IN THE EARLY 1930S, British author E. M. Delafield published a short novel about an English woman whose literary aspirations bumped up against the drudgeries of life with an indifferent husband, two precocious children, and the challenges of everyday household management.1 It proved such a hit that Delafield produced multiple sequels in the years that followed. In the second installment, The Provincial Lady in London, the title character has scored an unexpected success with her own first novel. After its publication, she describes sitting in a literary conference in Europe, struggling to pay attention to the proceedings:
Literary Conference takes place in the morning… Am sorry to find attention wandering on several occasions to entirely unrelated topics, such as Companionate Marriage, absence of radiators in Church at home, and difficulty in procuring ice. Make notes on back of visiting-card, in order to try and feel presence at Conference in any way justified. Find these again later, and discover that they refer to purchase of picture-postcards for Robin and Vicky, memorandum that blue evening dress requires a stitch before it can be worn again, and necessity for finding out whereabouts of Messrs. Thos. Cook & Son, in case I run short of money.2
The provincial lady’s futile efforts to focus on the conference reflect a theme that recurs throughout the novels in the series: the difficulty of sustaining one’s attention on a single object of focus. Every few pages, she chronicles conversations or trains of thought that are derailed by interruptions from children, minor household disasters, or the irritatingly random peregrinations of her own thought processes. All of this, it should be noted, occurs almost a hundred years before the invention of the modern devices that we assume are driving our minds to distraction today.
We have been voicing complaints about our distractible human minds for at least as long as we have been talking and writing about them. A wandering mind represented a threat to the ideals of Greek philosophers who viewed ordered, rational thought as the ultimate achievement of the human species. Christian writers who urged their followers to “pray without ceasing” did so in response to minds that seemed too easily distracted from their devotions. Renaissance intellectuals living in crowded European cities complained about the noisy dins that prevented them from study and scholarship. Media technologies drive our contemporary concerns about our attention, but this has been true since at least the nineteenth century. The telegraph, the radio, the television, the computer—as each of these arrived on the scene, they brought with them critics who argued that they were destroying our attention spans, turning us into distractible creatures who could no longer focus on our work, our prayers, our study, or one another. In most of these cases, writers and thinkers suggested that some new development in human history was eating away at our powers of attention or cognition. When it comes to the distractible nature of our minds, the argument goes, we used to be like that; now we are like this, and we are worse off for it.
The story they tell is a biblical one. At one time, we lived in a prelapsarian state of mental grace, in which we were capable of complete control over our minds, long periods of sustained attention, and the ability to ward off distractions at will. But (so the story goes) our minds have been progressively degraded by our inventions, wearing away at our attentional capacities, making us dumber and dumber with each new technology. For the writers that embrace this narrative, and for the teachers who read and believe it, our task is to reclaim our minds and the minds of our students from the distractions that beset us today. We have only to put away our phones, sit on our meditation cushions, focus our brains really hard, and we will eventually get back the minds we have lost. Attention is our state of grace, distraction the original sin. Get rid of the distractions, and attention will naturally return.
I used to share this perspective. It was hard not to, as I heard versions of it from teachers and parents everywhere: our children and students were hopelessly distracted by their devices and could no longer pay attention in school the way they used to. That problem was a microcosm of the larger challenge occurring at all levels of society; children and students were not the only ones whose minds were suffering at the hands of their distracting devices. Everywhere around me, people were using their phones while driving their cars, scrolling through their social media feeds on dinner dates, texting in movie theaters and concert halls and even at wakes and weddings. There seemed no place safe or sacred enough to keep our phones in our pockets. Surely this level of uncontrolled interaction with our digital devices represented a new phase in human history, and perhaps it also was reshaping our brains in alarming ways. So I began exploring the literature on attention and distraction, because I wondered whether it was true, as everyone seemed to assume, that previous generations of students had better focus, more capacity to tolerate boredom and silence, and less distractible natures than the children in our homes and classrooms today. Were the brains of twenty-first-century students fundamentally different from students in the past?
If the answer to that question was an affirmative one, the implications for teachers would be monumental. The work of teaching could be considered, as biologist James Zull has written, “the art of changing the brain.”3 If the brains of our students today turned out to be different from the brains of their predecessors, then perhaps our centuries-long tradition of attempting to change them through classroom education had become irrelevant.
If we have lost the attention of our students, we’re in trouble. The cultivation and direction of attention are fundamental tasks of every teacher, from the kindergarten classrooms of an elementary school to the high-tech learning laboratories of the modern university. “Teaching’s essential task,” writes Yves Citton in The Ecology of Attention, “consists in heightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important in what we are looking at.”4 In every discipline, in every classroom, instructors prepare for and teach their classes by deciding what is remarkable and important in their fields of study. Countless things have happened in the world; the historian identifies the ones that matter for this particular course and trains the attention of her students on them. Human beings behave in a mind-boggling array of different ways; the social scientist notices patterns in those behaviors and creates courses that highlight the ones that deserve our attention. The enormity of the universe stands before us all, with its planets and stars and dark matter and empty space; the astronomer narrows students’ attention to the details that explain the origin of the universe or describe futures near and far—from approaching asteroids to the end point of existence. In every discipline, in every classroom, in all of our research, teachers point and explain: if you pay attention to this, you will learn something important.
We are worried today that our efforts at directing the attention of students no longer work. The narrative can be spun in different ways: in one version, the students are taking control of their own attention and directing it to places the teacher has not pointed to, such as their phones or laptops. In another, the attention of our students has been hijacked by sinister forces, preyed upon by app designers and social media moguls, and those forces are directing the attention of students in irresponsible, meaningless ways. In either case, the problem remains. Teaching fails when we can no longer focus our students’ attention. Michelle Miller, a cognitive psychologist who writes at the intersection of learning and technology, has argued that teachers could think of themselves as “stewards of students’ limited stores of attention.”5 In the twenty-first century, our stewardship seems to falter and fail, besieged by the onslaught of screens and devices that call out to our students constantly.
Too many faculty and educational institutions have responded to this onslaught by attempting to wall off the classroom from digital distractions, banning phones and laptops in the vain hope that students will pay attention if they don’t have access to their screens. In November 2017, the economist Susan Dynarski published a New York Times essay entitled “Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting,” in which she explained why she banned all electronic devices from her college classroom. Dynarski argued that the rationale for such a seemingly drastic action rested on “a growing body of evidence [that] shows that, overall, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them.”6 In support of this claim, Dynarski pointed to studies like the ones we will consider in Chapter Two, which demonstrate that digital distraction in the classroom can hurt student learning. She also linked to a highly publicized study that suggested students learn better from taking notes by hand than they do from typing on laptops.7 Considering the power of handwritten notes along with the benefits of an environment free of digital distractions made the solution clear for her: ban devices from the room. Her essay sparked a lively debate in higher education, as faculty argued with one another about whether we should solve the problem of distracted students by banishing laptops and digital devices from our lecture halls, seminar rooms, and laboratories.
I serve as both an English professor and the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at a smallish liberal arts university in Massachusetts. At the teaching center, we provide programming and resources that help faculty reflect upon and improve their teaching. Our work is enhanced by a group of student fellows, who meet with us every month to help take the pulse of teaching and learning on campus. They also write essays for the center’s blog. Just around the time Susan Dynarski’s piece appeared, I published on our website a thought-provoking essay by one of the fellows, Jessica Ferronetti, a senior who was preparing for a career as a high school Spanish teacher. The essay began with a striking story about an experience Ferronetti had while doing her preservice teaching at a local high school:
This past fall, I was standing up in front of a class of freshmen and sophomores, teaching them a lesson on stem changing verbs in the present tense in Spanish. I glanced at the clock and decided it was time for their closure activity. I asked the students to please take out a piece of paper for the closure activity as I was going to collect it to gather evidence of assessment. The students didn’t move. I asked them again to take out a piece of paper, and one timid hand rose up. “Señorita, we don’t have any paper. We don’t carry notebooks.”8
What Ferronetti learned from the conversation that followed was that the district in which she was teaching was working to ensure that every student had a Chromebook or an iPad, and that students were increasingly doing all of their work on these devices, including in class. She concluded her essay by noting that she knew many professors had mixed feelings about allowing technologies in the classroom, but that these polices were setting up a conflict between what students had experienced in their education up to that point and what they would encounter in their college courses. “Students are increasingly becoming dependent on their iPads and laptops in a world where technology is so easily accessible,” she explained. “These students will start appearing on college campuses across the country soon, expecting to be able to use all of this technology in class. Teachers and professors must be ready to work with them.” You can find evidence of this in almost any K–12 classroom you might care to visit. From kindergarten through high school, our future students are learning on electronic devices.
One could argue that we should just push Dynarski’s solution down into the K–12 realm as well, banning devices from classrooms everywhere, from kindergarten through graduate school. But this approach would mean abrogating our responsibilities as educators. We prepare students not only for the future, but for the world in which we are all living now. In the present, they are using their devices to get information, find directions, access music and videos, apply to college, communicate with their teachers, and more. In the future, they will be pursuing careers in which they rely on laptops, tablets, smartphones, or some not-yet-invented technology to facilitate their work, even as those devices will offer them continuous distractions. They will also be using their devices to manage their personal lives: to get driving directions, manage their household while on vacation, communicate with distant children, parents, and friends, and discover and pass along news. Part of our work as educators has to include helping them understand how to navigate their digital environments safely and effectively. It seems strange to me that we would ask students who are immersed in technology outside of school, and will be immersed in it throughout the rest of their lives, to come to our classrooms and work in a technology-free bubble during their school years.
Derek Bruff is the director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and the author of two books on the use of technology in the college classroom. Our students, he noted in a recent interview on digital distractions, are “going to have to graduate and get jobs and use laptops without being on Facebook all day.”9 Their employers are not going to ban laptops from their desks, or force them to put their smartphones away. Screens, and their potentially distracting powers, have become an inextricable part of the education process, the twenty-first-century workforce, and the personal lives of an increasing majority of humans.
For all of these reasons, which we will consider in greater detail in Chapter Two, I am convinced that we need more nuanced responses to the problem of distraction than laptop or device bans. The evidence adduced by writers like Susan Dynarski is real and unequivocal; digital distraction in the classroom hurts the learning of our students. Everyone teaching today has likely seen this play out. The students whose eyes are glued to their laptop screens, or who are texting furtively throughout class, are often the ones who struggle the most. I know that enough of us are speaking to students about the problem of distraction that they likely know they should pay attention in class, and yet they don’t. But they are not unique in that respect. I expect you will have no problem envisioning times and places in which the urge to distract yourself interferes with your work: checking Twitter instead of grading, texting during committee meetings, watching YouTube videos instead of writing. We are all guilty of these behaviors, even when we know they might be hurting the quality of our work or setting us up for misery later, once we finally turn our attention to the tasks we need to complete. Our distractions—and particularly our digital distractions—call to us convincingly these days. To begin the process of turning down the volume, we need at least a basic understanding of their appeal. What makes digital distractions so difficult to resist, for us and our students?
In The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen address the thrall of digital devices by inviting us to consider the situation of an early human in a grasslands environment.10 What would have helped our ancestors survive, in order to pass along the features of an evolving brain structure to future generations? Envision this ancient progenitor moving across a natural landscape with an extended family group, in search of the components of life that we still need today: food and water sources, potential mates, shelter. In addition to these elements of the environment he was seeking to discover, there were others he had to avoid: predators, dangerous landscapes, rival groups. What helped him find what he needed and avoid what would hurt him was a brain that had different capacities for attention. On the one hand, he most certainly needed the ability to focus on elements that would ensure his survival. That focusing capacity would have facilitated tracking and hunting, or the kind of deliberate thinking that would have allowed him to retrace the steps of the group toward shelter or water after a long absence. It would have enabled him to attend to his family group and to build or find shelter.
But even while he was using his focused attention to achieve these objectives, it would have been unwise for our ancestor to stay too focused. He also needed the capacity to remain open to potential surprises in the environment, including anything that might hurt or help him. If he attended too closely and exclusively to the tracks of a tasty animal, for example, he might find himself becoming lunch for a different animal. If he focused completely on seeking shelter, he might miss the flash of fur that indicated a possible food source had just unexpectedly arrived in his vicinity. However much focused attention might have benefited our ancestor, too much would have ultimately hurt him. What would have been most helpful to our ancestors, then—and what they have passed along to us today—is the ability to focus and pursue a goal in a sustained manner, and the ability to remain open to novel movements or developments in the environment that provide crucial survival information. In order to survive, in other words, the brain needed to be easily distractible.
I don’t want to place too much weight on an imagined evolutionary scenario—because the next thing you know, we’re inventing paleo diets—but some version of this history would help explain the attention systems that we still carry in our brains today.11 The dual nature of our attention is not exclusive to humans, either; it may be a fundamental feature of the architecture of the animal brain. In a talk based on his book The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist invites us to consider the spectacle of a bird pecking at dirt and grit in search of seeds: “It’s got to focus very narrowly and clearly on that little seed and be able to pick it out against that background. But it’s also, if it’s going to stay alive, it’s got to actually keep a quite different kind of attention open. It’s got to be on the lookout for predators, or friends… whatever else is going on.”12
McGilchrist argues that the attention systems of most animals take two forms: one enables us to focus, while the other remains in a state that he describes as “broadly vigilant,” meaning open to whatever novelty might arise in the environment. If you have a furry creature living in your house, as I do, this will likely seem familiar. When my dog Finn eats his food, he’s zoned in pretty tightly on it. But if someone knocks on the door while he does so, he turns immediately and searches for the intruder. The work of McGilchrist and other scientists who write about attention makes clear that our complex attention systems, capable of focus but open to distraction, are as inseparable from us as our five-fingered hands or four-chambered hearts.
But one aspect of our attention systems seems especially characteristic of primates, including the primates in your classroom: not only do we notice novelty in the environment, but we actively seek it out. Sources of novelty—like a flash of fur or the gurgle of a nearby stream—provided our ancestors with useful information and contributed to their ongoing understanding of the environment. Because the acquisition of such information benefited survival, the brain evolved to search continually for it. Gazzaley and Rosen explain that biological mechanisms that rewarded our ancestors for finding new information still exist in us today, as they do in some of our primate cousins:
At our core we are information-seeking creatures, so behaviors that maximize information accumulation are optimal… This notion is supported by findings that molecular and physiological mechanisms that originally developed in our brain to support food foraging for survival have now evolved in primates to include information foraging… Macaque monkeys, for example, respond to receiving information similarly to the way they respond to primitive rewards such as food or water.13
Our desire to scan the environment for new information, the authors argue, forms such a fundamental part of our attention systems that it parallels our desire for basic needs. We get a burst of satisfaction from identifying a new bit of information, just as we do from a cool glass of water on a warm summer day.
Gazzaley and Rosen ultimately describe us as having “ancient brains in a high-tech world,” and from that phrase we see our modern dilemma. We have brains that have the capacity for concentrated attention in the pursuit of our goals, but that are also designed to search continuously for novelties in our environment. The students who come into our classrooms, for the most part, do not need to notice or seek out novelty in order to survive. Shelter comes in the form of their bedrooms or dorm rooms, food comes packaged in the supermarket or served in the dining hall, and potential reproductive partners live next door. Even though we no longer depend on our information-seeking brains to ensure our survival in many aspects of our lives, those brains still do what they evolved to do: seek new information. But now our students have information dispensers always at their fingertips, beckoning and calling to them at every turn.
We might not think about the phones of our students as information-dispensing machines when they are using them to watch YouTube videos, but that’s simply because we are judging the information they are dispensing as meaningless. Viral videos may well be useless for the pursuit of academic goals, but that doesn’t mean they’re not information. Those social media accounts that students find so enticing are absorbing for a reason: they provide users with an ongoing stream of new data about what’s happening with their friends, family, and the world around them. Phones and laptops are perfectly designed to draw and hold the attention of an information-seeking brain, especially because they offer frequent and varied bursts of novelty. Nothing new on Twitter? Check Instagram. Instagram tapped out? Try YouTube. On my phone or laptop I can sit for hours and never run out of novel sources of information, each of which has been built to push new content in front of me constantly, in the form of scrolling and feeds. Our ancient brains love every minute of it.
That our devices have become so effective at this solicitation of my attention is no accident, as we can see from the work of someone like Nir Eyal, a former video-game designer who wrote a book teaching companies how to grab the attention of consumers. “As infinite distractions compete for our attention,” he writes in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, “companies are learning to master novel tactics to stay relevant in users’ minds.”14 Reading through the book and its footnotes, one finds well-informed references to the scientific research on attention. The designers of our new technologies have made themselves experts in attention and have a wealth of new scientific research at their disposal. They can operate in ways that were not accessible to earlier attention-catching technologies. The television sought to grab my attention, but it could only do so once I turned it on. The phone in my pocket is designed to always be on and within reach, and it does everything in its power to say, “PAY ATTENTION TO ME, JIM!!!!” It buzzes with phone calls and text messages, it plays an annoying melody when someone wants to FaceTime, and when I pull it out of my pocket to check the time it shows me all of the people who like me, dammit, whether they are doing so on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes it tells me it needs an upgrade, or it offers me tips on how it can play an even bigger role in my life through some new app.
While some of this comes to me freely, much of it carries costs, either hidden or explicit. In The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Tim Wu traces the historical pathways that capitalism has helped to pave toward increasingly distracting digital technologies, from the rise of newspaper advertising in the nineteenth century to today’s apps and devices. As the popularity of books like Nir Eyal’s would attest, capturing our attention brings big dollars to corporations who can do it successfully, and the competition for our attention drives innovation and effectiveness. “The game of harvesting human attention,” Wu writes, “and reselling it to advertisers has become a major part of our economy.”15 When smart people with big bankrolls want to grab our attention, they work with increasing effectiveness at doing so. They entice us with badges and certificates, draw us into games and competitions, reward us with stickers and levels, promise us better health, connect us to potential friends and mates, and more. To turn away from these potential distractions of our digital devices and focus on academic pursuits that demand hard cognitive work requires increasing effort—and increasingly smart strategizing on the part of teachers.
This is a hopeful book, in which I will argue that such smart strategizing can have a powerful impact on the attention we seek to cultivate in our classrooms. But we will not succeed in teaching today’s students unless we make a fundamental shift in our thinking: away from preventing distraction and toward cultivating attention. The human brain is an eminently distractible organ. We thus are fighting a losing battle if we try to solve the problem of attention by eliminating distractions. Banning devices from the room still leaves pencils for doodling, windows to stare through, coughing and sniffing humans to irritate us, and the endless chaotic swirling of our thoughts. Instead, we need to think about how the learning environments that we build for students can be safe and supportive spaces in which they are inspired, encouraged, and rewarded for directing their attention toward the hard work of learning. Reorienting our thinking away from distraction and toward attention opens up an entirely new way of approaching the problem. It shifts the debate away from the use or disuse of specific technologies, or technology in general, and asks us to reevaluate basic assumptions we make about the nature of our teaching. If we are willing to think with careful and open minds about the research standing at the crossroads of attention and pedagogy, I believe that we can discover teaching approaches that push us into exciting and creative new territories, both for ourselves and our students.16
That doesn’t mean, however, that we educators don’t need to evolve our work as a result of the explosive growth of personal technologies; we do. Thanks to the speed with which they dispense novel information to us, today’s digital devices are highly potent tools for distraction. The time that students spend on their devices is shaping their behavior at school and work, and their beliefs about themselves, the world, and the responsibilities that we bear toward them. They are developing habits of living and thinking that are worth questioning, and that may prove resistant to change. The time they spend with their devices may also be reshaping the way they interact with the human beings around them and impacting their mental health.17 Those of us who teach have to account for all of these possibilities and be prepared to do what teachers have always done: consider the education our students need in both present and future, and work together to determine how we get them there. As I will argue, one of the most fundamental challenges for educators today is helping students use their attention to support their learning in an age when distractions are more potent and numerous than they have ever been. If we want to do that successfully, we need to recognize three fundamental truths about attention in education. They represent the most important ideas I hope you will take away from this book.
First, attention is an achievement. Our students are distracted for the same reasons we all feel distracted these days: because we have easily distractible minds, because attention is difficult, and because our devices make it even more difficult. Teachers tend to assume that attention represents the norm, from which distraction constitutes a falling away. But this characterization of our minds is both incorrect and disempowering. As we shall learn from philosophers and writers in Chapter One, the normal state of our brains might best be characterized as distracted or dispersed, from which focused and sustained attention arises in certain specific contexts. In Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind, Daniel Reisberg offers an admirable description of this view:
We need to think of paying attention as an achievement, something that you’re able to do [and not that you do effortlessly]. Like many other achievements (e.g., doing well in school, staying healthy, earning a good salary), paying attention involves many elements, and the exact set of elements needed will vary from one occasion to the next. In all cases, though, multiple steps are needed to ensure that you end up aware of the stimuli you’re interested in, and not pulled off track by irrelevant inputs.18
Attention is an achievement, and a difficult one at that. Sustained periods of attention in the classroom arise like islands from the ocean of distraction, in which we all swim on a regular basis. The achievement of attention comes from multiple parts of our brain and requires coordination between those parts.19 The focus we seek to cultivate in our classrooms represents an especially difficult form of attention, because of the hard cognitive work we are asking students to do in the presence of multiple possible distractors, from other bodies in the room to wandering minds and alluring devices.
The second point is that attention remains achievable. Even in this distracting era, human beings remain perfectly capable of paying attention in non-digital contexts, even if they don’t do it as consistently and frequently as we would like. They spend minutes and hours and whole days locked into playing or watching sports, pursuing hobbies, reading and writing, traveling off the grid, exercising, and working on difficult projects. In the classroom, we can find equally diverse examples of students paying attention: they concentrate on quizzes and exams, participate in discussions, take notes on lectures, engage in in-class activities, do field and lab work, and more. Since we can find plenty of examples of humans in general and students specifically paying attention, we know that attention is achievable. Our students remain capable of focusing their attention, sustaining it, and blocking out distractions. They can attend to you, to one another, and to the course material when the conditions are right. All of the factors that go into that are complex, and not all of them are under your control. Sometimes attention flags or never arises because students are hungry or tired, or because they are in the midst of emotional turmoil or trauma. We should therefore not expect perfect attention in our classrooms, since we can’t (and shouldn’t) control all aspects of our students lives. But we also should not give up hope.
Putting the first two points together leads ineluctably to the third: if we wish to achieve attention in the classroom, we must cultivate it deliberately. The achievement of student attention requires deliberate and conscious effort from the teacher. We won’t get students’ attention by scolding them, at least in the long term. We won’t get it from simply hoping for the best. We won’t get it from going about our business in the front of the room and letting them fend for themselves out there in the seats. We’ll get attention when we establish it as an important value in our courses and consider how we will help students cultivate and sustain the forms of attention that help them learn.
In the pages that follow, I’m going to offer you plenty of models for what it looks like to think and teach with a deliberate focus on attention. Those models arise partly from my observations of dozens of classrooms—high school and higher education—during the two years I spent researching and writing this book. In every classroom I visited, I kept a close eye on the students in the room and noted when they seemed to perk up and tune in, as well as when they seemed to slump in their chairs and sneak off-task. I observed how students’ attention waxed and waned according to the structure of the class, the variety and nature of different activities, and even the timing and placement of these activities. During that same time period, I searched continuously for good ideas for cultivating attention in the educational literature, everything from teacher blogs and podcasts to the latest books and journal articles on effective teaching practices. I compared what I read in those places and observed in live classrooms with the more theoretical and scientific research on attention and distraction. I also observed when people paid attention in contexts outside of school. I tried to understand what drove people into activities that sustained their attention and what principles we could derive from those activities and bring back into the classroom.
This process of developing the ideas for the book will help clarify its audience. The teachers who will see the most immediate potential application for its ideas are college and university faculty, followed very closely by secondary-school teachers. Although my work addresses higher education faculty most directly, I also work regularly with future high school teachers at my institution and have given multiple workshops for secondary-school teachers over the past several years. I have found much common ground in the challenges faced by higher education and secondary-school teachers, and significant overlap between the teaching strategies that prove most effective for our students. Middle and elementary school teachers should also find useful strategies here, although there may be developmental issues for younger students that differentiate their challenges from those of teaching teenagers and emerging adults. Readers should also notice from my description of the research process that this book focuses primarily on the cultivation of attention in face-to-face classrooms. The challenges for online students are overlapping but distinct. Still, I hope online teachers will find food for reflection on attention and distraction, as well as opportunities for translating some of the recommended strategies into their teaching practice. I hope all readers, including administrators or parents who might not be directly involved in classroom teaching, will come to find the challenge of attention as fascinating as I have, and will consider this book as a spur for their own creative thinking about the cultivation of attention in the digital age.
Of course, some percentage of our students face specific obstacles to attention in the classroom, including those who might be diagnosed with attention disorders and students who struggle with anxiety or other conditions that make focusing difficult in an academic environment. Although I do not address directly the unique challenges of working with these populations, the pathways I have chosen toward attention in Part Two are ones that should have a beneficial impact on all learners in the classroom, whatever level of attention they bring. Indeed, as will be clear in places throughout the book, some of the specific recommendations I make in Part Two come from conversations with teachers who work with students with these special challenges or from reading or hearing the perspective of those students.
As you will see in the chapters of Part Two, teachers in classrooms of every kind, teaching students of every kind, are embracing and meeting the challenge of thinking creatively about attention. I invite you to join them in that creative work. As you read this book and reflect upon your own experiences with attention (or lack thereof) with students today, you should ask yourself this core question: What captures the attention of my students? Your answer will provide you with the best models you can create for reinvigorating your teaching with attention, whether your context is the physical classroom or online or some combination of the two. In her book The Power of Mindful Learning, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer argues that “when we are distracted, we are attracted to something else. From this perspective very different questions come to mind: What is so attractive about the alternative stimulus? What can we learn from that attraction?”20 You will devise the best possible answers to these kinds of questions if you ask and answer them with a group of peers. Get together with your friends on the faculty, with the members of your department, with a book group, or with the team at your center for teaching and learning. Organize or participate in a discussion, and share with one another what you have learned about attention from your on-the-ground experiences. I had multiple opportunities during the writing of this book to present ideas to faculty on other campuses, and I always posed to them the same questions that I am encouraging you to ask yourself: What is happening in your classroom when students are paying attention? And what you can you learn from those moments?
Attention has a strong social component; when we turn our gaze in some new direction, other eyes follow. My ultimate goal is to turn the gaze of more teachers to the challenge of attention, and in so doing provide an opportunity for us all to think and talk together about how to help and support student attention in an age of distraction.
Joanna E. Ziegler was an art historian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, before her untimely death at the age of sixty. In an essay for a collection entitled Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms, Ziegler described a striking assignment she gave to students in her art history courses. The students had to leave campus every single week and make a visit to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in order to spend time in front of the same work of art for thirteen consecutive weeks. They wrote a new paper on that same work every week, describing what insights they had developed with each viewing. This slow unfolding led them, Ziegler explains, “from personalized, almost narcissistic responses to descriptions firmly grounded in the picture.”21 As they learned to train their attention on a work of art, that attention brought them insights. They saw more clearly, developed new ideas, and wrote creatively about what they observed.
The important point about Ziegler’s experiment to me is that she believed that sustained attention was an important value to cultivate in her students. So—instead of simply lamenting its disappearance, criticizing students for their distractibility, or scapegoating their digital devices—she designed an assignment that helped them develop it. Ziegler was right in believing that attention deserves our attention; our students won’t learn without it. We can throw up our hands in the face of our devices, wish that the kids these days paid more attention than they used to, or ban technologies from the room in the vain hope that sustained attention will suddenly blossom in response. A better solution would be to join teachers like Ziegler in recognizing that the challenge of attention in learning is a deep and historic one. It requires us to address it directly and think creatively, in conversation with one another, in order to help our students stay attentive to their learning, and to one another, in the age of distraction.