‘Attention is the primary gatekeeper of learning and relearning and the ultimate commodity of our classrooms’ (Kristian Still, 2022*)
We sometimes forget to focus on the simple things that are right in front of us. If people aren’t paying attention, the highest-quality teaching techniques and resources for learning are not going to make a difference. This applies right throughout the world of learning – as aids to learning, we can forget about the importance of relationships, the quality of the learning environment, tight forensic lesson planning, the use of the best, most up to date teaching techniques, fabulous textbooks and so on, if students aren’t paying attention. If we don’t pay attention, we can’t learn. This is why the first part of the new Hinchingbrooke Approach to Learning is ‘We pay attention’.
Paying attention allows information to pass through our senses into our short-term memory – if my maths teacher is explaining how to add simple fractions to me as well as anyone has ever explained it, but I’m staring out of the window and thinking wistfully about my last holiday, it’s very likely that nothing about adding fractions is getting into my head. Obviously, it’s more than a one-step process: we pay attention, then we THINK, and then, maybe, we lay down some memory traces; some neurons are encoded. Schweppe and Rummer (2013) put it nicely when they said, ‘We learn what we think about, and what we think about is determined by what we attend to’.
Daniel Willingham’s Simple Model of Memory (2009), interpreted here by Oliver Caviglioli, also illustrates the point well:
Agree so far? The question then of course becomes, so HOW do we ensure people are paying attention? Unlike some other aspects of teaching and learning, such as memory, there is far less written about having people’s attention SO THAT they can learn well. Maybe it’s less of a science; maybe it merits a load of research – for now, I’ll just say what feels right to me. Starting with what it’s NOT about – it’s not about whizz-bang actions to grab people’s attention. Say I take over a Year 7 Maths class in January and they have 8 lessons per fortnight. Yes, I could bring a trumpet into lesson one and blow on it really hard when I want students’ attention; for lesson two, I could arrive dressed as The Joker and start tap-dancing – I’m probably going to get students’ complete attention, for a while at least. But I can’t be doing things like that 8 lessons a fortnight for the rest of the school year, can I? It’s not about shouting either, or being horrible – that’s equally unsustainable, and undesirable for everyone.
Having people’s attention so that they can learn well has to be about school policies and routines, and those are down to school leaders to set and individual teachers to implement and insist on, with the support of leaders when they need it. I have seen plenty of classrooms where it’s abundantly clear that the students are following strong routines: they arrive at the lesson, unpack quickly and sit down and get on with a brief ‘Do now’ activity that has already been put on the board by the teacher. In this example, they are expected to pay attention right at the start of the lesson and they’ve been taught to do this over time. So it becomes a habit. As does making the transition from students working on thing x to now paying attention to thing y, which the teacher is about to explain.
Strong routines are the cement that holds everything together in the classroom. It’s worth spending a lot of time getting them embedded because once they are, we have the best chance of securing what we want: our students’ attention, every lesson, every day.
*’A teacher’s Guide to retrieval practice: Let’s make some memories stick’ in an article for SecEd, 30 March 2022
