IN THE PREVIOUS two chapters, we considered the strategies that will lay the foundation for attention in your classroom, first through the policies you create and then through the community you establish. Assume your students have been convinced that attention matters, and that they feel welcomed and connected in your classroom. Even in such a supportive room of peers, people can be bored and distracted, if nothing in that room seems worthy of their attention. What we teachers ultimately hope will capture and sustain the attention of our students is the fascinating subject matter of our courses. In this chapter, we thus shift our focus toward a more challenging question: What strategies can you use to cultivate the attention of your students toward political theory, or British literature, or mammalian anatomy?
Most teachers have their first opportunity to cultivate the attention of students toward their course content through the syllabus and the opening days of the semester—and, in my view, too many of us drop the ball in these key moments. I did myself for a very long time. I want you to envision yourself as a nineteen-year-old student, plopped down in a seat in Professor Lang’s section of British Literature Survey II, a course that is required for English majors and that also counts as a general-education requirement for all students. In other words, it’s a mix of students who are almost exclusively taking the course to fulfill some degree requirement or another. Professor Lang walks into the classroom, introduces himself, and then hands you a packet of papers that begins with this description of the course:
Following upon British Literature Survey I, this course will introduce you to the major works of British literature, and their cultural and historical contexts, from approximately 1800 to the present day. These two centuries are generally divided into four broad literary periods: Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, and Contemporary. Because of the large amount of ground the course covers, we will focus upon reading the major canonical authors from this period who represent the most significant trends in the development of modern literature.
Have I captured your attention? Have I convinced you that reading British literature will improve your life, or enrich your understanding of the world, or even provide you with any enjoyment? Have I whipped you up to a fevered pitch of excitement, eager to dive right into the semester? If those opening words weren’t enough to send students reaching for their phones, I would have followed reading this paragraph aloud with a long explanation of all the rules of the classroom, intimidating descriptions of the work I would be assigning, and warnings about what would happen if they plagiarized. Some variation of these words and procedures were all vintage Jim Lang, circa 2002, in pretty much every course I taught.
This reflects the way too many of us open learning experiences that we hope will capture student attention. We show our courses to students as boxes of content, packaged in bloodless syllabus descriptions like the one presented above. The issue here is not so much the actual opening paragraph of the syllabus, which often has been written for (or lifted from) a course catalog and is required to appear in some form. But describing our courses with content-box language, even just on the syllabus, can affect everything we do. It might condition our first-day activity and lead us to hand out the syllabus and then provide an introductory lecture on the course, instead of seeking to capture the attention of our students with an intriguing question or a fascinating problem. It might lead us to focus more on what we need to cover, rather than what students need to learn. It might lead us to blame students for their lack of attention, rather than considering the possibility that we could be doing more to bring the material to life and make it deserving of their attention.
In Chapter Four, we considered how to make students present in support of their learning. In this chapter, we shift our focus to considering how we can use curiosity, one of the great drivers of human attention, to shape the encounters that our students have with course material. Curiosity makes us sit up and take notice, makes us wonder and reflect, and spurs our desire to know more. It captures our attention and can hold it well beyond the confines of the classroom. But not all curiosities are equal. To understand the role that curiosity can play in harnessing attention and directing it toward learning, we will explore some variations in this very complex human emotion, and then consider the choicest ways to place curiosity at the forefront of your courses and how to use it as a core strategy for the support of student attention.
“Homo sapiens,” writes Josh Eyler in his book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, “is the species of curiosity.”1 Eyler, the director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, draws this conclusion after an extensive review of the literature about curiosity, tracing its origins back along both evolutionary and developmental lines. Curiosity first helped drive our evolution as a species; Eyler describes it as an “evolutionary adaptation that has allowed us to discover, to invent, and to learn. Our species has been shaped by nature to be wide-eyed children… always striving to know more.”2 Curiosity drove our early ancestors to nibble at new food sources, explore strange territories, and communicate with other social groups. Curiosity pushed us to experiment, explore, and discover. The curiosity-driven evolution of humans plays itself out in a parallel way within individual human lives. Curiosity helps each one of us grow and learn from the earliest stages of our life. Children are driven by their curiosity to build an understanding of the world around them, to resolve discrepancies or obstacles they encounter, and to communicate with others. Of course, we are not the only species that demonstrates curiosity; primates in general are curious animals, as are other species to varying degrees. But our curiosity combines with other aspects of the human brain to make us animals that have achieved remarkable feats of both learning and application of that learning to the world around us.
In spite of its importance to human development, curiosity proves extremely difficult to define. Mario Livio is an astrophysicist whose account of the origins and effects of curiosity in humans was driven by his own wide-ranging curiosity. In his book Why?: What Makes Us Curious, he argues that “what we refer to as curiosity may actually encompass a family of intertwined states or mechanisms that are powered by distinct circuits in the brain.”3 In other words, we can’t locate just one part of the brain in which curiosity resides; like attention, it seems to draw from and connect to different aspects of our emotions and cognitive processes. However we define it, the research is clear that we learn more effectively and deeply when we bring curiosity to a task. Livio writes that curiosity is “a drive state for information… [It] is the desire to know why, how, or who.”4 That drive state can be directed toward a specific end, such as seeking particular information, or it can be more open-ended, simply wondering and thinking about bigger questions. In either case, the state of curiosity opens our minds for exploration and more firmly fixes into our brains whatever we learn.
One group of researchers conducted a fascinating experiment that demonstrated the powerful link between curiosity and learning. The researchers showed subjects a long series of questions and had them rate their curiosity about each one. Then the researchers put the subjects in a brain scanner, and showed them the questions again; after the subjects saw the questions this time around, they experienced a short delay, saw an image of a face, and then saw the answer to the question. When they returned a day later, the subjects had a better memory of the answers to the questions they were curious about—and also a better memory of the random faces that popped up before they saw those answers. Curiosity opened their minds to new learning, and they became like sponges that soaked up whatever they encountered in that aroused, curious state.5
One of the reasons that curiosity spurs learning is that it directs our attention to the subject we are pursuing. Cognitive scientists Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki devote a chapter to the connection between attention and learning in their book Understanding How We Learn, and they review a theoretical model that explains two types of interest that students can take in our course material: individual and situational. Individual interest refers to the prior interest that you bring into a novel context, which will drive you to explore and learn in order to satisfy it. Situational interest arises as the result of you arriving on the scene and finding something there that intrigues you, which spurs you to want to know more. Using their own book to explain the difference between the two types of interest, the authors explain that “individual interest is the extent to which you yourself are already interested in applying cognitive psychology to education, whereas situational interest is how absorbing our text is or how enjoyable you find the illustrations.”6 Swapping in the word curiosity for interest gives us individual curiosity and situational curiosity, and the connection to education is easy to make. Students with individual curiosity would come into a course wanting to know more about the subject matter (for example, students in a psychology course who always wondered about how their minds work), whereas students with situational curiosity might find themselves unexpectedly intrigued by the subject matter (for example, a student who was required to take psychology and discovered there how fascinating brains were).
Weinstein and Sumeracki make the case that “as teachers, we are in control of situational interest, but not of individual interest.”7 At one level, this is obviously true. We can’t control the interests or curiosity that students bring into our courses. Our first responsibility, then, is to see how we can make the material as fascinating as possible in order to stimulate their situational curiosity. Most of the recommendations in this chapter will focus on the support of attention through the development of situational curiosity in your courses. But we shouldn’t give up entirely on the prospect that individual curiosity can play a role in our teaching work. A student who arrives to a psychology course without any understanding of psychology or particular interest in it will most certainly have other types of interests and curiosities. The student might, for example, be a budding entrepreneur, whose primary goal has always been to learn how to succeed effectively in the market. It will most certainly turn out, though, that things she learns about the human mind and human behavior can help her become a more successful entrepreneur, if the instructor gives her the opportunity and encouragement to see the connection between the course content and her own interests. The individual curiosity that students bring into their courses, then, can always be solicited and connected to the material. These two different types of curiosity strike me as intertwined, able to influence and strengthen one another in an educational environment.
The recommendations that follow cover four ways you can induce better attention in your courses through curiosity, the first three of which connect more with situational curiosity, in that they seek to pique the curiosity of students in relation to the course material you present to them. The final recommendation invites students to bring their own questions to bear on the course material, and hence leans more toward individual curiosity.
I began this chapter with the opening paragraph of a syllabus because our course descriptions provide us with a handy testing ground for our ability to cultivate curiosity in our courses. If the goal is to begin the semester by invoking the situational curiosity of our students, then the first thing we have to do is shift away from content-box course descriptions, and instead set those descriptions on the launchpad of human curiosity by asking questions. In his book Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham argues that most of the courses we teach are designed to help students answer deep and fascinating questions: Why do some people get sick and others don’t? What is the best form of government? Why do humans speak so many different languages? Unfortunately, too many of us skip these big questions and go right to the answers. “The material I want students to learn,” Willingham writes, “is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting.”8 The implication here is that we should begin the process of framing and presenting our courses by identifying the questions that underpin them, and enfold the course content within those questions.
But not all questions are equal or alike. Some of our course questions might be small and specific, and some might be large and mysterious. Ideally, a course will include both kinds of questions. Ian Leslie’s provocative book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It gives us more precise language for distinguishing between questions large and small, specific and open-ended. Leslie points out that we can be curious about both puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles intrigue us, but they do so because we know they have a solution that just happens to evade us at the moment. We expect to solve them or have them solved for us. Your favorite mystery novelist excels in the creation of puzzles, which she generally resolves for you by the end of the story. Mysteries are those big, open-ended questions that fascinate us, and yet have no easy answers, or no answers at all. Mysteries are capable of long, sustained study or exploration without resolution. Your favorite poet, whose body of work leads you continually to wonder about the meaning of human existence, deals in mysteries.9
To begin the process of evoking curious attention to your course material, take a look at that first passage of prose that your students will see when they encounter the course, and ask yourself whether you have written it to present a box of content, or to stir curiosity for the intellectual journey they are preparing to undertake. What is the mystery that lies at the heart of your discipline? How can you evoke it for students in the opening of your syllabus? Identifying a mystery at the heart of your course can be challenging initially, especially if you have not thought in these terms before. But consider the fact that almost every academic discipline arose as the result of something that humans wanted to know, and that eluded us. We might study psychology because we wonder why people act in sometimes baffling ways; we might study physics because we wonder about how the material world operates; we might study literature because we want to know how stories and language can have such a powerful impact on us. Whatever reason you study what you study, something about it caught your attention and provoked your curiosity at a very basic level. Can you find your way back to that original moment, and then evoke it for your students?
This notion was captured well in an interview that education writer Jessica Lahey conducted with Teller, of Penn & Teller fame. Before becoming a magician, Teller taught Latin for six years, and Lahey asked him about how he got students interested in that subject matter. One of the first things he mentions is that teachers have to retain their initial wonder at the subject: “If you don’t have both astonishment and content,” he says, “you have either a technical exercise or you have a lecture.” To get beyond technical presentations of material and into the kind of learning experience that grabs the attention of students, you have to keep that astonishment alive in yourself. The interview concludes with a beautiful statement of how that sense of wonder connects to learning: “When I go outside at night and look up at the stars, the feeling that I get is not comfort. The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education.”10
Note the appearance of the word “mystery” here, evoking once again the notion that we are driven to attention and learning by the questions that puzzle us, that keep us wondering. These are the questions we need to surface in ourselves and present to our students.
Rebecca Zambrano, a director of online faculty development, suggests a number of pathways toward helping instructors develop course-level conceptualizations that will capture the attention and pique the curiosity of students (the following are excerpted quotes from her essay):
1. What fills you with a sense of wonder? What aspects of the content you teach lead you to a sense of awe at the deeper mysteries beneath the skill sets you teach?
2. What large questions remain unanswered by the great minds of your field?
3. What are some of the most “magical” paradoxes or mysteries in your field of knowledge? Perhaps there are case studies that seem to contradict each other or data discrepancies that seem impossible to reconcile given current knowledge.
4. What stories of wonder and passion led foundational thinkers in your field to give so much of their lives to unraveling important mysteries?11
I love the notion embedded here: that we need to reconnect with our own questions about our discipline before we can cultivate the questions of our students—and their attention. To begin the process of using curiosity to capture the attention of your students, use questions like the ones above in order to rewrite the course overview that appears at the beginning of your syllabus. Write it like you are inviting students into the most fascinating learning journey of their lives. Don’t worry if they skim right over it when you first hand them the syllabus; the process of rewriting that opening paragraph will help remind you of what makes your discipline so fascinating, and your curiosity about its deepest questions can then spill over into all other aspects of the course—including and especially the first class period.
The first day of the course provides our first opportunity to capture attention—an objective that will be made more difficult if you begin by handing out and reviewing the syllabus, which was my modus operandi for many years. But nothing says “check your phone” more than the teacher walking into the first class of the semester and providing an overview of the course, all of the work students will have to do, and all of the policies that will govern their behavior. Begin instead with the goal of evoking curiosity.
One strategy for doing this is to create an opening-day activity that gets students engaged in thinking about or trying to solve the mystery that you have identified in your syllabus. Cate Denial, a historian at Knox College in Illinois, provides an excellent example of what this might look like.12 In her history courses, Denial wants students to find fascination in the way history changes, how the way we think about an issue like slavery today differs from how historians thought about it fifty years ago. New sources are discovered, new perspectives are developed, and the story we tell about the past changes. That raises some pretty profound, epistemic mysteries: Can we ever really know the truth about the past? Does such truth even exist? What does that say about our understanding of our own pasts, both individual and collective?
Denial wants her students to begin asking these questions about the past on the very first day of the semester, and has developed an intriguing method for getting them to do so. After welcomes and introductions, she hands out a “document packet” of sources related to a single historical event. The contents of each packet vary from student to student; some items are in every packet, others are not. For this exercise, Denial chooses a historical event that she will not cover in the course, in order to ensure that all students—including those who might have signed up for the course because of prior interest or expertise—will have to struggle with unfamiliar sources. Students are put in random groups, which she has selected in advance, and asked “to put the sources in the order that makes the most sense to them, and tell the story the sources supply.” This activity, according to Denial, takes fifteen to twenty minutes of class time. Afterward, each group is asked to share their story with the class. Of course, no two stories end up alike, and Denial then leads a discussion about that, which allows her to introduce a core theme of the class: “History changes as more sources are found, old ones are re-examined, and new theories suggest new interpretive frameworks. For the duration of the term, every student in the class will be a working historian, putting sources together to understand one part of our collective past.” The puzzle of this first-day activity—How can I put together these sources in a way that tells a coherent story?—leads Denial and her students to the mystery at the heart of her courses, and at the heart of her discipline.
Denial’s technique works especially well because it engages students with the puzzle of the day and the mystery of the course by having them work with course materials. Talented lecturers might be able to draw students into a mystery with a great presentation of a story, case, or problem that points to the deep questions of the discipline. But if you want students to participate actively in your course throughout the semester, it is best to foster that engagement on the first day and set the tone for the semester. Build the puzzle, and let them take a crack at solving it. Consider classic or contemporary cases or problems in your discipline, present them to students, and see what they come up with: Here’s an example of a business that did everything right according to accepted management theory, and yet failed spectacularly in the first year. What happened? A woman came into the doctor’s office presenting with the very familiar symptoms of the flu, and a week later died with the following complications. What could explain this? A skeleton with the following characteristics was discovered in a remote corner of Europe that didn’t fit with then-contemporary theories about how humans evolved. What other theories could explain its strange features? When students have had the opportunity to learn about and wrestle with these puzzles, finish by letting them know that the course will provide them many opportunities to engage with such fascinating problems, and with the deeper questions that underpin them.
Questions designed to evoke the situational curiosity of students should continue beyond the first days of the semester. The first time I observed a question-based lesson plan was a decade ago, when I visited the classroom of Greg Weiner, then a professor of political science and now the provost of Assumption University. At the beginning of class, he showed students four questions on a slide. He then proceeded through a standard mix of lecture and discussion. At the end of the period, he returned to the questions in order to remind students that the class material for that day had been intended to supply them with potential answers. This strategy had the positive side effect of demonstrating to students that they had acquired some concrete knowledge over the course of the class period: their ability to answer the questions on the slide at the end of class meant that they knew more than they had before. Weiner had also made those questions available to the students in advance of class, to help guide their reading and homework. But having the questions visible at the start was designed to draw out their curiosity in those crucial opening moments of the period.13
Another colleague of mine, Aisling Dugan, takes a different approach: the question is the same every day, but it is applied to different content. Dugan teaches a course in microbiology on my campus, and she begins each class period by putting up a slide with the “microbe of the day.” Next to the name and image of the microbe, she lists some categories that scientists would use to understand and classify it. The question she poses is a simple one: “What can you discover about this microbe in each of these categories?” Class formally opens with students spending five minutes looking up everything they can find about that microbe, using their phones and laptops. Dugan allowed me to observe this opening ritual in her class one afternoon, and it was striking to see how quickly the pre-class student conversations quieted down, and how intently the students became absorbed in this five-minute task. My informal survey of the room, from my vantage point in the back row, showed me that every student was on task during those five minutes, seeing what they could discover about the microbe of the day—which was the one that causes the plague, chosen playfully by Dugan to mark Halloween that day. After five minutes were up, she asked students to report what they had learned. Together the room filled out the picture of this scary microbe, and throughout Dugan was able to connect their findings to other questions: “Do you remember which previous microbe had that shape? And where do anaerobic microbes live in the body?” Dugan’s classroom demonstrates that we don’t have to scramble to find completely different questions every day. The basic form of the question might remain the same, but we can apply it anew to each day’s course material.
My favorite method for posing daily questions to students takes the form of the peer instruction pedagogy developed by Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. I have seen him model this technique, and discuss its origins, on more than one occasion.14 In his physics courses, Mazur explains, he found that his students were able to use memorized formulas to solve problems without really understanding the concepts that underpinned them. So he began posing conceptual questions and asking students to respond with handheld clickers, the results of which were instantly visible to him. He could then see how well the students understood whatever concept was at play in that class period and adjust his teaching accordingly. If few students got the answer correct, he would return to the material; if many were right, he knew he could move on. The handheld clickers that Mazur used now have been mostly abandoned for free online programs like Poll Everywhere or Socrative, which allow faculty to write questions into a presentation slide and students to respond with their phones, tablets, or laptops, the results again immediately visible to all. (Mazur always points out, however, that low-tech versions of this process work equally well, with colored index cards or even just raised hands or fingers accomplishing the same result, if a little more messily.)
But what’s most striking to me about the process that Mazur developed was the extent to which it seems designed to first raise and then intensify the curiosity of students. The core process of peer instruction as Mazur practiced it followed this pattern:
1. The instructor poses the question.
2. The students submit their responses.
3. The students have to turn to a peer, explain their response, and listen to the explanation of their peers.
4. The students have the opportunity to change their mind, and can resubmit their answer.
5. The instructor invites some students to explain their answers.
6. The instructor reveals the answer.
Throughout this process—which could take just a few minutes or last as long as a half hour, depending on the time you allot to steps three through five—both curiosity and attention are slowly building. Mazur argues, and I would concur, that having students make an initial commitment to an answer is a crucial part of the process. Once they have committed, they are curious to know whether they are right. In other words, the process wouldn’t be as effective if you simply posed a question and asked a few students for their responses. In the peer instruction model, everyone commits, everyone speaks to a peer, and everyone thus has a stake in learning the answer.
I have seen the power of this approach in my own classes, but my favorite places to use it are in the faculty workshops that I conduct on other campuses or in conference keynotes. I am often asked to speak to these groups about how research on learning and attention can inform our teaching. After I present some basic principles of learning theory, I tell the audience about a 2013 publication in which a team of psychologists analyzed ten common learning strategies that students use.15 The psychologists’ purpose was to determine what research indicated about the effectiveness of each of those strategies; they rated all ten of them as high, moderate, or low utility. In my talks, I describe all of this, provide some background on the study, and then show the faculty five of those ten strategies on a Poll Everywhere slide. Only one of the five was rated high utility, I explain; keeping in mind the learning principles I just described for you, see if you can identify that high utility strategy and use your device to respond. I then walk them through the peer instruction process, asking them to explain their answer to a peer, letting them change their mind if they wish, and having some participants explain their responses. After the group has heard those responses, the atmosphere in the room is always the same, whether I am doing this activity with a dozen people or five hundred: everyone is on the edge of their seat, wondering whether they got it right. I never have the attention of the room more fully than in the moments before I reveal the answer to the question I have posed. Every time I conduct this exercise I see how effectively peer instruction gradually builds and intensifies curiosity—and, with curiosity, attention.
Your discipline or course—or even just your teaching personality—might not lend itself to asking factual questions that have a correct answer. Your questions might be more designed to get the flavor of the room on a particular topic, or to invite students to express their understanding of a text, or begin to form their convictions about a problem. You know best what kinds of questions emerge from the heart of your discipline and your course, and even what questions fascinate you. If you can identify one great question per day, or even one great question per week, and make it a centerpiece of your teaching, you can turn the classroom into a place where answers come in response to questions, instead of a place where answers are provided whether anyone has questions or not.
I’ve spent much of my career working with faculty to advocate for small changes that can make a positive difference to our teaching, and one of the best changes I’ve ever heard recommended was the simplest one you could possibly imagine. So many of us finish or pause in our presentation of material and say, “Any questions?”—a prompt that is usually met either with silence or with a question or two from your most vocal students, and that might be viewed by some as a quick opportunity to check their phones or hop online. This is unfortunate, because the formulation of questions has multiple learning benefits for students. In a review of the role that student questions play in the learning process, Christine Chin and Jonathan Osborne argue in the journal Studies in Science Education that “the act of ‘composing questions’ focuses the attention of students on content, main ideas, and checking if content is understood” (italics mine).16 The small change here, designed to elicit those benefits, involves a very simple rephrasing of this question into a slightly modified one: “What questions do you have?” The logic behind this question is that you have just been hearing about complex material and ideas, so of course I know you have questions, and I am very willing right now to pause here and learn all about them. The question has to be accompanied by actions that reinforce its intention, which include waiting for at least ten or fifteen or even thirty seconds, and maybe even doing a little bit of browbeating when no one responds immediately: “C’mon, I know you have questions. I want to hear them, and I’m willing to wait.” You won’t have to do this more than a time or two before your students get the idea and start asking their questions.
You can solicit their questions in this informal way, but I like a bit of creative thinking along the lines of this strategy from Meriah Crawford, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Crawford found, as many of us have, that students often don’t ask questions in response to open solicitations, and that these “unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibit their learning.” She thus developed a concrete method for soliciting student questions at critical points during the semester: on the first day, as well as on days surrounding key assignments, she hands out index cards and asks students to write down a question they have. She collects them, shuffles them in order to maintain anonymity, and then takes the time to respond. On her course evaluations, one student responded to this activity by saying that the index cards were “a good way to get unresolved questions answered as well as possibly obtain crucial information I hadn’t thought about based on the answers to other students’ questions.”17 Thus, not only does this technique allow students to voice and hear responses to their questions, but it allows them to open up to the questions of others and wonder about those as well.
A final way to elicit questions from students, and surface whatever individual curiosity they bring into your classroom, could come through a simple variation on a popular teaching technique in higher education called “the minute paper,” in which an instructor ends class by asking students to write short responses to the following questions: “What was the most important thing you learned today?” and “What are you still confused or uncertain about?” I frequently mention this strategy to faculty when I am giving workshops on teaching, and on one occasion a participant raised her hand and suggested we consider a third question: “What do you want to know more about?” Put in terms of this chapter, we might rephrase that questions as, “When it comes to this course material, what are you curious about?” I love that question as a way to evoke the individual curiosity of students, which should provide you with information on what might be most likely to capture their attention in an upcoming class period. Once they have told you what they are curious about, find ways to acknowledge their questions or provide opportunities for them to search for answers. You might offer them the chance to pursue their questions in an assessment, such as an upcoming paper or project. More simply, you can keep their interests in mind as you plan each class period and find ways to point to their questions. Nothing will make students sit up and pay attention like speaking or writing their name and mentioning a question they asked previously, noting that the lecture, reading, or discussion for that day will help to address it.
• Foreground questions at the opening of your course. Remind yourself about the deep questions from which your course material emerges, and then rewrite the opening paragraph of your syllabus, as much for your benefit as for the benefit of your students.
• Begin the course with a first-day activity designed to invite student curiosity through some engagement activity; ask them to solve a puzzle at the heart of your mystery. Hold off on presenting your syllabus until you have piqued their curiosity.
• Use questions, problems, and stories along the way of your course. Identify the moments of transition, or the openings of new units, as times when you can inject life and attention into your course with questions.
• Develop methods for actively soliciting student questions. Formulating questions can help students improve their learning, and hearing their questions can help you identify future topics and strategies that will get their attention.
In The Distracted Mind, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen provide one final conceptual framework for understanding how questions and curiosity can support attention and reduce distraction. They argue that distraction occurs as a result of a conflict between two fundamental features of the brain: our ability to create and plan high-level goals and our ability to control our mind and our environment as we take steps to complete those goals. The challenging and complex nature of the goals we set for ourselves means that they require an extraordinary amount of work from our attention system. We have to decide, plan, attend to individual tasks, monitor progress, and more. As they explain: “Our ability to establish high-level goals is arguably the pinnacle of human brain evolution. Complex, interwoven, time-delayed, and often shared goals are what allow us humans to exert an unprecedented influence over how we interact with the world around us, navigating its multifaceted environments based on our decisions rather than reflexive responses to our surroundings.”18
Not all of our goals take the form Gazzaley and Rosen articulate, but almost all of the tasks that we ask students to complete in our courses could rightfully be described as “complex, interwoven, and time-delayed.” Everything from preparing for a test to writing an essay to completing homework problems will entail multiple cognitive processes, spread out over time, working together to achieve that goal. The best way to understand the origins and nature of distraction, according to Gazzaley and Rosen, is to envision it as a “mighty clash” between our impressive ability to set and pursue such complex goals and the features of our brain that welcome easy distraction.
The real purpose behind cultivating curiosity in the classroom is to help students develop learning goals that matter to them. When I am curious, I have an immediate goal: I want to learn more. The stronger my curiosity, the more I focus my attention—and the less I feel tempted by distraction. If we can create genuine curiosity in our students, we are boosting their ability to resist distractions by helping them establish meaningful goals. Moreover, a little distraction won’t hurt a truly curious student. I have been distracted a thousand times during the writing of this book, but I came back to it every time and pursued it to the end, because I never stopped being fascinated by a simple question: What helps students pay attention? Likewise, we need to help students discover the questions that will become their academic goals, and that will give them the boost they need to put away their distractions and focus on learning. If we envision distraction as arising from a conflict between the pursuit of a goal and the obstacles that interfere with that pursuit, we can then see that one way to reduce the power of distraction is to maximize the power of our goals. The cultivation of curiosity gives the brains of our students a helping hand in the mighty clash between goals and distraction.