1 E. M. Delafield, The Diary of a Provincial Lady (London: Virago Modern Classics, 2008).
2 E. M. Delafield, The Provincial Lady in London (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), 31.
3 James Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2002).
4 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 98.
5 Michelle D. Miller, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 87.
6 Susan Dynarski, “Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting,” New York Times, November 22, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/business/laptops-not-during-lecture-or-meeting.html.
7 Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 (June 2014): 1159–1168. While I was finishing the revisions for this book, a newer study attempting to replicate this experiment was published, and did not find the same level of superiority for longhand notes. See Kayla Morehead, John Dunlosky, and Katherine A. Rawson, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),” Educational Psychology Review 31 (2019): 753–780.
8 Jessica Ferronetti, “Technology and Your Students,” D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence, www1.assumption.edu/cte/damour-student-fellows/2017-2018-student-fellow-essays/jessica-ferronetti-technology-and-your-students/.
9 Beckie Supiano, “Digital Distraction Is a Problem Far Beyond the Classroom. But Professors Can Still Help,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 2019, www.chronicle.com/article/Digital-Distraction-Is-a/246074.
10 Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). This scenario is first introduced on page 30.
11 For a subtle consideration of such evolutionary arguments, see Marlene Zuk, “The Evolutionary Search for Our Perfect Past,” New York Times, January 19, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/health/views/20essa.html.
12 Ian McGilchrist, “The Divided Brain,” RSA Animate, October 2011, video, 11:48, www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain.
13 Gazzaley and Rosen, Distracted Mind, 13.
14 Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York: Penguin, 2014), 2. Five years later, Eyal turned around and published Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2019), a book designed to help people resist those same habit-forming products.
15 Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 6.
16 I take this same problem-based approach to educational improvement in my book Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
17 The extent to which we should blame the explosion of smartphones for teenage mental-health problems remains for me an open question. Too many news stories seem to be pushing us toward some certain conclusion on this question, usually landing on the idea that rising rates of anxiety and depression among teens stem from their phone and social media use. For two informed and research-based perspectives on the potential causes of these rising rates of mental-health problems among young people, see Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World (New York: Grand Central, 2019); and B. Janet Hibbs and Anthony Rostain, The Stressed Years of Their Lives: Helping Your Kid Survive and Thrive During Their College Years (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019).
18 Daniel Reisberg, Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016), 168.
19 Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian argue that “the many components of attention cannot be described by a single mechanism, but rather constitute a collection of cognitive processes that produce the ability to be attentive.” Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian, Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 26.
20 Ellen Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1997).
21 Joanna E. Ziegler, “The Role of Contemplative Ritual in Approaching Art,” in Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms, eds. Karen E. Eifler and Thomas M. Landy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 52.
1 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), 188.
2 Saint Augustine, Confessions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2004), 223.
3 Huston Smith and Philip Novak, Buddhism: A Concise Introduction (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 48.
4 Cited in David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 98.
5 Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). See also Melvyn Bragg, “Coffee,” December 12, 2019, in In Our Time, produced by BBC4, podcast, 55:00, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1.
6 Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 111.
7 Standage, Writing on the Wall, 112.
8 Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind (Boston: Hickling, Swan, and Brown, 1855), 143.
9 Cited in Natalie M. Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 41. Phillips provides an excellent overview of growing fears about attention and distraction in the eighteenth century.
10 Reproduced in Melissa Dickson, “The Victorians Had the Same Concerns About Technology as We Do,” The Conversation, June 21, 2016, http://theconversation.com/the-victorians-had-the-same-concerns-about-technology-as-we-do-60476.
11 Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt, Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 213.
12 D. A. Christakis et al., “Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children,” Pediatrics 113 (2004), 708–713.
13 Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, “Study Finds Link Between Television Viewing and Attention Problems in Children,” news release, Science Daily, April 6, 2004, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040406090140.htm.
14 T. Stevens and M. Mulsow, “There Is No Meaningful Relationship Between Television Exposure and Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder,” Pediatrics 117 (2006), 665–672.
15 Michael Z. Newman, “Children of the 80s Never Fear: Video Games Did Not Ruin Your Life,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 25, 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/children-80s-never-fear-video-games-did-not-ruin-your-life-180963452/.
16 Edward L. Swing, Douglas A. Gentile, Craig A. Anderson, and David A. Walsh, “Television and Video Game Exposure and the Development of Attention Problems,” Pediatrics 126 (2010), 214–221.
17 “Video Games Threaten Kids’ Attention Span,” CBC, July 5, 2010, www.cbc.ca/news/technology/video-games-threaten-kids-attention-span-1.939917.
18 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 10.
19 Carr, The Shallows, 129.
20 Carr, The Shallows, 31.
21 Carr, The Shallows, 63.
22 Brian Resnick, Julia Belluz, and Eliza Barclay, “Is Our Constant Use of Digital Technologies Affecting Our Brain Health? We Asked 11 Experts,” Vox, February 26, 2019, www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/11/28/18102745/cellphone-distraction-brain-health-screens-kids.
23 Daniel Willingham, “Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb,” New York Times, January 20, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/opinion/smartphones-dont-make-us-dumb.html.
24 Henry Wilmer, Lauren E. Sherman, and Jason M. Chein, “Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links Between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (April 25, 2017), www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00605/full.
25 This is not to say, however, that excessive exposure to screens at a very young age might not shape people’s brains for better or worse—that’s true of many things that can happen to us as infants. But even if we see problems arising from excessive screen use from a young age, it still might not be the screens themselves—instead the screen time could be substituting for healthy behaviors in which children should engage, like physical activity and imaginative play and socializing. The problem may arise less from the screen itself, in other words, than from what the screen crowds out.
1 This three-part scheme is my own; there are many competing schemes to describe how humans learn. My recommended titles would include Joshua R. Eyler, How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2018); Susan A. Ambrose et al., How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010); Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki with Oliver Caviglioli, Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide (New York: Routledge, 2019); and Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
2 Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2019), 11.
3 Montemayor and Haladjian, Consciousness, 25.
4 Michelle Miller, “Tweet and You’ll Miss It,” Inside Higher Ed, December 2, 2014, www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/12/02/essay-calls-professors-start-teaching-students-about-distraction-and-attention.
5 Weinstein, Sumeracki, and Caviglioli, Understanding How We Learn, 53.
6 Larry D. Rosen, L. Mark Carrier, and Nancy A. Cheever, “Facebook and Texting Made Me Do It: Media-Induced Task-Switching While Studying,” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 3 (May 2013): 948–958.
7 Charles Calderwood, Phillip L. Ackerman, and Erin Marie Conklin, “What Else Do College Students ‘Do’ While Studying? An Investigation of Multitasking,” Computers and Education 75 (June 2014): 19–29.
8 Bernard R. McCoy, “Digital Distractions in the Classroom: Student Classroom Use of Digital Devices for Non-Class Related Purposes,” Journal of Media Education 4, no. 4 (2013): 5–14, http://en.calameo.com/read/000091789af53ca4e647f. Bernard R. McCoy, “Digital Distractions in the Classroom Phase II: Student Classroom Use of Digital Devices for Non-Class Related Purposes,” Journal of Media Education 7, no. 1 (2016): 5–32, http://nwmet.org/wp-content/uploads/Digital-Distraction_Research_-Bernard-R.-McCoy.pdf.
9 Yvonne Ellis, Bobbie Daniels, and Andres Jauregui, “The Effect of Multitasking on the Grade Performance of Business Students,” Research in Higher Education Journal 8 (2010), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1595375.
10 Arnold L. Glass and Mengxue Kang, “Dividing Attention in the Classroom Reduces Exam Performance,” Educational Psychology 39, no. 3 (2019): 395–408.
11 Andrew Lepp et al., “College Students’ Multitasking Behavior in Online Versus Face-to-Face Courses,” SAGE Open (January–March 2019): 1–9, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244018824505.
12 N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Profession (2007): 187.
13 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 3.
14 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 4.
15 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 26.
16 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 10.
17 For a summary of this research, and some qualifications of it, see William C. Compton and Edward Hoffman, Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Flourishing (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2013), 86–90.
1 Dynarski, “Laptops Are Great.”
2 Jonathan Zimmerman, “Welcome, Freshmen. Look at Me When I Talk to You,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2016, www.chronicle.com/article/Welcome-Freshmen-Look-at-Me/237751.
3 Matthew Numer, “Don’t Insult Your Class by Banning Laptops,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/Don-t-Insult-Your-Class-by/241972.
4 Karen Costa, “The Nuance of Note Taking,” Inside Higher Ed, July 30, 2019, www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/07/30/why-professors-shouldnt-ban-laptops-and-other-note-taking-devices-classrooms.
5 Lee Skallerup Bessette, “Rethinking Laptop Bans (AGAIN) and Note Taking,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 19, 2018, www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/rethinking-laptop-bans-again-and-note-taking/65223 (site discontinued).
6 Elena Neiterman and Christine Zaza, “A Mixed Blessing? Students’ and Instructors’ Perspectives About Off-Task Technology Use in the Academic Classroom,” Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 10, no. 1 (Spring 2019), https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/cjsotl_rcacea/article/view/8002/6577.
7 Jesse Stommel has been the most vocal advocate of the admirable idea that we should err on the side of trust in our students, which seems traceable back to a tweet and subsequent blog post in which he argued that our pedagogy should “start by trusting students.” Jesse Stommel, “Why I Don’t Grade,” October 26, 2017, www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/.
8 Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin, 2017), 5.
9 Lindsay McKenzie, “Professor Bans Laptops, Sees Grades Rise,” Inside Higher Ed, May 11, 2018, www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/05/11/ohio-state-professors-technology-ban-finds-positive-reaction-and-results.
10 Rick Godden and Anne-Marie Womack, “Making Disability Part of the Conversation: Combatting Inaccessible Spaces and Logics,” Hybrid Pedagogy, May 12, 2016, http://hybridpedagogy.org/making-disability-part-of-the-conversation/.
11 Michael T. Luongo, “Screens in the Classroom: Tool or Temptation?,” New York Times, December 11, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/education/screens-classroom-tool-temptation.html.
12 Godden and Womack, “Making Disability Part of the Conversation.”
13 Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010), 90–91.
14 Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 3.
15 Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, 5.
16 See Cathy Davidson, “Getting Started 5: First Class: Collectively Writing a Constitution,” HASTAC, August 13, 2015, www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2015/08/13/getting-started-5-first-classcollectively-writing-constitution.
17 Ashley Waggoner Denton, “Smartphones, Laptops, and Learning: A PowerPoint Resource,” Teach, Reflect, Repeat (blog), August 15, 2018, https://teachreflectrepeat.com/smartphones-laptops-and-learning-a-powerpoint-resource/.
18 Richard J. Harnish and K. Robert Bridges, “Effect of Syllabus Tone: Students’ Perception of Instructor and Course,” Social Psychology of Education 14, no. 3 (September 2011): 319–330.
19 Aviva Bower, “Disconnect to Connect: Empowering Students with the Research on Multitasking” (presentation), Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education 44th Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, November 18, 2019.
20 Flower Darby, “How to Be a Better Online Teacher,” Chronicle of Higher Education, www.chronicle.com/interactives/advice-online-teaching.
21 Matt Reed, “Device Etiquette,” Inside Higher Ed, November 13, 2019, www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/device-etiquette.
1 “Important Milestones: Your Baby by Two Months,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, October 24, 2019, www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/milestones-2mo.html.
2 Michael C. Frank, Edward Vul, and Scott P. Johnson, “Development of Infants’ Attention to Faces During the First Year,” Cognition 110, no. 2 (2009): 160–170.
3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 175.
4 Harriet L. Schwartz, Connected Teaching: Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2019), 13.
5 See Cia Verschelden and Lynn Pasquerella, Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2017).
6 Akira Miyake et al., “Reducing the Gender Achievement Gap in College Science: A Classroom Study of Values Affirmation,” Science 330, no. 6008 (November 2010): 1234–1237.
7 Judith M. Harackiewicz et al., “Closing the Social Achievement Gap for First-Generation Students in Undergraduate Biology,” Journal of Educational Psychology 106, no. 2 (2014): 375–389.
8 Yoi Tibbetts et al., “Affirming Independence: Exploring Mechanisms Underlying a Values Affirmation Intervention for First-Generation Students,” Journal of Personal Social Psychology 110, no. 5 (May 2016): 635–659.
9 Eugenio Parise, Angela D. Friederici, and Tricia Striano, “‘Did You Call Me?’ 5-Month-Old Infants Own Name Guides Their Attention,” PLOS One 5, no. 12, (December 3, 2010), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0014208.
10 Hongsheng Yang et al., “The Cognitive Advantage for One’s Own Name Is Not Simply Familiarity: An Eye-Tracking Study,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 20, no. 6 (2013): 1176–1180.
11 See James M. Lang, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016), esp. the second and fourth chapters.
12 For an excellent and ongoing compendium of the research on this learning principle, see Pooja K. Agarwal’s website Retrieval Practice (retrievalpractice.org).
13 Katelyn M. Cooper et al., “What’s in a Name? The Importance of Students Perceiving that an Instructor Knows Their Names in a High-Enrollment Biology Classroom,” CBE: Life Sciences Education 16, no. 1 (2017): 7.
14 See, for example, resource pages from the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University (www.cmu.edu/teaching/solveproblem/strat-cheating/tips-studentnames.html).
15 Carol E. Holstead, “Want to Improve Your Teaching? Start with the Basics: Learn Students’ Names,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 29, 2019, www.chronicle.com/article/Want-to-Improve-Your-Teaching-/247098.
16 Derek Bruff, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019).
17 Melissa Rands and Ann M. Gansemer-Topf, “‘The Room Itself Is Active’: How Classroom Design Impacts Student Engagement,” Journal of Learning Spaces 6, no. 1 (2017): 31.
18 Doug Lemov, “Notes on Circulating: Break the Plane and Engage When You Circulate,” Doug Lemov’s Field Notes (blog), Teach Like a Champion, September 29, 2014, https://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/notes-circulating-break-plane-engage-circulate/.
19 I describe Woodworth’s insights into classroom performance in more detail in my book On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 69–73.
1 Eyler, How Humans Learn, 24.
2 Eyler, How Humans Learn, 29.
3 Mario Livio, Why? What Makes Us Curious (New York: Simon Schuster, 2017), 114.
4 Livio, Why?, 58.
5 This experiment and others are nicely summarized in Sarah Cavanagh, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2016), 120–124.
6 Weinstein, Sumeracki, and Caviglioli, Understanding How We Learn, 55.
7 Weinstein, Sumeracki, and Caviglioli, Understanding How We Learn, 55.
8 Daniel Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 75.
9 Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
10 Jessica Lahey, “Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic,” The Atlantic, January 21, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/what-classrooms-can-learn-from-magic/425100/.
11 Rebecca Zambrano, “The ‘Big Bang’ of Motivation: Questions that Evoke Wonder in Our Students,” Faculty Focus, February 18, 2019, www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/the-big-bang-of-motivation-questions-that-evoke-wonder-in-our-students/.
12 Description and quotes in this section from Cate Denial, “Making the First Day Matter,” August 3, 2016, https://catherinedenial.org/blog/uncategorized/making-the-first-day-matter/.
13 I wrote more fully about this in James M. Lang, “Small Changes in Teaching: The First Five Minutes of Class,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2016, www.chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-in-Teaching-The/234869.
14 For the published version of Mazur’s journey and practice, see Eric Mazur, Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual (New York: Pearson, 1996). Another excellent resource for the use of peer instruction is Derek Bruff, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
15 John Dunlosky et al., “Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14, no. 1 (2013): 4–58. And if you made it to this footnote, you’re curious to know what they found, right? The full text of the article is available for free online: https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovinglearning.pdf.
16 Christine Chin and Jonathan Osborne, “Students’ Questions: A Potential Resource for Teaching and Learning Science,” Studies in Science Education 44, no. 1 (2008): 1–39.
17 Meriah L. Crawford, “A Simple Trick for Getting Students to Ask Questions in Class,” Faculty Focus, October 13, 2017, www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/a-simple-trick-for-getting-students-to-ask-questions-in-class/.
18 Gazzaley and Rosen, Distracted Mind, 8.
1 Karen Wilson and James H. Korn, “Attention During Lectures: Beyond Ten Minutes,” Teaching of Psychology 34, no. 2 (2007): 85–89.
2 Diane M. Bunce, Elizabeth A. Flens, and Kelly Y. Neiles, “How Long Can Students Pay Attention in Class? A Study of Student Attention Decline Using Clickers,” Journal of Chemical Education 87, no. 12 (2010): 1438–1443.
3 Stephen Kaplan, “The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 15 (1995): 170. Kaplan argues that exposure to nature is the most impactful way to renew attention (and obtain other cognitive benefits). A more comprehensive treatment of this idea, and application of it to the college environment, can be found in Donald A. Rakow and Gregory T. Eells, Nature RX: Improving College-Student Mental Health (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
4 Kaplan, “Restorative Benefits,” 170.
5 Bunce, Flens, and Neiles, “How Long.”
6 Kathleen M. Quinlan, “What Triggers Students’ Interest During Higher Education Lectures? Personal and Situational Variables Associated with Situational Interest,” Studies in Higher Education 44, no. 10 (2019): 1781–1792.
7 See Gail Taylor Rice, Hitting Pause for Learning: 65 Lecture Breaks to Refresh and Reinforce Learning (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2018), 34–36.
8 Lemons described the intellectual provenance of this workshop in an e-mail to me as follows: “That presentation was based on the ‘5E’ model, which was described to me by Kimberly Tanner. I met Kim at a case study workshop in upstate NY. She is a Professor of Biology and Director of the Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory (SEPAL) at San Francisco State University. Kim gave a presentation at the case study workshop in NY, and her presentation was primarily based on her publication entitled, ‘Order Matters: Using the 5E Model to Align Teaching with How People Learn’ in CBE-Life Sciences Education, vol 9, 159-164, Fall 2010.”
9 Daniel Rosenn, “Is It Asperger’s or ADHD?,” Asperger/Autism Network, www.aane.org/is-it-aspergers-or-adhd/.
10 Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek, Dynamic Lecturing: Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2017), 56.
11 Christopher Emdin, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
12 On reading aloud and its impact on attention, see Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction (New York: Harper, 2019).
13 John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2014), 190.
14 Miller, Minds Online, 95.
15 Miller, Minds Online, 154–155.
16 Chris Drew, “Using Colors, Images, and Cartoons to Support Learning,” Learning Scientists, www.learningscientists.org/blog/2019/10/31-1.
17 Drew, “Using Colors.”
1 Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin, 2017), 173–174.
2 Oliver, Devotions, 105.
3 Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown, 2010), 55.
4 Chabris and Simons, Invisible Gorilla, 55.
5 Davidson, Now You See It, 49.
6 Langer, Mindful Learning, 43.
7 Here’s how Fisher described the origins of this activity to me in an e-mail: “This approach has long been used in the study of the Talmud in a traditional study pair called a ‘havruta’ (also spelled ‘hevruta’) which I’m told means ‘friendship’ or ‘partner.’ The idea is that you unravel the multiple meanings of a text by being in dialogue with it and with each other. Meaning is constructed rather than simply received. I learned this from Devorah Schoenfield at Loyola University of Chicago in a workshop on religious pluralism sponsored by the American Academy of Religion and then adapted it to some of my course readings.”
8 Davidson, Now You See It, 100.
9 Jessica Metzler, “Ways of Seeing: Building Center-Museum Partnerships to Support Teaching” (presentation, POD Conference, Portland, OR, November 15, 2018). I did not attend this session; it was brought to my attention in Susan Hrach’s book Minding Student Bodies, which was in the production stage at West Virginia University Press at the time of this writing. I subsequently conducted a brief phone interview about the approach with Jessica Metzler on January 10, 2020.
10 Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired, February 1, 1996, www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/.
11 Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (New York: Perigee, 2015).
12 “Concept Mapping.” Center for Teaching and Learning, Brigham Young University, https://ctl.byu.edu/tip/concept-mapping.
13 Sarah Stein Lubrano, “Living with ADHD: How I Learned to Make Distraction Work for Me,” Aeon, October 18, 2019, https://aeon.co/ideas/living-with-adhd-how-i-learned-to-make-distraction-work-for-me.
14 Saundra Yancy McGuire and Stephanie McGuire, Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2015), 26.
1 You can find an overview of Deci’s research and ideas in Edward L. Deci, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation (New York: Penguin, 1996).
2 Alfie Kohn, “The Case Against Grades,” November 2011, www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/.
3 Davidson, Now You See It, 159.
4 Ambrose et al., How Learning Works, 82.
5 Michaeleen Doucleff, “How to Get Kids to Pay Attention,” Mindshift (blog), KQED, June 21, 2018, www.kqed.org/mindshift/51509/how-to-get-kids-to-pay-attention.
6 Jay R. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015).
7 Elbow has produced a two-page handout that provides his guide to minimal grading, available on his personal website. Peter Elbow, “Grading: Do It Less, Do It Better,” http://peterelbow.com/pdfs/Grading_Less_Grading_Better.pdf.
8 Agarwal and Bain, Powerful Teaching, 28.
9 Agarwal and Bain, Powerful Teaching, 39.
10 Shana K. Carpenter, “Testing Enhances the Transfer of Learning,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, October 1, 2012, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721412452728. Carpenter’s essay reviews multiple studies demonstrating this effect.
11 See B. Rosenshine, C. Meister, and S. Chapman, “Teaching Students to Generate Questions: a Review of the Intervention Studies,” Review of Educational Research 66, no. 2 (1996): 181–221.
12 Max Teplitski et al., “Student‐Generated Pre‐Exam Questions Is an Effective Tool for Participatory Learning: A Case Study from Ecology of Waterborne Pathogens Course,” Journal of Food Science Education 17, no. 3 (2018): 76–84.
13 Flower Darby with James M. Lang, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2019), 98–99.
14 “Why One Science Professor Has Students Write a Children’s Book,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Why-One-Science-Professor-Has/244844.
1 Kabat-Zinn’s most comprehensive presentation of the theory and practice of mindfulness comes in Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (New York: Bantam Books, 2013).
2 Scott R. Bishop et al., “Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11, no. 3 (2004): 232.
3 For an overview of these studies, see Daphne M. Davis and Jeffrey A. Hayes, “What Are the Benefits of Mindfulness,” Monitor on Psychology 43, no. 7 (2012), www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/ce-corner.
4 For an overview of these studies, see Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014), 24–27.
5 Destany Calma-Birling and Regan A. R. Gurung, “Does a Brief Mindfulness Intervention Impact Quiz Performance?,” Psychology Learning and Teaching 16, no. 1 (June 2017): 323–335.
6 Calma-Birling and Gurung, “Brief Mindfulness Intervention,” 330.
7 Casey Helber, Nancy A. Zook, and Matthew Immergut, “Meditation in Higher Education: Does It Enhance Cognition?,” Innovations in Higher Education 37 (2012): 349–358.
8 Helber, Zook, and Immergut, “Meditation,” 351.
9 See, for example, Jian-Wei Lin and Li Jung Mai, “Impact of Mindfulness Meditation Intervention on Academic Performance,” Innovations in Education and Teaching International 55, no. 3 (2018): 366–375. Some studies that do claim to show positive results for mindfulness in education base them on laboratory experiments or on short-term learning only, as in Rebecca Iranzo Bennett et al., “Mindfulness as an Intervention for Recalling Information from a Lecture as a Measure of Academic Performance in Higher Education: A Randomized Experiment,” Higher Education for the Future 5, no. 1 (2018): 75–88. For an example of a study that does report some positive impact, see Jacquelyn J. Lee and Sarah A. Himmelheber, “Field Education in the Present Moment: Evaluating a 14-Week Pedagogical Model to Increase Mindfulness Practice,” Journal of Social Work Education 52, no. 4 (2016): 473–483. In this case, though, mindfulness was very thoroughly integrated into the entire course. In addition to the brief meditations, the students learned about mindfulness, discussed it regularly in class, and wrote journal entries about it. I’m prepared to believe that such a full commitment to mindfulness in a course could have lasting impact, but I also don’t believe most faculty members are willing to make that kind of commitment.
10 See, for example, Moira Martin, “Mindfulness and Transformation in a College Classroom,” Adult Learning 29, no. 1 (2018): 5–10; or Keith Kroll, “On Paying Attention: Flagpoles, Mindfulness, and Teaching Writing,” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36, no. 1 (2008): 69–78.
11 Ellen Langer, Mindfulness: 25th Anniversary Edition (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2014), xxv.
12 Lang, Small Teaching, 179.
13 Cavanagh, Spark of Learning, 70–71.
1 Rollo May, The Courage to Create (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 57–58.
2 Moheb Costandi, Neuroplasticity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 155.
3 Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Power of Patience,” Harvard Magazine (November–December 2013), https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/the-power-of-patience.
4 Esteban Loustaunau, “The Classroom as Retreat Space,” Inside Higher Ed, December 6, 2016, www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/12/06/benefits-stepping-outside-regular-habits-classroom-essay.
5 Oliver, Devotions, 264.