Get Students to Understand the Power of Their Attention

Hey, it’s Spring Break time!

To help get grab students’ attention when they come back, check out this issue of Coffee with Classavo. It's packed with tips you can use right away.

Grab your favorite drink, sit back, and let's chat about engagement.

Your Students Are in Class, But Are They?

Teaching today is hard. Full stop.

When I think about what makes it tough, I think it’s clear that we all have a mile-long list of hurdles to overcome.

What keeps popping at the top of my list, though, is keeping my undergrad students’ attention. It might be THE hardest thing to do (at least when I’m inside the classroom).

So let’s talk about attention, and what we can do about it — and our brains — to maximize the time that we have with students.

Now this isn’t students fault per se— there’s a million things that are clamoring for our attention, and it sometimes feels that we have to pay attention to them all.

The problem is that the human brain simply didn’t evolve to be able to do this skill — yet (give it time, who knows!).

What we have to do is help students understand that attention is selective, and the cost of paying attention to one thing comes at the cost of paying attention to something else.

Need to prove it to them?Have them watch the video below, something called the “Selective Attention Test”.

It’s pretty simple: have your students count how many times the players wearing the color white pass the basketball.

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Okay, now… did you see it? Or some other changes you might have missed?

Odds are, no.

I recommend to have a conversation with students that their attention matters, and that really, truly, they can only put it towards one thing at a time.By the way, if you’d like the science behind why this is true, here’s a well-regarded study by Atkinson and Shiffrin on the information processing model. Attention is THE resource that determines if sensory information goes into our working memory. Fun!

5 Strategies for Grabbing Students’ Attention

So we know students’ attention matters, so how do we grab it?

Here’s five ways that we can grab students attention right away, and work with any lesson you might teach, even tomorrow!

What does this look like when we put it in practice?

• Maybe we base the start of our lesson on a place that holds personal meaning for students (Personalization).
• Explore a collection of social media posts and embed them for discussion (What’s New).
• Watch a clip of a Ted Talk by a controversial or thoughtful speaker (Ambiguity)
• Try to answer a difficult question posed by student last class (Mystery)
• Create a course-specific version of mythbusters, including some fancy script writing (Mythbusting).

Until then, happy teaching!

—Prof. Nate Ridgway

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How Do We Grab Students’ Attention?

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What's Next?

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