Cultivating Attention in the Classroom
By: Jason Park
Tags: Education, Books, Reading, Psychology, Teaching

Cultivating Attention in the Classroom

A review of James Lang’s *Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It*

When you were in high school, how much did you see people disciplined for being distracted in class?

One of my teachers used to (by his own admission) throws a chalkboard eraser at distracted students in the back of the room. You could see the eraser marks on the back wall sometimes. You might notice by the “chalkboard eraser” reference: this was pre-iPhone days. Are classroom distractions a new thing?

While distractions have proved easier to come by since 2007 (the year the iPhone came out and my senior year of high school), to say that pre-2007 students weren’t similarly distracted in class is almost laughable. I didn’t have a smartphone until after I graduated from college, but I was still frequently distracted in class. When the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to seems unworthy of your attention, the brain finds other things to do. Smartphones have diverted that attention mostly to one place for a majority of people, but take away student phones and I promise you they would find other distractions on which to shift their attention.

That is why it was so refreshing to read James Lang’s new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Lang is clear that distraction is a natural state of the human brain, but is not simply defeatist. It’s right there in the title: what you can do about it. So what is the answer? Lang writes:

(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.

So how do teachers cultivate attention in the classroom? That is what Lang explores for the rest of the book. From student buy-in on device policies to the teacher circulating the room or strategically placing oneself at the back of the room, Lang gives some simple advice that is commonly given in good teaching training. However, some of his advice is less simple and more philosophical, shifting the paradigm of your entire classroom and your relationship to your students.

One of Lang’s more philosophical ideas that will shift how I teach: transparent talk. He suggests letting students in on not only the “how” but the “why” behind everything you do. Proactively explaining why each building block of learning in the classroom is important will keep students’ attention when you might otherwise lose them. Lang gives examples:

• “Today I am lecturing because this material is incredibly complex and I’d like to boil it down to a few essentials for you. You’re very welcome to follow along or take notes on your laptop; you’ll find the slides in the course web pages.” • “We’re going to spend the last fifteen minutes of class thinking and talking about why we should still read poems like this one: Why do they still matter to us today, two hundred years after they were composed? You don’t need to take notes for the next part of class, so I want devices closed, so we can give our full attention to one another.” • “We use groups in this context because I want to help you connect with the peers you’ll be working with on your final projects. You don’t need your devices here; I want you to focus on working with each other, and you will only need one person to record your work on the whiteboards around the room. Afterward you can take pictures of the board if you want to preserve the ideas for yourself.” Such transparent talk articulates whether they will need their devices, but that’s really a side issue. More importantly, it clarifies the purposes of all of our work. It makes the classroom more like a communal learning experience than like a magician performing for his mystified audience.

This will shift and already has shifted my entire teaching strategy in large and small ways, especially as I am teaching virtually and in-person at the same time right now. Ensuring that students understand the learning objective for the day is one thing. It can often be like someone saying “Here, this is what we’re going to learn today” and then 45 minutes later you come back and say “Hey, remember this? Look, we actually learned it!” and students are to be shocked and awed. Deconstructing every step and making it clear why that step is so important, that process is something that so many teachers miss but will help students immensely in staying attentive. Why? Because they understand the immediate purpose. As Lang says, learning isn’t a magic trick anymore. It’s something that each student has control over by focusing his or her attention on a specific purpose.

Other principles of Lang’s that were especially helpful include employing 1) student curiosity and 2) what Lang calls “signature attention activities”. Curiosity is another aspect teachers often miss because we assume that students should be interested in our material because it’s interesting to us or because they should know it’s important. (Then we get frustrated when they say things like “We talk about China SO much. Why do we have to learn about China?” Or is that just me?) But Lang conveys a sort of manifesto in his chapter on cultivating curiosity in the classroom, urging teachers to think about what questions first interested them in their chosen field. For me, I started college with a curiosity about what the rest of the world is like, what makes people different, and how your past or your nation’s past affects who you are today. Is it surprising, then, that I am teaching world history and psychology? If I share this curiosity with my students on the first day rather than bore them with specifics about the syllabus, how much more likely is it that they will be interested in the content? So, what is it for you? What first made you interested in your chosen content area? And how can you translate that to students?

While curiosity is important in cultivating student attention, sustaining that attention takes work. Lang shares some surprising research on student attention that essentially shows attention flagging every few minutes and sometimes more often than that, so Lang argues that teachers should be keenly aware of when attention is flagging and be ready with a quick change of pace. That doesn’t mean it has to be something big or even something that takes more than a minute, but teachers should have “signature attention activities” in the back pocket such as an engaging question you can tailor to the day’s lesson easily, or an image that relates to the content in some way that students can analyze. These activities and many more don’t take very long and don’t take a lot of planning, but they can have tremendous effects on student attention. Lang gives a lot more examples of these types of activities in Distracted.

Since Distracted was mostly written pre-pandemic, there is a lot of specific advice in Lang’s book that won’t work under COVID restrictions. (For example, I can’t circulate the room right now even for those few students who are in-person.) However, the vast majority of the book is full of advice that can be implemented in big and small ways no matter where you are or what you are teaching. It is honestly the most applicable book on the art of teaching that I have read since good old Harry Wong’s The First Days of School. So if you are a teacher, especially one interested in educational psychology or how to cultivate attention, please read Distracted. Our students will be better for it.

I received a review copy of Distracted courtesy of Basic Books and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.