Restart the Attention Clock and Ensure Learning!

Denise Burson
Jul 07, 2008

Given that students have a short attention span and classes are scheduled for around 50 or 75 minutes, teachers must do something to control their students' attention and ensure learning is taking place. We recommend using "distributed summarizing" to restart the attention clock. Johnstone and Percival report that teachers who "adopted this approach . . . and deliberately and consistently interspersed their teaching with question prompts, illustrative models or experiments, . . . short problem solving sessions, . . . teachers commanded a better attention span from the class, and these deliberate variations had the effect of postponing or even eliminating the occurrence of an attention break". When teachers intersperse question prompts with active engagement for students for as brief a time as two to five minutes, students are re-energized and learning takes place.

By planning exactly when to insert a question prompt, you can make sure that your students pay the most attention to the issues and concepts that are the most important. Do not ask questions for their own sake; they should be integrally related to giving students practice with the most important concepts in that day's class. This helps students to become responsible and aware of their own learning. Confusions, misconceptions or misunderstandings surface and teachers can then adapt teaching accordingly. The research on the mind gives us the theoretic base for advocating distributed summarizing throughout the lesson to actively engage the learner. A large body of research tells us that when the goal is to foster higher-level cognitive or affective learning, teaching methods, which encourage student activity and involvement, are preferable to more passive methods. What better way to get students actively engaged than to have them talk about what they are learning? Ask them to explain their new knowledge to one another. By making the classroom a social learning experience, instead of a solitary one, teachers can reduce the student passivity and increase learning.