’t be able to learn everyone’s name. One immediate response to the challenge of learning names in such an environment would be to ask students to place table tents on their desk with their names, so you can call them by name when they ask questions or when you are soliciting responses during an activity or discussion. Such placards won’t necessarily help you remember the names of those students when you are outside of the classroom, but they will allow both you and the students to refer to one another by name when someone asks a question or makes a comment to the classroom as a whole.
According to one study, just using student names in a large course, even if you don’t have them memorized, might be enough to make students feel recognized as individuals. Instructors in a co-taught, large-enrollment biology course had students use name tents throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, students were asked to identify whether the instructor knew their name, and close to 80 percent of them reported that at least one of the instructors knew their name. When the instructors were actually asked to identify students by name through photographs, they could only correctly identify around 50 percent of them. The researchers also asked students whether it mattered to them that the instructors knew their name, and more than 85 percent of them responded in the affirmative. “I feel like I’m just a face in the crowd most of the time,” one student reported, “even in classes where the teacher is really excited about teaching and helping students understand. Knowing my name makes me feel more noticed and welcome.”13 This student comment reinforces a point I made above: the pedagogical strategies that support attention will be even more effective when they are conducted in an environment in which we know and attend to one another as individuals in a community.
The teaching centers of many large universities have web pages devoted specifically to this issue, if you teach large classes and are looking for more concrete strategies to learn student names.14 What struck me over and over as I read through these tip sheets, and even watched some video tutorials on learning names in large classes, was how many faculty members still made it a priority to try to learn student names, even when they were dealing with a hundred or more students in a class, and even when names were difficult for them to remember. In the end, I suspect that’s what matters in those contexts—not whether you have memorized every student’s name, but if you are trying to. Carol Holstead, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, conducted surveys with her large classes in which she asked students “what made them feel that a professor was invested in them and in their academic success.” The top response she received: “When the professor learned their names.” But one student clarified in the survey that the knowing was less important than the trying; what she really valued was seeing professors “making an effort” to learn her name.15 Make the effort to learn as many names as you can, use table tents or other strategies that enable you to call names in class when you can’t remember, and let students see that you are trying.
The final practical way you can support both community and attention comes through the use you make of the physical space of the classroom. The arrangements of bodies and furniture can orient students toward the course content and the classroom community, or it can leave them vulnerable to distraction. Some of us will have the freedom to shape the interior of the classroom; others will not. But even if we can’t design our own rooms or move the furnishings, we can still consider the choices we make in terms of how bodies are positioned and how that changes—or doesn’t change—over the course of a class period. All of these choices can affirm the work you have done to create a community of learners, or they can work against that value and isolate you at the front of the room with your students arrayed in their neat rows, all of them with their eyes trained on a screen.
Before I make practical recommendations for classroom practice, I’ll begin with two paragraphs that you can photocopy and show to the administration at your institution. The most valuable gift we can give to any instructor who wishes to support the attention of her students is a classroom that is open to multiple configurations, no matter how large the space or the number of students. Derek Bruff, the director of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching and the author of Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, argues that his favorite technology in the college classroom is “chairs on wheels.”16 What he means by this is that the most essential component of any classroom is its flexibility, which should be considered far more important than stuffing the room with new technologies, most of which are unlikely to be used by the typical professor. What faculty need are opportunities to configure the classroom in ways that will help support the attention and learning of their students—and that means that they should be using a variety of teaching strategies over the course of the semester, each of which might benefit from a different layout.
Flexibility should take primacy over technology. One study of a classroom redesign at Iowa State involved the transformation of a traditional classroom into a flexible space with movable tables and chairs, portable whiteboards, and shiny new technologies. The researchers conducted focus groups with faculty and students who had used the redesigned space, and they discovered that the new technologies played a secondary role. “The lower cost features,” the authors explain, “such as portable whiteboards and movable chairs, appeared to provide the greatest affordances for learning and student engagement.” Faculty and students cited the value of being able to solve problems or create work on the portable whiteboards that were visible to the instructor, who could easily check progress and provide feedback.17 When I served on a committee that helped design classrooms in a new building on my campus, this was the most common request we heard from faculty, much more common than any technology requests: they wanted more whiteboard space. The addition of sophisticated technologies to a classroom will benefit certain professors and make sense for certain disciplines, but this study, like others before and after it, demonstrates that creating an effective classroom space does not require blowing your budget on the latest tech trends. What matters more than the buttons and screens are the opportunities for teachers to design the classroom as they see fit. Because there is not one correct way to build or arrange a classroom that supports attention, administrators and faculty members who help make decisions about classrooms should favor chairs-on-wheels flexibility whenever possible, which will give instructors the freedom they need to think creatively about how the spaces they teach in can support student attention.
We’ll consider first the happy prospect that you have been given this gift of flexibility—assigned to teach in a room that has chairs and tables on wheels, generous whiteboard space (or portable whiteboards), the technology you need, and room for you all to wriggle around a little bit. In that case, I would argue that the decisions you make about the arrangement of furniture should depend primarily on how it will help support the attention of your students (and perhaps yourself). When you are lecturing, it seems obvious that faces should be oriented toward the front of the room. If you want students engaged in a whole-class discussion with one another, and yet you still want to preserve the role of moderator, or you want to write down insights from the discussion on the whiteboard, then a double horseshoe seems like the right strategy. But instead of tying every possible teaching strategy to a room configuration, keep in mind the following two principles of attention, some details of which we have discussed already and some of which will appear in later sections of the book.
First, as I have been arguing in this chapter, community matters to attention. At least some of the time, you should opt for layouts in which students can easily see, hear, and work with one another. Equally important, consider whether it will help build community if you ask students occasionally to leave their normal spaces and sit in a different part of the room or engage in paired or group work with new partners. Second, as we saw in Part One, novelty sparks attention. This means that you should not default to the same configuration every time, just as you should not default to the same teaching strategy every day. Every once in a while, begin class by having them help you rearrange the space to create a new room for the students, one that will reinvigorate their attention. Rearranging the room might also occur midway through the class period, especially in longer classes. While it might seem like a waste of a few minutes to pause mid-class to shift the chairs and desks from lecture rows to a discussion horseshoe, this brief physical activity might be precisely what your students need in order to renew their attention for the second part of class. Don’t fear a few minutes of messy reorganization; embrace the power of novelty and change.
Some reflection on the ways in which you can configure and reconfigure the space of the classroom might also be precisely what you need in order to kick-start creative thinking about your teaching. If you are walking into the default setting of the classroom for the tenth class period in a row, a little reflection on shaking up the physical space might encourage you to think about an activity that will get the students up and moving, collaborating with one another, or trying something new.
We now consider the less-happy prospect that you are teaching in a space of fixed furniture, with no opportunity to reconfigure. Perhaps you are in a large lecture room with tiered rows of tables or chairs and a single screen on the front wall, and the obvious place for you to stand is behind the podium that someone has set up next to the technology station. Even if you step out from behind the podium, you still are likely to confine yourself to the empty space at the front of the room. Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion, describes this space as separated from the students by an invisible plane, an “imaginary line that runs the length of the room, parallel to and about five feet in front of the board, usually about where the first student desks start.”18 Remaining behind that imaginary line has the advantage of directing all eyes on you, just as the seats in a theatrical performance train all eyes on what’s happening on the stage. It has the disadvantage of separating you from the students behind an imaginary barrier, enabling them to pursue their distractions out of your sight while you lecture to a half-attentive audience.
The first and most obvious solution to this problem is a simple one: break that plane. From the first day of the semester, you should make it a habit to move throughout the space in which your students are sitting. We have discussed already the prospect of you walking into the seats to have informal conversations with your students, which will launch you into this practice. Continue it throughout the class period. Walk up and down the aisles of those tiered rows, stand occasionally and talk about your slides from the sides or middle or back of the room, and as students ask questions or make comments, approach them so you can make eye contact as they speak. Your physical presence invites attention. When my wife gets a student in her kindergarten class who has been diagnosed with attention problems, one of the strategies that always accompanies that student’s individual education plan is “close proximity.” In other words, that student needs to sit near the teacher. The teacher’s presence helps keep the student on task. Our adult learners are no different. You might not want to force students to sit next to you, but you can bring that presence to them in the seats.
For several years early in my career, I attended an annual series of workshops on teaching that included lessons on communication and performance from Ann Woodworth, an acting teacher at Northwestern University. Drawing from her work coaching students to perform effectively in front of audiences, she provided us with numerous strategies to engage the attention of our students, two of which have stuck with me to this day.
First, make your movements around the room deliberate; stand near different groups of students throughout the class period. Nothing will make a student snap to attention like finding the professor standing nearby. This might sound a little creepy, but think of it instead as working deliberately to make sure you are giving your attention to the students in every corner of the space, just as actors move around the stage and speak lines toward different segments of the theater. Especially in large classes, students can feel like anonymous faces in the room. Join them in their space, and make eye contact with the students around you as you speak or listen to their contributions.
Second, we want students to listen not only to us, but also to each other. A simple tip to support this involves occasionally moving in the other direction from a speaking student, thereby requiring them to address not only you but others in the room. If a student on the right side of the room raises a hand to speak, I might migrate my way over to the left side, putting rows of students between us, which means that the student’s comment must be addressed to all of us, not just me. Obviously you should practice this one with care, as an introverted student might find it disconcerting. But too many student questions and comments unfold as a serial dialogue between teacher and student, rather than as a whole-class conversation. This practice invites everyone to attend to the speaking student.19
If you are not used to moving around the room, ease your way into these practices. When I first began teaching, I learned a tip from an experienced lecturer of large classes: Before the semester begins, visit the room where you will be teaching and walk around it, speaking from different parts and noticing where students might feel especially disconnected from you and their peers. This initial movement around the empty room will make it easier for you to remember and practice those same movements when students are present. Once the semester begins, in every class period make a concerted effort to stand somewhere else for a while, and direct your attention to the students around you. The more you can give your attention to each one of them, the more they are likely to return that attention to you.
If you are looking for the simplest possible strategy to reduce off-task digital use in your classroom, this might be your lowest-hanging fruit. I have been observing classes of other faculty for many years, and in most of those classes I park myself somewhere in the back of the room, which means I have a very clear view of all of the screens, the students with phones on their laps, and even those students who have their laptop open and their phone sitting on the keyboard, so that they are facing the prospect of dual distraction. It’s almost always the case that students in the back of the room are more likely to be doing something else on their laptop than the students in the front of the room. The teacher who stands at the front, and has students in the back on their laptops, might be losing the entire back third of the room to distractions over the course of the class period. She will gain many of those students back simply by standing more regularly in their presence, supplementing her efforts toward community with a conscious use of the classroom space in support of attention.
• Begin the semester by providing an opportunity for students to articulate their values and strengths to you and one another. Use this research-supported strategy to help students feel greater confidence in their academic abilities, make a stronger commitment to their learning, and build community in the classroom.
• Learn and use student names; in larger classes, have students bring name placards to class every day. We jump to attention at the sound of our names. Learning and using the names of your students will not only help spark attention but also build community among your students.
• Whenever possible, choose to teach in spaces that have flexible furnishings, and advocate for such rooms. As you plan each class period, spend a moment considering what arrangements of furnishings will best support the kind of attention you want from students that day. Enlist the help of your students to create that room.
• Break the symbolic plane between the front of the room and the students in the seats. Move deliberately to different parts of the room as you lecture, engage in discussion, or monitor individual or group tasks. Give your attention to students in every part of the room.
We began this chapter in a small classroom in New England, and we finish it in a massive lecture hall in Texas. That’s where Asha Rao plies her trade in biology, teaching introductory classes of up to three hundred students at Texas A&M. And yet, in spite of the enormous number of students who pass in and out of her classroom every day, Rao makes community a fundamental value of her teaching, beginning with her efforts to learn as many student names as possible. “I want each of the 300 students in my class,” she told me, “to know that he/she is not just another body, but is an individual whose presence and learning I deeply care about.” She communicates this dedication to her students with a very simple statement at the beginning of the semester: “Your job is to learn amazing things about biology… and my job is to get to know you.” That sentence, which Rao said to me during a workshop I was conducting at Texas A&M, might be the most perfectly concise statement I have heard about the commitment we should make to the community of students in the room.
The most prominent way Rao manifests this commitment to her students is through her industrious efforts to learn their names. “I will give you everything possible to help you learn important concepts in biology and earn an A in this class,” she says to them on the first day of the semester, “and you will provide me with name tents and anything else you can, to help me learn your names.” In response to my post-visit interview questions, Rao listed for me the numerous ways in which she challenges herself to learn names throughout the semester:
• “When students are busy working in groups or discussing, I walk the classroom, stop by groups, look at their name tents and try to associate their names and faces.”
• “Outside of class, when students visit me during my office hours, I ask them to sign their names on a signup sheet. I then use the names to interact with them in my office. When the same students return to my office hours the next time, I try to recall their names before they sign in.”
• “I frequently log in to [the Texas A&M portal], which has the image roster of my class, and put names and faces together.”
In 2020, Texas A&M completed an innovative new classroom building, specifically designed to create a “culture of excellence in teaching and learning.” The building includes a large lecture hall with seats circled around the lecturer at the center, which means that there are only eight rows, reducing the distance between the teacher and the students in the “back” of the room. Rao was one of the university instructors selected to teach in this new room, in part because of her deep commitment to building community even in the largest of classes.
The core lesson I have learned from the research on community and attention in teaching, as well as from teachers like Stephanie Yuhl and Asha Rao, is that attention has a very strong social component. Attention from the teacher invites attention from the student. Perhaps more accurately, attention to the student—the individual student, named and valued—invites attention from the student. The reverse is equally true: distraction invites distraction. When we don’t give our full attention to our students, they return the favor. When we don’t provide opportunities for them to develop meaningful relationships with one another, they are more likely to disengage from the room full of strangers around them. If we want our students less distracted in class, the first thing we must do is pay attention to the extent to which we create a strong sense of community in the classroom, and work deliberately to develop structures and strategies that support our students’ attention to us and to one another.