Teaching is nearly impossible to do when students aren’t paying attention, especially when there are distractions like smart phones, other students and hallway banter. It’s easy to get frustrated, but Andrew Watson wants to shift the blame away from students.
“There’s no attention center in the brain,” said Watson who is a teacher and author of several books about learning. “Attention is a behavior that students do when three other mental processes are happening correctly.”
He spoke directly to teachers in attendance at Learning & the Brain’s Teaching Stronger Brains conference earlier this year about helping students pay attention better in class. He said the onus to engage students’ attention falls on classroom teachers like him, and the key is to minimize as many distractions as possible, while implementing teaching strategies with a full understanding of attention, memory and motivation.
“Almost any teacher will tell you that telling students to pay attention doesn’t work,” Watson informed me. Being told to “pay attention” isn’t specific enough, and the response from students will only last for a short amount of time because of that, he continued.
Watson identified the three mental processes of attention as alertness, orienting and executive control. A student can have too much or too little alertness — like running around or being sleepy. Orienting has to do with focusing on a specific task, and can be disrupted by distraction caused by outside stimuli. Executive control is complex because it requires students to choose to focus on a task in front of them over distractions that might surround them.
‘Memory is the Residue of Thought’
Watson likes to think about memory as “the residue of thought,” an idea developed by psychologist Daniel Willingham. And because memories are reinforced by thinking about an idea over and over again, it would make sense that part of a teachers’ job is to facilitate that process.
The more you know about a subject, the easier it is to build upon it and learn more about it, so there is a reciprocal relationship between learning, memory and attention, said Watson.
As a teacher, his role is to support memory building through assessment planning and reviews. Why? The likelihood that students will both be able to learn and also monitor their own attentiveness is nil, he said.
It’s easy to blame students for their shortcomings in attention and memory, but in reality “learning is actually very hard and takes up somewhere between most of and all of the cognitive resources that my students actually have,” said Watson. For example, if his students are learning how to craft topic sentences, they need to think about how to do this difficult task, and not think about how to stay on task — that’s something Watson can help them do.
Helpful Attention Strategies for the Classroom
High school teacher Blake Harvard scaffolds self-assessment into the learning process in his AP psychology class.
He uses simple assessments – like asking students what they learned the previous day or even five minutes ago – to clue him in to what class material students are struggling to remember or learn. Frequency of these information recall opportunities help the lessons stick.
An assessment is a learning opportunity, Harvard said, and “retrieving information — pulling that memory out — and using it itself strengthens that memory.”
Harvard believes that teaching should center memory and that students need to think critically about the way that they take in and retrieve information. His new book, “Do I Have Your Attention,” brings the research to teachers in an easy to digest way that has positively contributed to his own classroom practices.
In order to maintain his students’ attention, Harvard has them face the front of the classroom, even when the classroom furniture doesn’t easily support that configuration. His students currently sit at tables, not individual desks, so he had to get creative to get everyone facing forward.
Decorations are also kept to a minimum in Harvard’s classroom, and those that remain all have to do with the subject matter of his classes. But “it’s not completely bleak,” he said. Cellphones are away at all times during the school day, and he also encourages his students to take notes with pencil on paper, instead of transcribing on a computer.
Common classroom practices like movement can be helpful to engage students’ attention and memory retention, and the benefits of movement when learning are well documented. But Watson warned that movement isn’t a cure all for students’ attention issues. “The point isn’t that movement is a good idea or that movement is bad; it’s a really useful solution to an alertness problem, but it might make an orienting problem worse,” said Watson.
So, if a student is falling asleep in Watson’s class, he might resort to having that student get up from their desk and do a task, like returning a book to another teacher’s classroom. But if a student seems to be distracted by a soccer game outside the classroom window and their focus is diverted away from the lesson — an orienting and executive control issue — “movement might be a bad idea,” said Watson.
Giving students time to think
Brains forget, and that’s a normal process of memory, but sometimes students can experience retrieval failure. When his students are struggling with retrieval, Harvard helps by providing context clues or reframing the definition of the concept that they are struggling to remember.
When reviewing material from a previous lesson, Watson takes a simple approach to prompting his students’ memory and memory retrieval. Instead of beginning with a short review of topics from the day before, he asks his students to write down what they learned the previous lesson. He then walks around the classroom and monitors students’ answers. “Now, [students are] practicing by retrieving from their memory rather than my telling them,” he said.
If students can’t seem to remember what they learned recently “that’s not their failing, that’s my failing, because I didn’t practice enough. So what I need to remember is to include that thing in more frequent, say, retrieval of practice exercises,” said Watson.
The pressure that teachers face from schools, administrators, and districts surrounding standardized tests can be overwhelming, and students not being able to remember class material can contribute to that stress. However, Watson knows that laying a great foundation in the first half of the year is essential for his students’ long term success.
For example, Watson’s sophomore students need to be able to write great five-paragraph analytical essays by the end of the school year. Instead of following an accelerated pace of teaching, Watson spends all of fall semester on individual sentences and paragraphs. His students often ask him why their class is behind, because their peers in other classes are already writing five-paragraph essays, but Watson reassures them that mastering the individual components of a five-paragraph essay first will make writing longer material easier come spring semester.
“As we’re building towards that summative assessment, it’s okay if they don’t know how to do it now. Especially in a cumulative class, the solid foundation is absolutely worth the time it takes to build,” said Watson.
The attention economy makes focusing a struggle for students. Here’s what we can do to help.{}