I FINISHED WRITING this book in February of 2020, one month before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in the United States. While the book wound its way through the production process, teachers around the world were shifting their courses online on very short notice. Having never taught online before, I had ten days to transform my British literature survey course, which met three times per week in a physical classroom, to one in which our every encounter would be mediated by screens. During those ten day I learned how to record video lectures for my students, write productive prompts for our discussion board, conduct group and individual Zoom sessions, and assign and evaluate student work entirely online. Much to my surprise, I found the exploration of these new teaching practices invigorating. I had been curious about online teaching for several years, wondering how it would compare to the traditional classroom experience. Some of the teaching practices I experimented with in my online course proved very effective for my students; I will continue to use them when I return to the face-to-face classroom.
I suspect many traditional high school and college courses, the kind that meet in physical classrooms filled with human bodies, will undergo a similar transformation in the post-pandemic world. Our courses will be enriched by our newfound familiarity with tech tools that have been tested and proven effective by online teachers for the past decade or two. As a consequence of this, the devices that we like to blame for distractibility will assume an even more important role in the lives of educators and students. Attempts to remove them from our learning spaces will become increasingly challenging in this world of blended learning environments, in which students are learning through both their devices and the community setting of the classroom. But whatever differences might emerge in the educational world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the core challenge that this book addresses remains exactly the same as prior to the pandemic, and as it will remain for as long as humans teach other humans through formal schooling: cultivating the attention of students in support of their learning.
You’ll read much in the pages that follow about how attention contributes to learning, and about how and why distraction gets in the way. If you have been teaching for any length of time, you will have direct experience with this problem in your own classroom: you will have seen students’ attention drifting out the window, waning over the course of the day, or disappearing into their phones and laptops. If you have now also taught online, at least temporarily, you will likely have witnessed attention failing and flailing in those environments as well. Perhaps you noticed students eyeing their phones or checking e-mail during your Zoom sessions, or perhaps you were able to surmise this was happening because you were doing precisely the same thing in your departmental Zoom meetings. You might also have complained to your spouse or friends that you were having difficulty concentrating on your work during the early weeks of the pandemic—a reminder that distraction comes in many forms, and not just from our digital devices. We can be as distracted by our fears and anxieties (and other aspects of our nonacademic life) as we can by our phones and laptops. Whenever we are attempting challenging cognitive work, distraction sings to us sweetly, beckoning us into easier and more pleasurable pursuits.
But the education supported by attention brings greater and more meaningful rewards than the temporary bursts of pleasure we can get from our distractions, and it can give us the cognitive tools we need to manage our fears and anxieties during times of crisis. A student comes into my literature course baffled and a little frustrated by the poems I had assigned her to read; we circle our desks and work our way slowly through one of those poems, and then finish with a writing exercise in which I ask her to think about how the poem connects to her own life experience. Through the attention she has given to the class and the poem, she emerges with new insights into humanity’s right relationship with the natural world. A student who has no idea what she wants to do with her life hunkers down over an experiment with a lab partner, and finds in those test tubes something so fascinating that it launches her into her major and ultimate career path. While we were all teaching and learning remotely, I watched one of my daughters, who has struggled with anxiety, complete an art class online, working patiently at her charcoal drawings under the occasional online supervision of her teacher. Later in the evenings, I would sometimes find her holding coloring and drawing sessions with her younger siblings in her bedroom, helping all of them find comfort during this crisis through the exercise of their creative faculties.
Digital devices did not create the challenge of cultivating student attention in support of these kinds of life-altering learning experiences. We have been sidetracked in recent years by assertive voices who lay the entire blame for our distractible natures at the feet of our laptops and phones. But to place the blame exclusively there only works if you ignore the architectural features of our brain that make us prone to distraction, or the long history of humans complaining about the distractibility of their minds. Although we have more distractions today than we had in the past—and more powerful distractions in the form of our digital devices—teachers have always wrestled with the challenge of capturing and sustaining student attention in support of their learning. To overcome that challenge, we need to turn our heads away from distraction and toward attention. Our challenge is not to wall off distractions; our challenge is to cultivate attention, and help students use it in the service of meaningful learning.
This book emerges from my convictions about the essential role of attention to education. It offers many recommendations for how to make attention a priority in your classroom, from the building of community and the design of your course to the structuring of your class period and the development of creative new teaching strategies. I hope that you will find in here a new understanding of the role that attention can play in student learning, new tools for cultivating the attention of your students, and fresh enthusiasm for the task.
April 20, 2020
Worcester, Massachusetts