Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Principle 3: What students attend to is what they will learn about
Five themes: Mental models and purposeful execution

Graham Nuthall's The Hidden Loves of Learners is a fascinating book in part because of its description of tiny and otherwise mundane moments in the lives of ordinary students.¹² As I noted before, one of his main premises is that students learn ideas and content that they come into contact with three different times—especially if each interaction is comprehensive and if the interactions present the information in slightly different ways. But, he notes, this only applies if students are paying attention, and Nuthall describes a series of experiences that will be familiar to all of us. A group of students are learning about Antarctica, for example, and are supposed to have learned that Antarctica is one of the driest places on earth. Some have and some haven't. Nuthall notices that a student named Teine is whispering to a peer and passing notes while a video is describing the desert nature of Antarctica. Teine fails to learn the content. Another student, Tui, often decides that he already knows the content being taught and so fails to listen carefully. He's not passing notes but he's not attending, and he, too, fails to learn.

This reveals an obvious but important fact about education: In any learning environment some people develop quickly and some people develop more slowly. One major factor in the rates at which individuals learn is their ability to concentrate for a significant period of time. Half-focused or fleetingly focused learners master things more slowly and with more difficulty. This is often apparent to us when we work with students with diagnosed attention issues, but of course the ability to sustain focus is spread unevenly across all students (and adults); its strength is a hidden driver of progress.

As I discuss at greater length in technique 48, Habits of Attention, “selective attention” is the term for the ability to focus on the task at hand and ignore distraction. It is the ability to select what you pay attention to—to lock out distractions and lock in on the signal—and has “reverberating effects” on success in language, literacy, and mathematics, note cognitive scientists Courtney Stevens and Daphne Bavelier. They add that there are potentially “large benefits to incorporating attention-training activities into the school context.”¹³

Not surprisingly, it turns out that building strong habits for focusing and maintaining attention—a key aspect of how educators help support students with attention deficits—is useful for all students. Still, attention may vary from moment to moment even for the same person. Learners may concentrate deeply in one setting and be scattered in another, and this variability reminds us that learning environments shape habits of attention. Attending to attention—building habits of sustaining focus—is one of the most important things that teachers can do. If there's a mental model of a productive classroom it surely includes students able to lose themselves in a task and work at it steadily for a significant period of time, which means a setting where concentration can reliably be maintained and tasks and activities where the ability to focus is carefully cultivated.

This has always been true—and has always been a challenge, perhaps—but probably never more so than today, when the capacity of technology to affect and erode attention is exponentially greater than ever before. Yes, educators in the 1960s argued that television eroded students' attention and focus, but young people at the time did not walk around with a television in their pocket. Television was not the medium through which all of young people's social interactions were funneled. Young people did not surreptitiously—or openly—check their TVs every few minutes during class. They were not habituated to need to check their televisions every few seconds. A young person—and an adult—today owns very few garments that do not have a pocket for a smartphone. The assumption—written in the language of fabric—is that our phones are and must always be within reach. Quietly, gradually, the dosage and accessibility of technology has increased to the point where it has affected not only the level of attentiveness but the overall capacity for attentiveness of most people in profound ways. While a teacher's approach to attentiveness has always been a critical if unspoken part of a productive classroom, it is rapidly becoming more urgent. We aren't just struggling to help students learn to concentrate on what's important, we are struggling against a massive and pervasive technology that acts on our students—and ourselves—to erode that critical capacity in almost every minute of the day. Schools and teachers now must constantly design their choices and decisions with this challenge in mind if they hope to succeed. This is by far the single biggest change to emerge in education since the previous version of this book was published.

In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport examines the phenomenon of attention in the workplace, studying the conditions necessary to produce world-class knowledge work. Success in such a setting requires that you “hone your ability to master hard things,” he notes. A computer scientist by training, he uses writing code as an example. To be able to write complex, technical code is an outstanding thing to be good at, especially today, because knowledge work has never been more highly valued in society. Code moves freely and at light speed around the globe; if you write it well your audience of potential users is almost limitless. But this state of affairs—you in your happy place, writing code and sipping a latte while the world clamors for more and more of it—has a downside. Everyone else's code also moves freely and at light speed around the globe. Any line of it written anywhere in the world immediately competes with yours. All knowledge work is increasingly like this, Newport writes, and to succeed you not only must be able to concentrate to produce something uniquely intelligent, but “you must be able to do it quickly, again and again,” with “it” being the ability to achieve mastery of new and difficult things. The key to mastering complex material with speed and flair, Newport writes, is the ability to sustain states of unbroken attention and deep concentration. Those who can focus best for longest separate themselves from the crowd.

However, Newport also observes that it has never been harder to build these focused mindsets because our daily lives (which include our work and learning environments) socialize distraction, lack of concentration, and states of constant half-attention. They erode rather than build the sorts of locked-in mental focus that ultimately drive so much of success. Concentration, he concludes, has never been better rewarded and never harder to achieve.¹⁴

A useful term in understanding why is “attention residue.”¹⁵ When you switch from one task to another, your mind remains partially focused on the previous task. You pause during a project to check your email and when you've returned to the project your mind is still partially on your email even if you don't realize it. You're now less likely to do your best work. This is especially corrosive, Newport points out, to learning new and difficult things, but researchers have found that people in most working environments operate in constant states of low-level distraction. It's common for students, too. The average undergraduate student, presumably more mature than K—12 students and an example of academic success and interest, still switches windows every nineteen seconds when working on his or her laptop, for example.

But beyond attention residue is a larger issue: Our brains are neuroplastic, which means they rewire according to how we use them. And the way we, and especially young people, use them increasingly involves constantly switching tasks. Every two and a half minutes is average for an adult; it is surely more for young people. The result is not just that we are often more distracted than we ideally would be, but that we are increasingly less able to sustain focus. Our brains increasingly expect distractions to “pop up,” and become agitated and distracted by the deferral of this gratification. As productivity expert Maura Thomas put it in a recent article,¹⁶ “Our productivity suffers not just because we are distracted by outside interruptions, but also because our own brains … become a source of distraction in and of themselves.”

“Skimming is the new normal” writes Maryanne Wolf in Reader Come Home, one of the most profound and important books on learning in recent years. She describes how constant exposure to technology not only distracts us in the moment but rewires our brains to be less attentive, less capable of attention, and less able to sustain reflective states required in particular for deep and meaningful reading. Perhaps you notice this in yourself: Suddenly in the last few years you've found your eye rapidly skimming down the page while you read, inching ahead to look for … something. This is your brain, having been wired for distraction by a digital environment in which your average sustained attention to any task is under two minutes, looking for something new and flashing. In other words, this is you not only failing to pay attention, but losing the capacity to do so. You notice it because you once lived a low-tech life and feel the absence of the focus you used to have. Your students did not and do not. For most this is the only reality they have ever known.

This raises several questions for teachers. Do the environments they build in their classrooms socialize sustained attention or fractured and skittish attention? What can they do to help their students if they observe them, singularly or as a whole, to require stronger attention skills?

Recently I ran into a principal I know and I asked him about his students and how they are changing. “Attention spans are shorter and shorter,” he noted. “Especially because most students don't read outside of school anymore, unless they have parents who make them. But we're doing our best to adapt our instruction.” It was a short conversation and I never found out whether he meant We are adapting instruction to respond to the reduced attention of students by giving young people learning tasks that require less sustained focus or We are adapting our instruction to try to intentionally socialize concentration and improve student attention spans by engaging in sustained periods of a working on a single task. Were they acceding to the change or fighting back, in other words? This is a critical question. The latter can—and just possibly must—be accomplished. If you look at the videos referenced in this book, I believe you will see plenty of joy and energy and fast-paced learning, but you will reliably see in almost every high-achieving classroom students who can sustain focus on a single task, often quietly, deliberately, and independently. This is in part because their teachers have prioritized it and have built it up over time until it was a habit.

You will also see in the videos environments where constant disruptions to work, to thinking, and to reflection are rare. This is because teachers know that students deserve as much.

Even if the ability to focus varies widely among students and they walk through our doors with different levels of it, we can still seek to develop the ability to focus and pay attention as much as possible. Accomplishing this has always been one of the most important outcomes of schooling—even if this fact is not always recognized or acknowledged. Schools are increasingly one of the last places that can aspire to insulate young people from constant distraction, digital overstimulation, and task switching. There is a place for digital devices in learning, certainly, but there is just as much a place for sustained time without them. Providing steady doses of screen- and distraction-free time characterized by sustained meditative reflection—pencil, paper, book—is the greatest gift we can give to young people.

In 1890 (when high-tech meant newfangled innovations like the tabulating machine), the psychologist William James noted in The Principles of Psychology something else about attention: that what we pay attention to shapes our cognition more broadly. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” he wrote, anticipating a vast array of twenty-first-century research that suggests how profoundly what we pay attention to shapes us. Attention, in other words, is not just a sort of “muscle that allows us to keep looking” as my colleague Hannah Solomon put it in a conversation on this topic, but also “the lens through which we students look,” and this is also critical to consider.

So how might attending to attention play out in the classroom? Here are some initial thoughts. You will surely find more.

You'll want to build strong habits for focused sustained writing through Silent Solo and then extend the amount of time that students can engage in writing over time. You'll want to use FASE Reading to train students to focus on what they are reading without interruption for a period of time and to help them experience the pleasure of focus—“flow” as some people call it, the moment when you lose yourself in a task and the rest of the world—including its phones and screens—fades away. You'll want to help students learn to concentrate during teaching and discussions via Habits of Attention and Habits of Discussion. You'll want to put Turn and Talk on rails. And you'll want to think about how to bring the concept of “flow” to your own instruction via the tools in the “Pacing” chapter. Another key question is the cultural and behavioral environment in your classroom. Can you sustain times for thinking free from interruption? If students shout out answers as soon as you ask, you cannot enforce wait time as a key tool that allows students to reflect and focus on questions. If this is the case, start with Means of Participation.

As the preceding paragraph reminds me, this book may in the end be first and foremost about building and sustaining attention.

Finally, there is technology to consider. Too many classrooms presume that doing a task with technology or on a screen adds value. Educators think that it is inherently good to wire the classroom. Technology gives us immense power but comes with profound downsides, as well. When you don't use technology, when you prevent it, in fact, is at least as important as when you do use it. School is one of the last places where we agree to mutually not introduce constant distractions. Pencil-to-paper writing, taking notes by hand, reading in hard copy books—there is ample research to support each of these activities as far more beneficial than the same task done on a screen.