6

Structured Attention

FOR CHRISTMAS ONE YEAR my wife bought us tickets to the Boston symphony, which meant we could have one of those sophisticated adult evenings that we always long for but almost never seem to actually experience. On a cold January evening, we settled into our seats at the symphony hall after a nice dinner at a nearby restaurant and perused the printed program. A very short modern work would be followed by a work from a lesser-known classical composer, or at least a composer that was lesser-known to me. The evening would conclude with the famous New World Symphony by Antonín Dvoák, a work with which Anne and I were both familiar.

At 8:00 p.m., the conductor walked out to the front of the stage, gave us all a bow, and waved his baton to launch the evening. The first of the three works was quick and had some nice moments; I never felt like I found my footing with it, but it was short and dynamic enough that it held my attention. It was followed by a brief break in which the musicians reset themselves and the rest of us shifted around in our seats for a minute or two. The second piece of music, according to the liner notes, consisted of five separate movements, but—unlike a typical symphony—did not contain clear breaks between them. It played continuously for twenty-plus minutes. Those twenty minutes, I will confess, were long ones. The music was completely unfamiliar to me, so I had to listen carefully to see if I could hear melodies or musical themes that I could latch on to as the piece progressed. I enjoy classical music, and often listen to it while I am reading or writing, but I was apparently not sophisticated enough to identify whatever melodies or themes held that piece together. As a result, it didn’t take long for my mind to start drifting. I wasn’t the only one, either. I could see many of my fellow patrons were in a similar boat, as quite a few heads around me were swiveling to view their fellow concertgoers or the decorative features of the concert hall. Although I did not pull out my phone, the unfamiliarity of the music and the lack of a clear structure in the piece left me yearning to.

A longer intermission followed the conclusion to this piece, during which time we could get drinks or use the restroom, and then the orchestra launched into Dvoák’s symphony. One of the most striking features of the New World Symphony is the fact that Dvoák builds it up from some very simple, catchy melodies, ones that would not be out of place in an Irish folk tune or even a contemporary pop song. But the symphony does something quite brilliant with these simple melodies. Rather than just repeating them over and over again—in contrast to, say, Maurice Ravel’s Boléro or, for parents of younger children, the “Baby Shark” song—the melodies are subject to several types of variation. They are passed around from instrument to instrument, thus giving them a different flavor with each repetition. You begin to notice, as the work progresses, that you are hearing shorter pieces of the melody—just the opening few notes, for example—and then some new twist on the remaining part of it. It seems to grow and evolve, taking different forms as the work unfolds. Finally, Dvoák (and the conductor) varies both the volume and the speed of the piece throughout. At times we are walking with it very slowly, and at times it gallops. There are moments when one lone instrument calls out the melody, and other moments when a host of instruments are playing the tune. In short, the symphony does not hesitate to draw its listeners in with a catchy melody, but then it keeps us on our toes as we listen for the ways it returns to us in many different variations. Because the core melodies are repeated so frequently, change and variety play an essential role in sustaining the listener’s attention.

In this chapter, we will consider how to sustain student attention throughout the entire class period by drawing inspiration from creative artists who have long counted as one of their tasks to keep listeners and viewers’ attention to works that stretch over extended periods of time, especially composers and playwrights. Creators of live, prolonged performances of any kind demonstrate a clear awareness of the limited attention of their audiences, which helps explain the structure of many of these experiences. Plays unfold in acts and scenes, with short transitions between segments, and usually at least one longer intermission when patrons can hit the restroom or have a drink. Classical music concerts are likewise parceled into three or four different performances, with an intermission, and symphonies are divided into movements. The changes and transitions are even more regular at modern rock or jazz concerts, where new songs are launched every four or five or ten minutes. Today’s modern TED Talks likewise recognize the limits of our attention spans, and speakers are asked to keep the length of most talks between ten and twenty minutes.

The classroom is one of the only places where we expect humans in seats to maintain their attention through an extended, uninterrupted performance of an hour or more. I suspect this happens because we (the teachers) are able to keep ourselves fully engaged during the class period, and we expect that the students should be likewise attentive. I once had the opportunity to observe a talented lecturer teach a seventy-five-minute class. He paced the room energetically, summarized the ideas of great thinkers in his field, made funny comments, and told entertaining stories. I was impressed with how thoroughly he was engaged in his own performance; he was truly in the zone, and I’m sure the hour-plus class period flew by for him. The story was not the same for his students, whom I also observed throughout the period. They cycled among rapt attention, struggling to pay attention, and just checked out. It struck me forcefully how different it was to attend to complex ideas when you were the speaker instead of the listener.

I expect that many readers of this book are teachers who use a variety of active-learning strategies in their classroom already, and it may seem to those readers that maintaining attention over an hour of discussion or group work would be less of a concern than it is for a committed lecturer. Perhaps students in your classroom sit around a seminar table and talk. Or perhaps you run an active-learning classroom, and students are working on problems all throughout the semester. Maybe you teach with simulations, or game-based activities, or case studies, or some other highly engaging pedagogical approach. You might thereby assume that these kinds of active classroom formats foster student attention throughout, as the students are engaged and working, rather than sitting and listening to a lecturer. I would have made this same argument myself at the beginning of my teaching career, when I taught largely by discussion. But anyone who has spent seventy-five minutes trying to host a discussion knows better than this. It doesn’t matter what teaching technique we are using—at some point throughout the class period, attention will flag. This doesn’t happen because of any particular teaching method; I am an agnostic when it comes to the choice of method, believing that all of them can be done both well and badly. The flagging of attention happens because that’s how attention works. It happens not only within the space of a single class period, but within the rhythm of the semester. Attention peaks and troughs over fifteen weeks, just as it does over the course of fifty minutes.

Learning is hard, and so is attention, especially for students. Yet we have only a short amount of time to spend with them each week and each semester, and we have much work to do. If we want to help students maintain their attention throughout the class period, we have to begin by thinking like playwrights and composers, recognizing that students need changes of scene, shifts in format, and opportunities to pause and catch their cognitive breath. Absent that kind of planning, we are in conflict with what the research tells us about the limits of student attention in the classroom.

The Limits of Student Attention

One of the most frequently cited maxims in education is that students can pay attention for ten or fifteen minutes before their attention starts to wane. If this is true, as I have heard many teachers say, it means that we should limit our lectures to ten or fifteen minutes in length, and put them at the beginning of class, while student attention is high. Then, as their attention starts to wane, we should shift into engagement activities. I was actually talking about this piece of pedagogical folk wisdom in the kitchen one afternoon with my wife, while one of my high-school-aged daughters was doing her homework nearby. “Seventeen minutes,” my daughter said, looking up from her book. “That’s how long students can pay attention in class.”

“Where did you get that from?” I asked.

She shrugged and returned to her homework. “That’s what my teacher told us.”

There are written sources for this theory, but a review of them published in 2007 by two psychologists at Saint Louis University concluded that the evidence for this claim was thin and sometimes based on shoddy research methods. No doubt student attention waxes and wanes throughout a class period, the researchers agree, but trying to map it onto an upside-down bell-shaped curve doesn’t do justice to the complexities of attention or the humans who wield it.¹ Their conclusions match well with the findings of another group of researchers, who gave clickers to students in chemistry classes and asked them to report their lapses of attention throughout fifty-minute periods, in which teachers used three different teaching formats: lectures, demonstrations, and poll questions. The authors found no evidence of the fifteen-minute period of student attention. Attention, the authors explain, instead “alternates between being engaged and non-engaged in ever-shortening cycles throughout a lecture segment… Students report attention lapses as early as the first 30 [seconds] of a lecture, with the next lapse occurring approximately 4.5 min into a lecture and again at shorter and shorter cycles throughout the lecture segment.” The paper contains a number of graphs in which students’ self-reported lapses of attention are mapped across the minutes of the class period, and they look like the beeping heart-rate monitors you see in hospitals, with pulses of inattention occurring with depressing consistency throughout the period.²

However long attention lasts or doesn’t last in the classroom, the important point is that it degrades over time and thus needs regular opportunities for renewal. This idea informs a theoretical model called attention restoration theory. According to this theory, any activity that requires our attention, including attempting to learn in a college classroom, makes significant demands on what some psychologists term “directed attention.” Environmental psychologist Stephen Kaplan argues that directed attention (a concept that he traces back to philosopher William James) has several key features: it “requires effort, plays a central role in achieving focus, is under voluntary control (at least some of the time), is susceptible to fatigue, and controls distraction through the use of inhibition.”³ The element that I want to highlight here is that our directed attention is “susceptible to fatigue.” Kaplan claims that “any prolonged mental effort leads to directed attention fatigue.” Like many researchers in this area, Kaplan adduces potential evolutionary reasons for this feature of our attention: “To be able to pay attention by choice to one particular thing for a long period of time would make one vulnerable to surprises. Being vigilant, being alert to one’s surroundings may have been far more important [to early humans] than the capacity for long and intense concentration.”⁴ According to this line of argument, our brains have good reason to nudge us away from directed attention on a regular basis and force us to disperse our attention back into the broader environment.

Because our directed attention fatigues over time, longer periods that demand our attention must feature regular change and variety. In plays and symphonies, the artist provides an opportunity for attention renewal through breaks and intermissions. Although I had been lulled into distraction by the twenty-minute piece during my night out at the symphony, I was returned and ready for Dvoák thanks to a trip to the restroom and some chatting with my wife. In the classroom, especially if you are teaching in two- or three-hour blocks, you might well provide breaks for students to get up and stretch, use the restroom, or check their phones. But for the typical class period, just under or over an hour, I would argue instead for the more familiar teaching strategies of change and variety. Short of intermissions, plays still have transitional moments in which the scene changes, the lights darken and return, the background scenery changes, and the actors come off and on the stage. In a symphony, the musicians pause between movements (often for just ten or fifteen seconds), the themes change from one movement to the next, and a movement that ends quietly might be followed by one that begins with a roar. In these transitions from one scene or movement to the next, attention can pause and catch its breath; in our anticipation of change, attention is renewed.

Research on student attention suggests that these attention dynamics operate in the classroom as well. The researchers who used clickers to study student attention in the chemistry classroom also analyzed the lapses of student attention preceding and following the use of one of the two major active-learning strategies in the course: demonstrations and polls. What they found was not only that student attention perked up during these changes in format from lecture to active learning, but that the reverse was also true: student attention was heightened during the lecture segments following an active-learning experience. The authors finish the essay with a section entitled “Implications for Teaching”:

Teachers should be aware of student attention cycles within a lecture and strive to improve student attention by using student-centered pedagogies at different times throughout a lecture, not only to decrease student attention lapses but also to increase student attention during the lectures that follow the use of such pedagogies. This research demonstrates that the positive effect of student-centered pedagogies does more than decrease student inattention during their duration but also has the added benefit of a carryover effect to a subsequent lecture segment. This supports the idea that changing pedagogies within a class period can not only be seen as a way to present concepts in an alternate format but may also help engage students in subsequent lecture teaching formats. [Italics mine.]⁵

This study helps affirm three essential points about the importance of changing our teaching strategies over the course of a class session. First, attention and distraction cycle off and on with very regular frequency. Second, deliberate efforts to renew attention with moments of active engagement have a positive effect not only in the moment of engagement, but in the period immediately following it. Third and finally, those moments of engagement do not require an extraordinary amount of time or creativity. In some cases in this study, the polls or demonstrations lasted just five minutes.

Another affirmation of these points comes from a 2019 study published in the journal Studies in Higher Education. The author invited more than seven hundred first-year students in the United Kingdom to fill out surveys indicating the times when their interest was especially piqued during a lecture. The author notes that she had various hypotheses about what would capture the students’ attention, including when the lecturer was using humor or multimedia. But the surveys revealed something different. The students reported interest when they were invited to participate in activities that provoked what the author called “cognitive activation.” She describes examples of this as the teacher “posing a question” or “introducing a problem or puzzle to be solved.”⁶ In other words, there was nothing too radical here—just a pause in the usual routine and a shift to something different. Cognitive activation would be one way to explain why attention perked up in those moments, but I would argue that there is an equally likely culprit in the room: the pause and the change. Indeed, because these cognitive activation techniques were all different, there was only one consistent element among them: they represented a transition from one teaching strategy to another.

Both of the studies above affirm the larger body of research that supports the use of active-learning techniques in the classroom. Student attention was piqued when the lecturer stopped talking and asked the students to do something. My suspicion is, however, that if you spent the entire class period doing polls, demonstrations, or some other active-learning technique, you’d see the same cycles of attention turning on and off as you’d see with lectures. What helped stir up the attention of students was the shift from passive to active—and, as the first study demonstrated, attention remained high after the shift back to passive. What mattered was the change. Studies like that one, paired with the accumulated wisdom of our artistic traditions and our everyday experience, support the idea that variety and change help maintain and renew attention.⁷ Conversely, lack of variety dulls attention and pushes us toward distractions. If we want to maintain student attention throughout the class period, we need to plan classes that feature changes, and that include plenty of opportunities for students to sit up and engage actively in the classroom, even if there is also lecture time. We don’t have to shift formats manically; a fifty-minute class period might need only a couple of changes to keep students moving along. In this respect, I think teachers need to think more like composers or playwrights, envisioning the classroom experience as an unfolding one, featuring change and variety.

The first three recommendations of this chapter provide a plan for developing a variable course-period plan, showing that plan to your students, and being prepared to improvise creatively when attention flags. The final recommendation narrows our focus onto those presentation slides that many of us use to structure our lectures, and considers what the research tells us about how those slides can support—or undermine—student attention.

Make It Modular

Sustaining student attention throughout the structure of the class period means providing regular opportunities for change, whatever teaching methods you use. A lecture or a seminar discussion will create the need for attention renewal; in both cases, pausing midway through and asking students to have a quick conversation with a peer might achieve that effect. But it might work equally well to have them stop and complete a five-minute writing activity, or have them do a quick bit of research on their laptops, or something else devised by your creative pedagogical mind. Likewise, if students are solving problems in groups in your flipped classroom, the best thing you can do to renew their attention might be to pause at the midpoint and give them a ten-minute lecture, or ask them to write down the solutions they have devised on the whiteboards, or have them stop and write in their notebooks for a few sentences about what they are struggling with. In all of these cases, the specific techniques you use (although of course we want to use effective ones that fit with our teaching knowledge and personalities) matter less than the commitment to break from longer tasks of directed attention with opportunities for cognitive activation and renewal.

All of this can be done deliberately, without as much work as you might imagine. You can accomplish it by thinking about your teaching as modular, by which I mean that what you do in the classroom consists of a series of different cognitive activities, each of which could be considered its own module, and any given class period is constructed by combining modules in ways designed to support both attention and learning. A modular approach helps you become more aware of your teaching strategies and routines, and that awareness can help you become a more effective steward of the attention of your students.

Although I had basically been using a modular approach to teaching for most of my career, its value became most apparent to me in a workshop I attended on our campus, hosted by Michele Lemons, a biologist who had recently returned from a faculty development session at her professional conference.⁸ Lemons had us write on index cards the different activities (or modules) that we usually did in class, one per card. That was the first time I had written out a list of my teaching modules—an activity that was eye-opening enough on its own. Then she asked us to consider an upcoming class, and to think about what we wanted students to accomplish during it. Finally, she had us take the cards and use them to build that class period. It was a fascinating visual activity to put the cards in different orders, seeing how each of them would lead to a new approach to both learning and attention in that class period. I highly recommend trying this on your own or with peers on your campus, doing so specifically with attention in mind. What are the modules that prove most difficult for your students to attend to? How can you enfold those modules within more active approaches—thus taking advantage of the research findings described earlier, which demonstrate that cognitive engagement persists beyond moments of student activity and into subsequent lecture periods? To answer these questions for yourself or with your peers, there are three steps you should follow.

Articulate the teaching modules you normally use. Begin by identifying the different kinds of activities that you use in class. Be creative and comprehensive. Write them down on a whiteboard in your office, on index cards, anywhere you can see them and move them. My list would include:

• opening writing exercises

• closing connection notebook-writing exercises (see next chapter)

• discussions of writing exercises

• group worksheets on literary texts

• lectures on historical biographical context of authors

• review of key passages in literary texts (teacher directed)

• creating story or poem “maps” on the board (student directed)

• open discussions of meaning and theme

• poll questions with peer instruction

• opportunities for student questions

• short videos connected to course content

• analysis of images connected to course content

• slides on effective writing techniques

• overview of assessments or assignment sheets

After you have created that list, you can check to see whether you feel like it’s comprehensive enough, whether it involves mostly content presentation or mostly student-centered activities, and whether you feel like you need to add some new strategies to your repertoire.

Use the modules to build the class period. Once all of my strategies are laid out, I can see much more easily and quickly how to put together a class period that has regular shifts in format and that never pushes the limits of my students’ attention too far. In a fifty-minute class period, I might have room for three or four modules, with almost none of them lasting longer than twenty minutes, and most of them less than that. A typical class period in Introduction to Literature might look like this:

• opening writing exercise (five minutes)

• discussion of responses (ten minutes)

• lecture on key passages from text (fifteen minutes)

• class creation of character map (twenty minutes)

As I build up my modules, I work very deliberately to make sure that active and passive formats are mixed. I almost always put mini-lectures or passage reviews (where I march the students through a text we are reading, highlighting key passages for them to notice) in between two modules in which they are active—as in the above example, where I have crammed it in between an open discussion and a group activity at the board. I also try to take a week-level view to ensure that modules are not neglected for too long or overused throughout the week.

Vary the pattern. Routines and patterns are helpful to students, especially in the beginning of the semester, when they are struggling to master both the initial material and your teaching style. In those opening weeks, I tend to start with a handful of modules that I use regularly, to make sure that students become familiar and comfortable with them. But of course familiarity can dull attention, so over the course of the semester I begin gradually and deliberately adding in new strategies and changing the order of things. Although we usually do a writing exercise at the beginning of class early in the semester, by week ten I might save it for the middle of the class, or finish with it.

I’ll note finally that taking this modular approach can have tremendously positive effects on the labor you put into teaching and the time you spend on course preparation. Early in my career, I would agonize about how we would spend the seventy-five minutes of class and overprepare massively in order to ensure that I always had something to say. These days, class preparation takes me a fraction of the time it used to, as some of the modules require nothing more than for me to come up with a great question. Christine Tulley, a professor at the University of Findlay, writes in Inside Higher Ed about the ways modular teaching, which she calls “pattern teaching,” can help new faculty members avoid the trap of overpreparation. She cites the example of a new faculty member who could never figure out when to stop preparing for class and who, as a result, was not making any progress on her research. After Tulley introduced her to modular teaching, the faculty member began sitting down each Friday to lay out her pattern for the following week, which finally gave her the freedom to make progress on her writing. Taking a modular approach to teaching will not only benefit the attention of your students—it may also give you the ability to return your attention to the parts of your professional life that don’t revolve around the classroom.

Signposts and Structures

Using change and variety within the structure of your class period will help sustain attention over the hour. But you can enhance the effectiveness of that structure when you make it visible to students. A trip to the theater or symphony always begins with receiving a program, and that program outlines the structure of the event for you. Many programs will not only show the number of acts, scenes, or movements; they often will also tell you how long the experience will last. Throughout the performance, you have a sense of where you are and what remains. If you are in a slow passage and feel your attention fading, you can always remind yourself that a break or change should be coming soon.

Likewise, when you observe effective speakers give longer lectures, you’ll hear them give sequencing clues all the time. They might show you an outline at the beginning of the talk and then include subheads along the way to remind you where you are within that structure. Along with the sequencing clues, speakers often will emphasize or remind you about key points. They might use oral signposts pointing you to the big ideas: “This is the main point I want to make this evening,” or “I’ve said this before, and I want to repeat it because it’s important.” Sequencing clues and emphasis on main ideas support your attention through a clear awareness of the organization of the experience and of your core takeaways. That awareness helps keep your attention on track. In the classroom, such awareness will especially help students who struggle with attention disorders, an increasingly common experience among our students. One difficulty faced by individuals with attention challenges can be an inability to discern between the salient features of an experience and the less important ones. A medical doctor’s overview of the challenges faced by students with Asperger’s syndrome, for example, memorably describes them as being “tyrannized by details; they accumulate them, and cannot prioritize them.”⁹ Everything seems equally worthy of attention, and so attention disperses more thoroughly and frequently than when the listener has a clear understanding of what matters. Providing visible pointers toward structure and key ideas from a class period will help students maintain their attention, but it’s also sound educational practice that will help all students learn. In their book Dynamic Lecturing: Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness, Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek argue that experts tend to have an immediate and clear view of the difference between important points and supporting details in the material, but students have trouble making those distinctions: “Because new or novice learners don’t have the necessary background knowledge to differentiate between the important and not-so important content, they often spend more time and energy focused on details rather than the big ideas or major points. This can result in students failing to learn the essential information.”¹⁰

You can catch a glimpse of this problem yourself if you ever have the opportunity (and fortitude) to look at student notes from your courses. They can provide a startling view of the challenges that students face as they are trying to see the orders, structures, and hierarchies of course material. Their inability to see the bigger picture obviously hurts their learning; it can also result in the kind of problems with attention and distraction that we frequently see in the classroom. When too much information is coming at students from the lecturer or her slides, students can get lost attempting to identify the key points—and just scribble away everything they see or hear—or they can become overwhelmed and check out.

You can help reduce those distractions by making visible to your students the structure of the class period, and the most essential ideas they should take from it. Four common methods of keeping those elements in view include:

• Old school. Segment off a section of the whiteboard and write down the outline or key ideas for the day, leaving it up and visible throughout the class period.

• Tech-y. If your class is driven by slide presentations, include, somewhere at the beginning (perhaps after the slide designed to provoke curiosity), a brief outline of the presentation and its key ideas. Use the subhead features throughout to remind students where they are in the presentation.

• Verbal. If you don’t use whiteboards or slide presentations, or even if you do, you can still use verbal signposting to let students know where things stand throughout the class period: “First I want to describe a case for you, and then we’ll consider three major theories that we could use to understand that case… Now as a reminder, we’re on our last theory. After that we’ll do a quick writing activity and that should lead us to the end of the hour.”

• Guided Notes. You can provide students with outlines of your lecture, giving the main ideas but then leaving spaces for them to fill in details. Harrington and Zakrajsek point out that such notes especially help new learners in a subject; as people become more familiar with the material, they can get by with less guidance and scaffolding.

Those four prospects should provide you with enough impetus to consider what strategy fits in your classroom—it might be one of the above or something completely different. All that matters is that you make some effort to reduce the need for students to use up mental energy wondering about the sequencing and main ideas of the class period.

The bonus of this recommendation is that if you have clarified the plan for your students, and are providing verbal signposts of where you are within that plan, some or all of those signposts can be invitations to attention. For example, let’s say you have three major ideas you want to cover in a lecture, and as you are shifting to the third one, you see students have been slumping in their chairs and angling toward their distractions. You have a moment there to call them back into the room: “OK, I know that last point was complicated, and I appreciate you sticking with me for a few minutes there. We are now going to tackle the final and most important point here, so let’s focus on this last part for ten more minutes and then we’ll stop and give you a chance to practice some problems.” I am sure you can attest to the power of a simple statement like this from your own experiences at academic conferences. I have sat through many talks during which I found my mind drifting, and then was suddenly called back into the room by the speaker making a verbal signpost or some sort: “Now we shift to the second half of my talk, in which I will argue…” And there we all are again, newly attentive to the coming material. When speakers make such comments, they keep me aware of the structure of the talk (which helps me identify the main ideas) and return my attention when I have drifted.

Can you do the same for your students?

Pentecostal Pedagogy

Taking a modular approach to your teaching, varying the patterns you use throughout the semester, and making those patterns visible to students—all of these actions will give your classroom an attentional boost. But even excellent planning and execution of these strategies won’t change the fact that brains get tired. The directed attention of students in the room will always experience some ebb and flow. It will be subject to fatigue, in need of restoration and renewal, capable of being both lost and found throughout the class period.

But accepting flagging attention as normal does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t respond to it. To the contrary, becoming more aware of the dance of attention and distraction in your classroom should help make you more alert to the imperative to intervene and help your students restore their focus. The good news that we learn from attention restoration theory is that such interventions do not require an excessive amount of time—just a few minutes can be enough to do the trick. On those days when you have planned everything well, and yet you still find that student attention is flagging, consider what you can learn from the work of Christopher Emdin, the author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. In his book, Emdin advocates for something he calls “pentecostal pedagogy,” which draws lessons on teaching from the wisdom of black churches. The experience of worshipping (or even observing) in a black church is fully engaging, Emdin explains, with continuous interaction between the pastor and the congregation, rich and varied music, and a decided orientation toward sustaining the attention of the audience. Pastors in black churches seem to recognize the limitations of human attention and craft the rhythm of their services around its continuous restoration. One of the core strategies that Emdin points to is the use of “call and response.” When a pastor is giving a sermon, and feels that the attention of his audience might be flagging or just needs a quick jolt of energy, he issues a call: “Can I get an amen?” The congregation responds: “Amen!” The pastor has that “amen” in his pocket throughout the sermon, and is always ready to break it out when he needs it for attention renewal.¹¹

Teachers need a similar attentiveness to the ebb and flow of attention, and need to be ready to use such quick renewal devices. We have been considering how you can structure opportunities for change and attention renewal into your course planning; pentecostal pedagogy entails a more fluid, in-the-moment mindfulness of the tenor of the room, and a recognition of when students might need a quick injection of attention renewal. I will give your creative brain just a few avenues for thinking about how to accomplish this in your own classroom, as potential strategies will vary according to discipline, class size, and your teaching persona. But consider some or all of the following.

Reading. In my literature classes, my favorite quick renewal strategy is to pause when I feel the discussion is lagging and read something aloud—or have a student read aloud. If I’m teaching poetry, I might shift us to a new poem and ask everyone to put their pens and books down and listen while I read it. Or I might ask them to put their pens in hand and highlight key words as I read the passage. In both cases, this strategy puts everyone’s eyes and ears back on the text, and gives me an opportunity to do a little dramatic performance of a great work of literature. It works almost as well when I ask a student to read something aloud, which shifts attention away from me and to some other point in the room (I recommend this only in smaller classes, where you will know your students better and are less likely to make the mistake of calling on a student who might have trouble reading to the class for whatever reason).¹²

Writing. You can always stop and ask students who are drifting away to write something down—something other than the notes they have been taking (or not taking). When the discussion is lagging, or the lecture seems to be fading, pose a question and ask everyone to write down one or two sentences in their notebook in response to it; let them know that you’ll be asking three or five or ten of them to read their sentences aloud afterward. These questions could be related to the content, or you could always jump to the meta level: What are you confused about right now? What do you see as the most important part of what we have discussed thus far? What aspect of the material could you use in your essay? To make this work, you will have to be willing to circulate around the room and encourage their participation, since some students may prefer to just sit and “think” about the question instead of writing. This strategy will be even more effective if you explain at the beginning of the semester, and even on your syllabus, that these quick writing prompts are an important part of their participation in the course and will happen as frequently as once or twice per class.

Moving. I try not to recommend teaching practices that I wouldn’t undertake myself, so I’m not going to advocate for one-minute stretch breaks, or having students do jumping jacks, or anything else that probably would be quite effective but that I would never do in a million years. Instead, consider the following example of a content-related way to get students up and moving. At a conference on education sponsored by the United Nations, I attended a session in which the workshop leader wanted to model a way of getting students actively engaged in a discussion. He posted a principle on the board, and then had everyone in the room get up and stand in relation to our position on that principle: if you agree with it, stand close to it; if you disagree, stand far away. After we had positioned ourselves in clumps around the room, he walked among us, asking us to explain our positions, posing questions, and getting us all thinking. This session contrasted profoundly with what happened during the rest of the conference, which consisted largely of panel discussions where speakers from different countries explained why education was important and 75 percent of the audience worked on their laptops on unrelated matters. What would it look like to use movement, instead of just words, to spark a great discussion in your classroom?

Seeing. So much of what students experience in the classroom comes in the form of words, whether they appear on a PowerPoint slide or are spoken by the people around them. Images can help break up our normal routines. Whenever an image might be appropriate to explore in the classroom, I will keep a tab with it open on the computer in the room and have it available to analyze when we need it. For example, when we read the poetry of William Blake in the British Literature Survey, I will have available some of the images that he drew to accompany his poems. In a lagging moment, I can throw one of those up onto the screen and ask students to tell me what they see. Sometimes I will ask everyone to get up from their seats, come to the front of the room, and look closely at the image so they can notice details. When the students are back in their seats, I have them describe for me whatever they noticed, and I write down their observations on the board. Once we have a few of those, we can start to analyze. How do the details connect to the work we are reading? What ideas from the class could they connect with? This is an easy and low-stakes discussion that gets students thinking in new and different ways.

Reading, writing, moving, seeing—any of these, and combinations of them, can be quick renewal devices in your pocket for when you feel attention sagging. A confident teacher with lots of experience might be able to insert these with just a moment’s consideration, but a better approach, especially if you have not thought in these terms before, would be to identify a small number of strategies that you will use on a regular basis and be very deliberate about deploying them for a while, until you get comfortable knowing how and where to use them—at which point you can add new ones and expand your repertoire of interventions in support of attention renewal in your classroom.

(Less Text, More) Images

Finally, many teachers use slideshow presentation as their default mode of structuring and directing the attention of students throughout the class period. In the dozens of class sessions I observed while writing this book, at least 75 percent of them included a segment where the teacher was presenting content to students with the use of slides. I thus feel compelled to conclude this chapter with a recommendation about this teaching strategy, which has become such a staple in today’s classrooms.

Most of the slides I saw in my observations, or have seen while in the audience at conferences, are joyless affairs. They are pumped full of text, sometimes so small that it’s impossible to read from the back of the room, and contain zero design elements and no images. That’s unfortunate, because it turns out that visual elements like images and graphic design have extraordinary power to grab our attention. John Medina’s book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School argues that “visual processing takes up about half of everything your brain does.”¹³ He points out sensibly that for most of human evolution, we were not reading text; we were looking at our environment, which means that an acutely developed visual sense was what we needed for all aspects of our survival: hunting, gathering, hiding, reproducing. Michelle Miller, in her book Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, explains that “information with rich sensory associations tends to be better remembered. Visual imagery is particularly powerful; we’re more likely to recall a word if it’s accompanied with a picture, or if we just see the picture and no text at all.”¹⁴ Too many of us neglect the power of images in our slides, and use them instead as repositories for really important words.

That has unfortunate consequences for the attention of our students—and not just students. My wife has to attend professional development events pretty regularly, with presentations from administrators, guest speakers, and fellow teachers. As I was working on this chapter, I asked her about how often she encounters presentation slides that are devoid of images and overstuffed with text. All the time, she told me. But they don’t bother her that much because she follows a simple rule when it comes to slides with lots of text: “If I can’t read it in five seconds, I don’t read it at all.”

When she sees a wall of text, in other words, she just ignores it and assumes the speaker will tell her whatever she needs to know. She does this for the same reason that your students do: when they see a barrage of words on an otherwise blank slide, they give up hope that they’ll be able to make heads or tails of it within the space of a minute or two, and they either stop taking notes and listen or they check out and sneak a peek at their phones.

The power of pictures, images, and even graphic design elements on slides to support student learning and attention has been much discussed in the research. The initial results, drawn largely from studies documented by Richard Mayer in Multimedia Learning, suggested caution. This was warranted by the fact that some images may actually detract from learning. Michelle Miller explains that Mayer’s research identified three kinds of images that can be used in the presentation of course content. “Seductive” images “are those that are interesting but unrelated to the material in any meaningful way.” These can actually distract the learner from the important content. “Decorative” images also “have no conceptual link to the material” but aren’t as interesting to the viewer and have a neutral impact on learning. What we ultimately want are “instructive” images, which directly relate to the course content and provide another way for the learner to understand what is on the slide.¹⁵ When I am teaching the nature poetry of William Wordsworth and providing students with background information about his life, an instructive image would show the Lake District where he grew up, scenes from which occur throughout the poems we will read. I try to support the instructive nature of that image by explaining this to students. Your use of images can always be supported in this way. If the images really are instructive, take a moment and explain what they are doing on the slide. If you can’t offer such an explanation, you should consider whether you might have a seductive or decorative image, instead of an instructive one.

Chris Drew, writing for the Learning Scientists website—an excellent and ongoing collection of essays and resources for teachers—argues that Mayer’s cautious approach to the use of images in teaching did not fully take into account the potentially positive impact that images and graphics can have on attention and motivation, which can more than compensate for potentially distracting effects. Drew points to research that shows the positive impact of “warm” colors and graphics in slides, and even of cartoonish images that evoke baby faces—because who doesn’t pay attention to babies, right? But more seriously, Drew argues that newer research on images in slides and other learning resources suggests that

a mix of words and images can have the effect of sustaining attention. Large amounts of uninterrupted text appear to be demotivating for learners, leading to decreased learner interest. By contrast, visually appealing texts may sustain intrinsic motivation. In other words, learners appear more likely to be interested in and more engaged with learning materials if the content is presented with visuals and texts rather than visuals alone.¹⁶

When you read that “large amounts of uninterrupted text appear to be demotivating for learners,” you realize that we are back at the Anne Lang five-second rule, and you note again with both irritation and gratitude that Anne Lang is always right.

From his survey of the most recent research in this area, Chris Drew draws two conclusions, both of which help underpin the very simple principle I am advancing here: you should reduce the amount of overall text on your slides and enhance that text with images or other strategically chosen graphic elements. As Drew explains it:

• Mayer showed us that visually appealing but excessively irrelevant graphical features on multimedia texts seem to harm learning by causing cognitive overload. Images may be a distraction from learning; but

• Subsequent cognitive psychologists have shown that visually appealing graphical features that direct our attention to the content could have benefits such as sustained motivation and attention to tasks.¹⁷

I am sure you have seen presenters show slides that were crammed with text, or just crammed with too much stuff overall, and have shaken your head in frustration. And yet in spite of the fact that most of us seem to know we should reduce text and enhance our slides with images, very few of us do it. I have sat through multiple presentations in which speakers have said something like, “Sorry, I know there’s too much text on this slide…” and then soldier right on, either trying to explain it all or suggesting that we ignore it and move on.

Take the reading of this summary of the research as the impetus to declutter your slides of text and add visual design elements or one great image at least every other slide. Becoming thoughtful about the role that slides can play in supporting the attention of your students might be the easiest way for you to sustain attention throughout a lecture, especially if you are combining those well-designed slides with some of the other methods recommended in this book.

Quick Take

• Build your teaching around modular activities that you articulate, sequence, and vary with attention in mind. Begin the process by writing down your regular teaching activities on index cards or a whiteboard, and then experiment with planning a class by shifting them around and thinking about the sequence that will best hold the attention of your students and lead to the most effective learning experiences for them. Vary the sequencing you use over the course of the semester.

• A visible structure to the class period can help keep learners on track when attention becomes a challenge. Without such structure, students might also have trouble distinguishing the supporting points from the key ideas, or identifying the purpose of engagement activities. Use your slides, the whiteboard, or oral signposts to provide continual reminders for students about the structure of the class period and its most important ideas.

• Stay mindful of the rhythms of attention and distraction throughout the class period, and have a small number of attention-renewal activities prepared that you can deploy when you observe student attention flagging. Consider reading, writing, moving, or seeing—whatever works with your teaching persona, can be normalized into your teaching routines, and can be dropped into the room whenever you need it.

• Research in cognitive psychology attests to the power of images to capture the attention of humans and promote their learning. When you are presenting content with the use of slides, reduce text and enhance them with images and graphics that will invite the attention of our sight-loving brains.

Conclusion

I mentioned in Part One that one of the ways I enhanced my own thinking about attention was by considering how it waxed and waned in both myself and others in noneducational environments. Those considerations were especially helpful in thinking about attention in relation to structure. Attention was on my mind while I was listening to the symphony, attending plays, watching movies and television shows, listening to guest lecturers on my campus, attending social events like parties or receptions, and even playing sports or pursuing hobbies. During some of those experiences, I saw examples of structural strategies that I had already encountered in the literature on attention in education; in other cases, I observed something that I had not yet encountered, and it led me to the literature to see what support for it I might find there.

To give just one example, I have a terrible habit of staying up late and flipping around cable television in search of something mindless to watch before bed. Occasionally I will pass over a televangelist working the crowd in some megachurch, and in the past I have sometimes stopped on those shows just to get a sense of how people who are very different from me think. But while I was working on this book, I stopped on those shows much more frequently, because I realized how masterful the preachers were at holding the attention of their audiences. When I encountered Christopher Emdin’s arguments about pentecostal pedagogy, they were more convincing to me because I had seen many examples of televangelists using similar techniques. Certainly they called out for those amens, but they used other methods as well. Occasionally they asked everyone in the audience to recite a familiar prayer with them, in a communal act of refocusing attention. At other times, they asked everyone to open their Bibles and follow along as they read a passage aloud, just as I do in my literature courses. They also regularly inserted jokes and self-deprecating stories into their more prosy expositions of the day’s Scripture reading, providing the opportunity for people to turn to one another and laugh.

If you want to get new ideas for yourself about how to sustain student attention through the structure of your class periods, make yourself into an amateur attention researcher over the next few months. When you are an audience member or a participant in an extended, structured experience of some kind—whether that means symphonies, sermons, or department meetings—pay attention to your own reasons for tuning in and tuning out. Check the faces (and devices) of those around you. See what draws you in and what checks you out. And then ask yourself this very simple question: What can I learn from this for my own classroom?

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