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Key points
- Humans are by nature prone to distraction; what's unnatural is focused and sustained attention, which needs to be honed in education.
- Banning technology from the classroom probably isn't the best approach, since technology can enhance learning if used effectively.
- Building community in the classroom is key to helping students feel invested and engaged in their learning.
- College students have evolved over the last two decades, and educators need to evolve with them to be effective in the classroom
I organized my summer reading to conclude with Jim Lang's, Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It, to psych myself up for another semester of teaching writing to college freshmen. Though Lang’s educational background is in the humanities (he’s the Director of the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University as well as a former English professor), he prescribes a scientifically informed vision of a more productive college classroom, one in which technology serves to enhance the humancentric learning experience.
Distraction, he argues, is nothing new, and in fact serves a very important evolutionary purpose. What is new, however, is how alarmingly effective our devices are at hijacking our distractable nature. Focused and sustained attention, by contrast, does not come naturally to us, Lang notes; rather, it must be honed in college (and life) in order to achieve our goals and live productive lives.
Herein, I highlight just three insights from Lang's book. College and high school teachers will find his book especially useful; others interested in education will find it informative, too.
Build Community in Your Classroom
Lang's insight here is that if college students feel connected to the people around them, they will feel more invested in the classroom experience and want to engage. This claim is intuitively true: humans are social creatures; we communicate not just to get our basic needs met but also to share stories, elicit support from others, and feel cohesiveness with the group.
It was notoriously hard to “build community” via Zoom during the darker days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s much easier in the physical classroom. On our first day of fall semester, I'll arrange the desks in a circle and students will be invited to share names, origins, and their favorite class in high school. Students connect if, say, they're both from the northeast or they both loved physics. Right away, bonds are created that last throughout the semester and, hopefully, beyond.
Taking the class outside on nice days or to the café on campus reinvigorates community-building as a change of scenery often does. On Day One you set the tone: This classroom is an open, welcoming, and safe space to share ideas and learn together. Students feel invested in the college learning experience.
Distraction Is a Natural State of Mind
When I read this, I rejoiced: Thank goodness somebody said it! I’ve long struggled with college students who say they “can’t” read a book or they “can’t” pay attention in their lecture classes. They blame it on their ADHD or their “boring” teachers or their phones. Lang turns this problem on its head, arguing that our ability to be distractable—for our attention to hop from one thing to another—is a large part of what’s kept us alive (both individually and as a species). If we were so wrapped up in conversation while crossing a busy city street that we didn't even notice the taxi running the red light at top speed, we’d be toast.
Likewise, if humans, throughout evolution, hadn’t been able to turn their attention away from tending to home base to the predatory eyes watching from the woods, they’d have been dinner. We can and should be able to use our lightning-fast brains to attend to this and then that and then this again. This ability fundamentally underpins our survival. What has changed, Lang argues, is that our distractions have gotten much better at distracting us: Social media platforms invest millions of dollars in figuring out how to grab and sustain our attention for longer. That is the problem.
I’ll explain to my students tomorrow and throughout the semester that we all get distracted and it’s natural. Sometimes you’re bored; sometimes you’re tired; and sometimes the material stinks (I never feel guilty about ditching a book if it’s not sustaining my attention—there are too many other books to read!). I’ll explain that distraction and attention wax and wane, and that one of the most important tasks during college is figuring out which subjects tend to harness your attention best: Those are the ones you’ll want to pursue in your major and maybe in your ultimate career path. Once you find something you feel passionate about, you don’t have to work so hard to pay attention to it, right?
Take a Nuanced Approach to Technology in the Classroom
I instituted a no-cell-phones policy in my classroom a few years ago, and it works well 90% of the time (the remaining 10% feel the urgent text they need to send apparently outweighs the consequence of a zero for the day). Laptops, too, are an issue.
A peer observer last year alerted me to the fact that, in my most engaged class no less, about half the students were off task even when their peer assessment was due at the end of the short class period. Like Lang, though, I’m skeptical about banning laptops in the classroom. Gen Z students grew up fully engrossed in technology; many received iPads in middle school, played video games after school, and completed all schoolwork on a computer. It seems anachronistic to make the classroom a tech-free zone à la 1992 but then release them to 2022 when class is over.
Lang’s suggestion is to take a nuanced approach to technology in the classroom: putting laptops and phones away when a face-to-face discussion is happening or a student is presenting and employing devices when required by the task at hand—for instance, when, in my writing classes, students are asked to compose a response paragraph to a class discussion or reading. The nuanced approach is a good model that reflects real life. Many of us use laptops in our daily work but don’t need them when hiking in the woods with a friend. Our cell phones are great for texting with friends but not at the expense of ignoring the potential friends sitting around you in the classroom.
References
Lang, J.M. (2020). Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It. Basic Books.
