If you want students to learn, don’t tell them “Pay attention!” Try this

Watson said the more you know about a subject, the easier it is to build on it and understand more, so there is a correlation between learning, memory and attention.

As a teacher, his role is to support memory building through assessment planning and review. Why? There is zero chance that students will be able to both learn and monitor their attention, he said.

It’s easy to blame students for deficits in attention and memory, but in reality “learning is actually very difficult and takes up most and all of the cognitive resources that my students actually have,” Watson said. For example, if his students are learning how to write topic sentences, they need to think about how to complete this difficult task rather than thinking about how to continue on the task—which is exactly what Watson can help them do.

Attention Strategies Useful in the Classroom

High school teacher Blake Harvard integrates self-assessment into the learning process in his AP Psychology class.

He uses simple assessments—such as asking students what they learned the day before or even five minutes ago—to help him understand what class material students have trouble remembering or learning. The frequency of these information recall opportunities helps remember the lesson.

Harvard says assessment is a learning opportunity, and “retrieving information—retrieving a memory—and using it itself strengthens memory.”

Harvard believes that instruction should be memory-centered and that students need to think critically about the way they absorb and retrieve information. His new book, Do I Have Your Attention, presents research findings to teachers in an accessible way that makes a positive contribution to his own classroom practice.

To keep students’ attention, Harvard has them face the front of the classroom, even though the classroom furniture doesn’t easily support this configuration. His students currently sit at tables rather than at individual desks, so he has to get creative to get everyone facing forward.

Decoration in Harvard classrooms was also kept to a minimum, and what was retained was related to the themes of his courses. But “the picture is not entirely bleak,” he said. Cell phones are never around during class, and he encourages students to take notes in pencil on paper rather than copying them on a computer.

Common classroom practices such as movement help capture students’ attention and memory, and the benefits of movement in learning are well documented. But Watson warned that exercise won’t solve students’ attention issues. “The point is not whether exercise is a good or bad idea; it is indeed an effective way to solve alertness problems, but it may make orientation problems worse,” Watson said.

So if a student falls asleep in Watson’s class, he might ask that student to stand up from their desk and complete a task, such as returning a book to another teacher’s classroom. But if students seem distracted by the football game outside the classroom window and their attention shifts away from the lesson (which is an orientation and executive control issue), “moving is probably a bad idea,” Watson says.

Give students time to think

The brain forgets and this is a normal memory process, but sometimes students may experience retrieval failures. When his students struggled with retrieval, Harvard helped by providing context clues or redefining concepts they were having trouble remembering.

When reviewing material from a previous lesson, Watson uses a simple method to promote retention and memory retrieval in students. Instead of starting with a brief review of the previous day’s topic, he asked students to write about what they learned in the previous lesson. He then moves around the classroom and monitors students’ responses. “Now, [students are] Practice by retrieving from their memory rather than me telling them,” he said.

If students can’t seem to remember something they recently learned, “that’s not their failure, it’s my failure because I didn’t practice it enough. So what I need to remember is to include that content in more frequent practice, like retrieval practice,” Watson says.

The pressure teachers face from schools, administrators, and standardized testing districts can be overwhelming, and this pressure can be exacerbated by students’ inability to retain classroom material. However, Watson knows that building a strong foundation in the first half of the year is critical to a student’s long-term success.

For example, Watson’s sophomores need to be able to write a strong five-paragraph analytical essay by the end of the school year. Instead of teaching at a faster pace, Watson spent the entire fall semester focusing on single sentences and paragraphs. His students often ask him why their classes are lagging behind because classmates in other classes are already writing five-paragraph essays, but Watson assures them that mastering the components of a five-paragraph essay first will make writing longer material easier in the spring semester.