Paying Attention to Attention

Being distracted is the norm. When I expect students to sit and focus on learning challenging material in the dense time-block of our class meeting, I’m asking for something very difficult. It’s hard to maintain a laser-focused attention throughout. The brain simply gets tired. Attention flags. Distraction distracts. What can we do? That’s the focus of James Lang’s latest book, Distracted. 

 

Why are humans easily distracted? Lang summarizes the story outlined in Ancient Brains. It’s an evolutionary argument suggesting that being wired to attend to our surroundings while focusing on a task at hand was important to our survival, back in the hunter-gatherer days. While today we’re unlikely to be attacked by crouching tigers or other hidden dangerous beasts, we might still get mowed down by a car while crossing the street – if we’re not paying attention. The odds of tragedy go up when we’re plugged into our headphones and our eyes are glued to our cellphone screens.

 

The book has a chapter on the debate about whether tech should be banned in the college classroom. Designers of apps and social media have learned how to get our attention, thanks in part to cognitive research over the years. Yes, our science has helped entrepreneurs exploit our attention, and have even persuaded us to give up our privacy. Wisely, Lang does not spend too much time on all this, because like in many other debates, the optimal solution will depend on your particular situation in your particular classroom. Instead he focuses on concepts, principles, and helpful practical suggestions.

 

Distracted begins by outlining its three main ideas about Attention.

·      It’s an achievement. (Distraction is the norm!)

·      It is achievable. (Amazingly, we can get so focused and caught up in something!)

·      Our job as teachers is to cultivate attention.

 

Why this focus on attention? Lang outlines the three phases we must traverse for learning to take place.

1.     We must attend to the item, whatever it might be.

2.     We must process what we are attending to and incorporate it into our existing knowledge frameworks.

3.     We must be able to retrieve the newly learned item from our memory after the initial apprehension and processing.

Too often we focus on the second stage. Sometimes we use the third stage to measure learning, and forget to utilize it as part of learning. As to the first stage? Sometimes we assume that what we’re presenting is so compellingly interesting that we skip cultivating attention before we launch into what we think are the meaty parts. I’m certainly guilty of this, but over the years I’ve started to pay attention and be more thoughtful of how to frame each class.

 

My favorite passage in the book comes from Chapter 5, “Curious Attention”. We’re all curious. Our ancient brains may have something to do with this. We’re still certainly curious in this day and age. Young children are marvelous examples of curiosity, constantly asking why, why, why. I particularly enjoy puzzles, and this is not surprising because it tickles a part of my brain and working through a puzzle brings me joy and satisfaction. Lang says it better than me so I’ll quote him instead.

 

“Puzzles intrigue us, but they do so because we know they have a solution that just happens to evade us at the moment. We expect to solve them or have them solved for us. Your favorite mystery novelist excels in the creation of puzzles, which she generally resolves for you by the end of the story. Mysteries are those big, open-ended questions that fascinate us, and yet have no easy answers, or no answers at all. Mysteries are capable of long, sustained study or exploration without resolution…”

 

This might explain why I’m attracted to origin-of-life research. It’s a mystery of the big open-ended kind. But I also enjoy crossword puzzles, logic puzzles, spatial puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, of the shorter and solvable variety. (Interestingly I don’t read many mystery novels.) I like how Lang goes on to ask the question: “What is the mystery that lies at the heart of your discipline?” This semester I opened my G-Chem 2 classes with the elusive and nebulous nature of energy. It’s something we’ll be exploring throughout, and this week’s discussion board prompt asks the student to ponder that strange thing we call entropy. I’m looking forward to reading the students’ entries.

 

I’d like to return to Lang’s third key idea – that as instructors, cultivating attention is an important part of our job. One tidbit he mentions is that attending to complex ideas can be very different experiences for the speaker versus the listener. Chemistry is both challenging and complicated, even at the introductory level. Lots of things are going on simultaneously at different levels. There’s also the gulf between the expert and the beginner to take into account. My ability as an expert to get into the “flow” while expounding on chemistry might feel good to me, but the students might simply be dumbfounded. I should pay attention to this phenomenon.

 

And if distraction is the norm, and if attention naturally degrades over time in my classroom, I need to pay attention to the pacing and the pausing. Lang discusses studies where student attention is renewed when switching to an “active learning” activity, but also when switching out of it and into a mini-lecture. Pondering this makes me doubly irritated at having to teach remotely through Zoom where I’ve not done as much mix-and-match activities in class as I did for in-person classes. This also means I need to revisit the density of information in my classes – I’ve always felt the need to make every minute count in the classroom, and I’m reminded that I often err on doing too much – or expecting too much out of the students. It’s important and good to have high expectations, but I too easily forget to be attentive as a teacher. I need to pay more attention to attention.