Transcripts For CSPAN2 James Lang Distracted 20240711

Much goes into the planning of the conference, and its gratifying to see a Record Number of colleagues from across the region taking advantage of our good work. For the first time ever, we hit over 1200 registrations. Welcome to our returning attendees, new attendees, and remote viewers who may be tune in through zoom or via cspan who has asked to broadcast the recording for todays keynote. We are absolutely thrilled to reach so many colleagues, wherever you might be. It took a whole team to get us here, team of colleagues representing more than 17 campuses in the broad expanse or our metropolitan region. They and others are volunteering time and energy to ensure all runs smoothly. We would nominally ask them to stand and be rick need built that not possible this year, unless you want to do so from home, please too. So as you see them convening sessions or helping, thank them for their work. Idles like to take a moment to wreck fine tee enormous effort taken by their center for teaching and learning assistant director jennifer mccannry, and emily goldsteen for leafing the conference. Look at these amazing women. Theyre so talented and creative. Im overcome with pride to know jen and emily and i get to work with them. Its incredible to see their creative touches to this years conference. We would like to personally thank the support the university of missouri leadership who places a high value on teaching and learning at our university. Without the support we couldnt do what we do. Please help me welcome our provost, marie mora for a few comments. All right. Good morning, everyone, and thank you keeta and thank you cspan for profiting the important conference. I hope everyone is doing well this morning and staying health and safe. It is my sincere explore privilege to welcome you to university of missouri st. Louis on such a beautiful and exciting day. I would have loved to welcome you to our campus and region the region is rich with history and has an inspiring set of institutions of high are education with create give innovative faculty, tv and students. Together we make the metropolitan region as strong as it is, and it is my understanding this is the 19th g and technology conference. That is remarkable. Conferences like this one where we can exchange ideas, learn together, and network, are how we maintain our strength and excellent in the region, against the challenged that many institutions of Higher Education across the nation are facing. During these unprecedented times teaching with technology hayes tend to keep students engaged and on track towards graduation and has not been easy. Sharing ideas and strategies through venues like this one maybe the job lighter. Thanks to all of your for devoting your time to think but how to to use technology to improve student learning, teaching, and research. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our keynote speaker, dr. James lang, professor of english and director of the demore center for teaching excellent at Assumption College in worcesters, massachusetts. The author of several books, the most recent of which are small teaching, everyday less fronts from the science of learning and teaching distracted minds. And im sure well all agree that our mind have been a little moyer distracted these days. I believe you have more details on his background in your conference materials. So join me in giving a warm welcome to professor lang in leading todayskey note address, featuring distractedded minds, old challenges and new contexts. Thank you. Thank youeverybody. And welcome. Im grateful for your presence. Im sorry i cant bev in st. Louis mitch wife is from st. Louis, i got my mast are at st. Louis university and i would have loved to have been there so, im grateful too for your presence during this time. I know how difficult it is to stay focused on webinars and zoom meetings. I was just listen to wife do this with her kindergarten class and ill count this as a success notify one raises the hand and asks me show show them their cat. So the bar is set pretty low. Emergency when youre struggling with the attention of your student imagine what my wife is dealing with tritrying to get fiveyearold told stay on the zoom call and be focused ill share my screen here and would like to be able to start our session today by talking a little bit about think philosophically but what about why attention is important and why we want to be able to make attention a value in our teaching, and thats where i want to get us started here in terms of thinking a little more about the bigger picture. I want to suggest to you that we should think pull out the idea that in some ways attention is a very fundamental part of what we do as teachers. Used to a book the ecology of attention argues that teaching in a sense is the earth of directing the attention of our studented. The essential task or teaching consists in heightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important and what we are looking at and i would encourage you to income put that. The extent to which your discipline has a kind of vast potential terrain and your job as a teacher is to identity what is most identify what is most important in the terrain and direct the attention of your students to that material. That content, those skills. So think but the idea that actually attention is really fundamental in terms of how we conceive of ourselves as teachers and conceive of our fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters in our disciplines and classes. Hain is a author of book called how we learn, and what he argues here ill argue as well today that we should be paying more attention to attention. If students arent attending to the correct information or the right things in terms of skills, the content, the qualities were trying to instill the them, its unlikely theyll learn anything. So our greatest talent, our greatest challenge, is challenging channeling and capturing the attention of our students, and im not going to get so much into the cognitive theory put one thing we nome from the research on how people learn is that process starts with attention. If student does not Pay Attention to whatever it is theyre trying to master, theyre not even going to get to sort of the latester later step odd learning so attention is the fundamental part of the learning process and the firstpast of the learning process and this is a value we have to make be really deliberate about in our teaching and have 0 think carefully how we are cultivating and sustaining the attention of our students. Thats true especially now, when were all dealing with working through our everything mediated through our devices, have this Global Pandemic raging round is, faces permanent and professional challenge but its true at any moment as well, so when we get back into our classrooms, one hopes, next year, then we will still need to be thinking pout how to cultivate and sustain the attention of our students. Ill finish this philosophical part by noticing not only is it our challenge to sort of capture and sustain student attention, but that challenge is made difficult by the fact that attention is a limited Capacity Resource. We have all experienced this on or zoom calls and everyday lives as well, paying attention to this, not paying attention to that. The fact that attention fatigues over time and its more difficult to pay in sort contexts and we have thats experiences every day and we want to think pout ourselves as Michelle Miller argues, a cog cognitive psychologist that we are stewart offed thank you students attention and she argues here that attention is the foundation for everything we want to do atas instructors as instructors but within the cognitive system its a precious limited resource, so since we are the designers of learning experiences we need to think about ourselves as stewards of the attention of tower students. What kind of stewardship are we offer to our students . What are we doing to support the attention of students in the classroom . Prior to the pandemic when we were the biggest question i got when he spoke to people about attention and distraction was what do i do put a the guys our room. That question has been pushed aside in our current context. But the question sort of is always what kind of stewardship are we offering to our students . Are we just saying, no, put your devices away, students cant Pay Attention anymore or actually trying to take a proactive positive stance and say im here to help support you in your effort to Pay Attention and i want to be a partner with you and thinking how to do that together and thats part of what ill argue here and what i argue in the poock as well. I like to bin our conversations by give putticcal context there is a lot of concern today but the extent to which our devices are sort of slowly degrading our ability to Pay Attention, our maintenance into teachers who can no longer Pay Attention because were so used to the sort of constant stimulation of our phones and other devices. So i think its worth stepping back a little bit to good some Historical Context and that can help us think more carefully about the kinds of solutions. So we can go back a long way to aristotle who writes that people who are passionately devoted to the flute are unable to Pay Attention to arguments if they hear someone playing a flute because they enjoy the flute playing more than the activity that presently occupies them. You might substitute here, listening to arguments as being in your classroom, and flute playing is youtube videos on your phone. So we can see going back almost as far as we have people writing about the mind, ill go back further an air to the dish aristotle, people were expression concern about the ability to stay focused especially to stay focused on michigan thats cognitively challenging like his. Ing to, following an argue. When storm temptations come along but external temp temptations come along, we step away from the challenging things and we go to the easier or more pleasant things. So we can see in this actually augustin writes, other writers wrote about the problem of our inability to Pay Attention when we want to. So we had the tee steir listen to the argue; we know its going to be helpful and yet still somehow we cant ignore that flute playing off in the distance. John dunn wrote the step to which he found attention disinfect in this prayers as a cleric. Notice what happens her when the throws himself town in the chamber pray. I put missiles in the position, invited guide and is a angels to come and then when i arrive i next god and his angel foods the fly, the winding of a door, and helps with this quote splits into two parts to identify the two ways in which we typically are distracted. One is the external stuff whether its flu play forking thefully but theres a second part which is thing that come inside my head. A memory of yesterdays pleasures. A fear of tomorrows dangers. Strong, noise in my a nothing, fans, all these things. But you notice that there are actually two kinds of things that can distract us, things outside of us and things inside our own heads and probably notice during the pandemic, a lot of the distraction has been things inside our own heads as were kind of thinking but global issues and our personal and professional challenges, thats making it more and more difficult for us to stay focused. Okay, i love this one as an example of how we start to worry about the technological distractions that arise, so this is a cartoon from the british magazine punch, and its from 1906, and its a series of cartoons giving forecasts for what will happen in 1907. So you have two sort of gnatly dressed wardans looking at their telegraph mons and not as a result paying attention to one another and its striking to put this picture in think but in relationship to the pictures we see of teenagers all huddled over the offends and the lament we dont talk to each other, were not communicating with ewan another so this is another concern we have that goes back a very long way. By the way, just to sort of note this i this talk two parts. The forthpart is the philosophy context history biology part of it and ill pause after that part, after im finished with that part and take questions from the chat, so meals if you have questions along the way or comments, feel free to put them in the chat, and then our moderators will let me know what is coming and ill stop and respond to some of those. Then well do the second half and the second half will be the same something, be able to put your questions the chat and well discuss them at the end. We see a new element addle thats external distractions that, for example, the fly and the door, whatever it might be, now we have the sort of added mix mix indication complication of technology. The favorite quote is from a november veil call the provincial lady in london argues series of novels about a woman who is dealing withall the challenges of household management while she was trying start a literary career as well, and in one of the novels called a provincial lady in london she writes about attending a literary conference for the first time, and she youll see, im sorry to find attention wandering to spirally unrelated topics, companion at marriage, absence of radiators in church, difficulty in preparing ice, she doubles down on her attention and tries to stay focused by taking notes, and then alert stop that her notes refer to getting post cards are for her children, memorandum but a dress that needs to stitch and finding her local bankers in case she runs out 0 money. Thrift is from 1930. So if youre feeling distracted during the conference, just know that you are not alone in that experience,ow are the provincial lady share yours pain. Way dont show you a before and after quote in term odd the way our contemporary technologies affect the way we think about technology and distraction. This is a quote from 1741, isaac watts wrote book called the improvement of the mind write pout the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the company of distraction, it makes you a more distractable person. So what he is arguing here is pout people going to coffee shops. Might not have known in the 16th and 17th century coffee shops swarmed into england and europe more generally, places of kind of heightened activity, buzzing with people talking, newspapers, meetings, stuff like that. And he is saying dont go to to the place is if youre trying to study because all the things that strike you eye and your ear have a tendency to steal the mind from a steady pursuit of any subject so thats the normal distractions but he argues and thereby your sole gets into a habit of trifling and wandering so if you spend a lot of time in the company our your distracts you back more distracted person. Once you see that ice cack watt has been arguing this in the 18th century, it can give us a little context for the argue. Ed made by people like Nicholas Carr in 2010. You see he argues in the shallows that the calm what the internet has done to our ability to Pay Attention, our distractibility, hand focuses indistrict linear mind is pushed if a side by a new kind of mind, who wants to take and n and toll owl information in short disjointed overlapping verse, the faster the better. And you can see now the extent to which that concern is a very ancient one actually. So the idea that somehow our new technologies are fundamentally changing us becomes less plausible when well see the extent to which these concerns we have been having these concerns for a very long time now. Another thing i hope you have soon in the quotes ive showed you already is we never really had a calm, focused undistracted and linear mind. Thats not the way the human mind works. The idea that we had this there was this prelaps stayed in which we calmly sat and focused on things for as long as we wanted. Thats kind of a myth. We never really had a mind like that. So, i want you to kind of think about this now as we go forward. Humans have distractable minds and the idea of this talk, teaching distracted minds, is meant to convey the fact that all of our minds are distracted and so as a result, we need to think carefully about how we teach to a distracted mind. Now, one striking thing pull out all those historical wrotes in the book has a little bit more of this, quotes from variety of cultures and time periods, and one striking thing youll notice in all of those quotes is that they are laments. We are unhappy pout the fact that our minds are easily distractable. We seem to want a mind that is better able to Pay Attention and engage in long periods of sustained focus, and so whenever we talk about our distractibility, we seem to be unhappy about it. Thats a really kind of interesting thing to notice but a owl these comments about our mind and it should make us wonder, why do we have these distractable minds . Why did we evolve with these mind we wish were a little bit different. We wish we had this ability to push if a distractions and look in and focus. So i want to spined a spend a few multiples talk us minutes talking about that. One of the really nice descriptions of this comes from a psychiatrist author of the divided brain and this comes from an animated video can lecture he gives. And he fifths an example here of a bird trying to peck for seeds against the difficult background and as he pointed out here the bird actually kind of has to have two different forms of attention. It needs to be able to focus to pick out the seed fence that background, and at the same time it has to be aware of its surroundings, because its got be aware of the potential for predators, for other birds around it, for kind of just has to be generally aware of its surroundings. And this in fact is true for us as well. We need to be able to focus but we also need to be aware of what is going around us to be alert to friends and enemies, dangers, we dont have the predators coming at us the same way the bird does but think about the way in which we evolved and its was important for us to be able to track an animal or to be able to start a fire but to be aware of the potential dangers around us as well as the potential positive things new food sources, new potential social groups, that kind of thing. So, along our evolutionary history its for a good reason we developed this ability to focus as well as kind of the ability to the capacity for awareness and our kind of to be easily distracted to the things around it that might actually be helpful to us. Now, the striking thing pout primates and other animals as well is the extent to which that kind of divide ability to focus is kind of intensified by the fact that we especially as primates are really drawn toward novelty. And so in the distracted mind which i one of my favorite books about this issue of distraction in a more general way, and ill show you an image of that at the end of the talk, they argue that we are information seeking creatures. And that Research Shows that in addition to kind of foraging for food and drink, our brains have kind of evolved to forage for new information and to continually be curious about new information, because again sort of through our lounge history it was useful say, im doing this but i want at the whates going on over there . Or maybe if i tried this a little bit differently, Something Different would happen. Kind of continually pushing ourselves to ask questions and to kind of look for novelty. To ask yourselves question to wonder and take kind of rabbit holes and pathways that might lead somewhere unexpected and that iseult elementary help ultimate live helpful. What has happened recently i dont want to downplay the fact we are our technologies are actually Getting Better and better at playing on this aspects of our minds and so what we have now that were dealing with here, with our offends, these are machines that have been carefully designed in order to appeal to our desire for novelty. Think what your phone does for you terms of providing you with novel information. Its constant. So its always available to give you something new when you are looking for something new. So you can check your email. Youve see what all your emails are and im done with that. Now you can pop over 20 twitter and theresing in smu and then go to instagram and see whats available and by them tile youre dune with that probably have more emails. So if youre looking for novelty, the phone is kind of a perfectly designed machine in order to provide you with that. Not only that but you should consider the fact that this is a billion dollar many billion dollar industry to try to capture your attention threw devices and theres a lot of time and Energy Invested in trying to ensure that these devices capture and keep your attention. So, the difference is today that the machines have gotten better at playing on the aspects of our mind that have always been there so the companies are Getting Better at thats as they put time and energy and work power into it. The question becomes have they got son good at it we have been rewired. You hear people saying this in all the time. I no longer able to Pay Attention. Students no longer able to Pay Attention. Somehow these devices are kind of rewiring our mind. My favorite psychologist is Dan Willingham at the university of virginia, and willingham and other everyone else i read on this subject suggests that we probably should step back from that concern because of the fact that attention is so central to our ability to think that imagine that somehow in the court of a few years, its undergone a significant key tier youre deterioration. That would require retrofitting of other cognitive functions and that kind of reorganization of our brains at a kind of species level is going to have over evolutionary time and not just because we started playing withour smartphones. So, it can change our brains in an acute way in the moment for a short period of time while were with our technology or afterward but the kind of deep rewiring we hear people talk but that you may be concerned but for yourself, doesnt really seem to be good evidence that is happening, those kind of architectural levels of our brain. So, to me thats great news. What it tells us is that our brains are still there as they always have been, theyre distractible because they have always been distractable and also able to Pay Attention when we the circumstances are right and when we are kind of put the effort into it to bring our attention to a task. So the brain of your students are still there as well, available for attention, and so what this all leads me to is the idea that if we want the attention of our students, we have to think but how we are deliberately cultivating it. And if theres one thing i want you to take away from this talk today is whats you see on the screen here. We need to think start thinking about attention as an achievement. Paying attention is an achievement its not the default mode. So i think sometime bed thinks that attention is here and then we fall away into distraction. I want to suggest is that our normal state istive extraction. Our thoughts swirling around in our heads, were attend tonight to environment, i maybe think can but one thing and another thing at the same time and when we are able to rise out of that and Pay Attention, that is an achievement, something we are able to do and do evidentlessly and effortlessly and multiple steps are needed to ensure we get we start paying attention and that we stay on track. So i really like this concept from daniel reeseberg that attention is an achievement and if it is that means we need to think but how are we helping students achieve it . What are we doing in order to support their attention over the course of a learning experience . And so that is our goal for thinking about this thats what i want to do for the second half of the session, is to think about the strategies were using that can support attention or might push students away into their distractions. Lets pause here and just sort of review the first principles. The first thing is to remember that a human mind is an easily distractable mind. And theres a chapter in the become that goes through all this historical examples i showed you a few of them already. But trust me, if you reading older work i was doing research nor become and started reading is a normally read, novels and live in and credit philosophy and criticism and i started to notice when people talked but attention and distract youll see it everywhere and for about as far back as you can read. So human mind is an easily distractable mind. Our Current Technologies technoe intensifying a precising college these present whale view ace the rite historical attitude. We have always been distracted but we are facing some special new challenges because of the fact that our Current Technologies are so good at playing on our distractable natures. So thats kind of to me the two halves of that equation. Attention is a hard won and fragile achievement and i think there are two things. Forthof all in a classroom setting we have to win the attention of students, we have to do things in order to draw them some the experience, but its also fragile. Its easy to fall away from it. And so we have to think what we are doing in order to support and sustain attention over the course of the class period. And then lastly if attention matters to learning, theres a lot of good arguments for that when we think pull out the cognitive literature we have to cultivate it deliberately. We have to make this a value in our teaching and i know you probably thinking i have all these other thing is need to think put in teaching and i would suggest to you actually if you kind of view you can do a lot of those things through the lens of attention actually. So, one thing we have all been talking about recent live is the importance of community in the classroom, and we face special challenges with that now asunder classes many of us are teaching only online classes and not having the normal opportunities to Cultivate Community in our classrooms that we did in the facetoface classroom. Put you can think pout this through the lens of attention as well. So what do we in the classroom community, one thing we try to do for one identity is attend to each. Other i pay take to you as an Pay Attention to you, i listen to you, i give you the gift of my attention and i hope that youre doing that same thing for me. So if we think pull out community, attention actually can be an avenue toward creative think about how we are cultivating community in the courtroom. How are we giving our attention to one another. How are we ensuring that when a student speaks other, students are giving that student their attention. So, a lot of the kind of challenges and problems be face in Higher Education i think can be viewed through the lens of attention and the lens of attention can help us think celttively pout potential about potential solutions so long standing challenges in education. Usually when i give the talk in i start give these talks about attention also i was working on the book, and the issues that people also wanted to talk pull out of course was device nets classroom. What die do. That is less often issue less of an issue now because were so. Im going to say one thing. That is to invite you to consider the extent to which your students can be partners in helping you think about how to support and sustain attention in your classroom. Your students are in three, four, five other classes, they have had lots of other classes if your upper class students have had plenty of other classes already. Theyve been in fireworks ten, 15, 20 or 30 classroom environments in which the teachers had different policies about devices and about attention, and which teachers use different strategies in order to try to support and sustain their attention so they have a wealth of experience in terms of solutions about how to cultivate and sustain their attention. Theyre sitting through zoom sessions all the time now. And webinars like this one. What is helping them . What is driving them away what . Is the moment at which they turn to their turn away from the screen and turn to their phones . Ask them these questions. And see what solutions they might offer you that will best help them sustain their attention throughout whatever it is youre asking them to do. Its nearing the end of september. A great time to sort of studented have had the our tower weekness your classes already. Three or four weeks of other class, student policies and creative teachers trying to do different things. Ask them what has happened and what hasnt been helpful to them. In your class in their other classes, the term and maybe in other class over the course of their high school and college experiences. See what kinds of idea they might be able to offer you in terms of what you might what you it might be doing in the classroom. Midterm evaluation is the great time ask these questions. I did this with my own students friar to the prior to the pandemic last year, asking them did it help give me solutions for what would make them most what i do too to help best support their attention in the classroom and they gave me several ideas i inflame thought but, thing theyd had seen my colleagues doing and i never had access to that. So consider what you can learn from your students about how to support their attention, and also invite you to think put your own experiences in sessions just like this one. What is the point at which you start to fade away . What can you learn from that about what youre going to do ifure own students, turn the lens of attention to yourself and think about your own distractions, when you get distracted and what draws you back interest a session like this one. Now is the time i want to pause and see what potential questions might have come up here about the first half of the presentation. So, jen, i dont know if theres anything the chat we should address or want me to respond to any particular thing that has come up. We did have couple of questions in the chat. The first one was about people with adhd or add and the struggles with that. One of our attendees mentioned that its kind of like continuously being in a coffee shop, even when theyre in a quiet isolated room. Right. Coffee shop inside your head, right . So, as a part of my research nor book i look at the literature on kind of the attention deficit disorders or adhd. And essentially what i kind of drew from that is the solutions that help us Pay Attention that help anyone Pay Attention can help those students. Its of course more challenging for her to students but the basic principles and pathaways are similar. One thing that i recommend in the book, for example, in a facetoface classroom, so this is when most of us or not worried put this particular semester put one thing in the book i talk pout is thewide idea of this often invisible plain in the classroom. Im in the to front expect then theres the desks and then as many teachers do not cross that invisible plain. I was die a lot of observing of teachers and the book and i cant tell you how many teacher its save that just stay in that little empty space between the first disks andboard. We of the easting to go thursday a facetoface classroom to pay better typings students is to break that plane and to get out there in the seats, to walk around, address individuals students, talk from different corners of the room. Now, one thing that first got me thinking about that was as i mentioned earlier my wife is a Kindergarten Teacher and when she has student whose come in and they have been have attention problems in their individual plans, one of the first recommendations they get is that student should sit near the teacher. So, the physical presence of the teacher actually helps support the attention of that student and i think that we can sort of start the. Like that was a specifically designed to help the studented but i believe we can generalize that to be one that helps everyone. Again if we were in in a Conference Room right now, all of us together, i would be standing right next to one of you right now, and the person im standing next to would be vary attentive. And i would be trying to move around that room in order to make sure that everybody has the times when kind of i was speaking directly to their area you sigh that in theater how actors speak to different parts of the house. So, what im kind of just trying to say here the principles im going to argue for are one this think can help support attention for students even though its more challenging for them. Im jumping out of order but this ties to what youre saying, theres the question of stand us versus sitting down. When youre lecturing, and in a facetoface room or like this . Either. They said are you standing up now when youre speak topping us today . While most of us are sitting down while youre lecturing . Yeah. I am standing right now and i do that to help keep my own energy up and that is a challenge in these kind of facetoface environments. Karen costa wrote a book, the camera eat outside energy. When im doing a session liking this i have to be especially energetic and thats one of the many reasoned why zoom is especially causing for students exhaust for students and teaches bus i have to be a little more energetic. Of course its useful if youre in the recipient to be probably help standing as well getting more blood flow going, pacing back and forth, that kind of movement helped your cognitive functioning so im standing. I all stand for these. The human brain has evolved to filter out irrelevant information such as background noise. How toes that fit in with attention in the modern classroom. A big one. Well, thats a complicated question here. To filter out redundant stuff. That is go to depend on what you what the person thinks is done the framework theyre bringing to the experience is going to help them determine what sort of relevant or redundant or irrelevant or not. So thats probably involves more kind of how too you help students recognize what matterss and what doesnt matter . That more of the tee sign of the content than specifically thinking about the cultivating and sustaining of attention. So thats maybe a deeper question here that im going to punt. Another question about the positive i engage in multiple activities when the tasks are mundane. Was a all know the whole thing but doing more thingses a once, theres so much written but the myth of multi tasking with think we are able to do this very well and when it and lots of scientist have shown user were not very good or as good as we think. However, were not good at it when wore doing similar kinds of things. And when both things require thought. So like require our full attention. You can watch tv and fold laundry. You can have a conversation and do something that doesnt require a lot of your attention. So thats why a lot of us while we feel like we can multitask because we often can if were doing thing that are not requiring our full take. You run into problem when youre trying listen to a reb naar and also respond to emails and post things require your attention and that kind of is going to diminish your ability to retain something from the webinar as well as write a carfully constructed email with no typos in it. So, thats the way to think about it. According to jump down the rabbit hole for a little while, it might lead me to something interesting. Its also the case of creativi creativity, the results of some kind of opposing two very different things. That may be im doing this and i will think about my product and start on a long time while Something Else comes up. That can be a really productive thing our brain is doing for us. I recognize for a minute, these things might come together. It is great for creativity and curiosity. We can have activities in the classroom that can help support that. I write about some of that in the book and also on the chapter and connecting so for those of you in the afternoon, im going to talk about those strategies. We can handle channel the brain in interesting ways through that activity. We have time for one more question. I think this is really relevant as well, the physiological aspects such as having enough to eat or being dehydrated, does this become an equity issue . Of course. They all interfere. If youre hungry, worried about taking care of your sibling, anything. Are these things interfering . Of course we want to think about and to me, were not really going to talk about those, there are six kinds of principles i argue for the we can use. One is thinking about an equity issue when we think about giving attention to our students and the challenges there racing. When i Pay Attention to you, youre more likely to Pay Attention to me. We need to Pay Attention to the challenges they are facing. In the book, but i will talk about the community and that but absolutely, we need to be aware of policies throwing away the attention of our students. Its always been true of things like anxiety or learning challenges. Thats always been true. Its especially true with all thats going on around us so we need teachers, pay close attention to students and challenges they are facing. The questions keep coming so i dont know, i know you had a certain a lot of time. Lets do second half. I think i will be able to get through it in 20, 25 minutes at most. That still gives us, how are we doing on time. With god until 10 30 p. M. Okay, ten or 15 minutes. Some of these, i believe youre going to address them in your second half. Okay. All right, were going to now start to think about solutions and what we can do in order to help cultivate and sustain that atmosphere and attention. In this particular area, three things. Structure, want to think about the fact of attention fatigue and so what are we doing to renew it . Then ill talk about the role i think that can be played in this process. In these first two things, i will think about maybe a playwright and a poet. This will be an easy thing for you to hang your hat on in terms of what you want to take away from it and think about the idea of the fact that the attention of our students has limits. It is true not only of our students but all of us. Tension is a Capacity Resource and it can change over time. One great demonstration is 2014, this looked at how long did students engage with videos and for large conducted for multiple years . I believe this data comes from Something Like 7 Million Viewers and they looked at how long students actually watched the videos part of the move. Along did they stay on the video before they signed off and did Something Else . What you will notice striking. When students watch a video on an online course, thats entirely online, up to about ten minutes, they watch the entire video. Nine to 12 minutes, they started to watch only about half of it. When the videos got longer than 12 minutes, they would watch only about 20 of it. What you see here is the extent in which attention fades over time. I want to get this, what we are asking students to do have directed attention. Directed attention requires effort, it plays a central role in our ability to focus, is under our control, some things will get away from us but this is what i want to focus on right now, susceptible to fatigue. Our attention is gradually fading overtime requires more and more effort for us to Pay Attention over the course of an experience. This is true in any kind of experience. Sometimes students cant Pay Attention over 75 minutes, well i cant. The attention forbade over 75 minute discussion also that is just how our attention works. Prolonged mental effort to directed attention fatigue. We want to think about that. Of course, the great articles of organizers focus on Harvard Business review, this is especially true of zoom fatigue. One thing i love in the article, in a zoom meeting, live discussion, we are looking at faces the entire time this is not normal for us. In real life, how often do we steer at somebodys face in person within 3 feet . It makes us uncomfortable. When we are talking to people in real life, we looking around all the time. The kind of stare off and then return our case, we are looking out the window but when we are on these video calls, when students on their cameras in the classroom, if i look away, they will think i am no longer paying attention. We dont make that same judgment in facetoface contact. You might recognize here, staring at one another, when you want to know if somebody is lying, get close to the base and look them right in the eye. Of course the joke is, we are all cringing as that happens because we dont get close and look in the eyes like that for an extended period of time but that is what we are doing in these zoom calls. So in a special way, which is our current situation, it is causing our attention to page right now. What i want you to think about as you are creating a learning exchange for your students whether its online or as you get back into the classroom and hopefully next year, think about the fact that a playwright, for 2000 plus right years, it had to think about, how to capture and stain the attention of humans over two or three hours when they are forced to sit still and just look up at them . I think we can learn something from the strategies theyve done to do that. They do quite a few things. First of all, you get a program. The program tells you how the experience is going to unfold. I think there is real value to that. You tell your students, we are going to talk about 20 minutes, if the conversation is good, will go a little longer. After 20 minutes or so, to do this activity and ill talk to you about 15 or 20 minutes and then a mini lecture, helping people understand how long i need to be good and keep my focus. Being able to lay out the structure of experience requires us to be more organized but the attention of your students is important, this is worth thinking about. There are acts and intermissions. They start with interesting items to draw the attention in this things get interesting, you draw the audience in. The thing about this example, his work i mentioned earlier, it talks about the fact that questions are really important for starting a learning experience. For something mysterious or whatever it might be, we have those questions. Willingham argues speakers coming into classes Start Talking about the answers to the Big Questions are disciplined but we need to do surface question. What is the interesting question for today . Getting with that to get the attention of our sins. A colleague does this, she begins every class by showing students a microbe and asking them to quickly dump on their phones and devices and find everything you can about that microbe and together the class compiles a quick overview of that microbe for the day so it is a great way to draw the students in and capture their attention, use their devices, it is not about devices or no devices and she uses that, but they discover to launch into her lecture. She knows they will find things she takes it and pushes them forward into the class for that day so how are you beginning in a way that draws the students in catches their attention . The kinds of questions you ask in the beginning . Second, how are you offering change . It may be active versus passive engagement. As i said, the important thing is not much to say i am not lecturing, i dont lecture you on a zoom call is about idea. Maybe we need to think about how we are doing it in the lecture and stopping to do an activity and then going back to. If youre doing lectures or videos, break it up into smaller chunks especially online. If you have students do activities, dont always go to breakout groups, maybe there are times you have a whole class discussion, maybe they do something individually, maybe they do a google doc, whatever it might be. Think about how you are very activities youre having students doing. In the classroom, it is not a bad idea we do group work to get up and move deaths as a way to reenergize and recapture their attention but one of the transitional moments for longer sessions, i do think we need to be able to take breaks. On and off camera, students are not spending 75 or 50 minutes having to look at faces the entire time. Maybe they have a time they can turn the camera off and do an activity created for them to think about the fact that change renews the engine. So how are you offering change to reengage . Doing Something Different every five or ten minutes but two or three shifts over the course of the class. I think will go a long way for something to be engaged. I did a workshop once the colleague of mine who did an interesting thing, she had us write down all of our Teaching Strategies we use on index cards. You can see what i wrote down for mine and then she had us shuffle them around. We would like what was the pattern most likely to use . As interested to see was a pattern likely sustained attention . I encourage you to do Something Like this especially if youre struggling with your teaching right now in terms of getting them to engage, write down all of the things you can do, put them on different posters or index cards, shuffle them arou around. What emerges . What is the best way for me to create an experience to sustain the attention of my students over the course of this. I like to talk about the fact that no matter what we do, attention will fade sometimes. We might have great discussions going really well and it goes on longer than it should and things fade. This talks about the idea, i love this, this talks about the extent to which we can learn from experiences about how to reengage attention, it talks about black churches, when they noticed the attention of the congregation they would pause and say, can i get an amen . They would do that to her three times and there would be shouts back. I to encourage you, its probably more appropriate for your facetoface classroom, what are the strategies you have . Stop and reengage in the moment. We should have structured things we are doing to help the court but we also should have a couple things in our pocket like this where we can say okay, stop here and i want everyone to write down these three things. Or, i got an image. Lets look at this together and see. There is a new problem kind of reserved when things got so here. Now is the time for us to look at it. Like i said, will do group work now, i would like everyone to get up and move the desk as an opportunity for a break and reenergize ourselves and get back to something about how you structure the experience for attention but also, what you have in your pocket you can pull out to help reengage in the moment . Okay, that is thinking like a playwright. Thinking like a poet what i mean by this is think about the fact that our attention not only in an experience but also as we become more familiar with something, we tend to pay less and less attention to it. Your students are used to coming into classrooms, sitting down, listening to teachers, doing the same basic activities classrooms always do, lecturing, discussions, writing and all that. I would encourage you if you want to capture the attention of your students, start thinking like a poet. One thing poetry does for this, for example painting, reno attention to the world. The poet of the book she had so many problems she wrote about attention, i love her poem here. Structure for living a life, Pay Attention, be astonished and then tell about it. To me, this is a great guide for what we want our students to be able to do. We want them to Pay Attention to the course material. Be astonished because this is amazing stuff and we want them to talk about. Whether its in discussion or maybe their papers, whatever it might be, we want them to talk about the wonders theyve seen in our discipline. The original way to accomplish that, i argue for the creation of divination activity. These are things you create to reawaken your students, the wonders of your discipline, connection to the lives in the everyday world. Practice your most creative self. Thinking creatively about things that are really going to awaken the attention of your students and that is the goal. Get students to see something brandnew eyes in the same way a still life painting graphs attention the new way, get us to think about and every day experience in a new light. That is the goal of these activities. What i mean by this . Here are a few examples. In the book talk about the holy cross, she gave her students this credible assignment, she asked students to go to this museum you by. Every week, look at the same painting and right a new response to that, one to two page response every single week. They had to write 13 papers about the same painting and she describes it in the article, they began and superficial ways and students had to look and look keep looking over and over again, it was astonishing what they were able to notice and how they were able to start making connections between this work in their own lives, the world around them, things they had learned in other classes, they got deeper and deeper in their analysis because teacher created this fascinating assignment designed to get them to really slow down and really look. I had an opportunity to observe a teacher on my own campus teaching biology theology class, instructions of the bible. What she did, another great example of an attention activity, she had them learn about the book of genesis. First book of the bible, she had her students across from one another in pairs they had to read the first few paragraphs allowed and talk after every sentence to think about the extent to which they noticed something new something fascinating in the sentence. I observed this for 20 plus minutes and the things the students were able to draw the first few sentences of genesis were really remarkable. It is because she forced them to slow down and look at it and think about it in a new and different way. Last, john, a recommended teacher, take everyday objects around them and dive into them forth deeply and think about them. Drawing from that, i liked the idea here of everyday object analysis for something you might have students even in their own homes tried to do an analysis of the asking these questions. First, what is it . Take a close look at it and describe it. Whats important about it . What does it connect to . What can i learn from it . How can i connect to other things make know about what can i do with that . What questions can i ask about it . What can i write a paper about in relationship to this . These three steps walked through and provided more detail but think about the tshirt, this tshirt produced in a factory on the other side of the world, people working in difficult labor conditions, trade polici policies, politics and economics and yet, its a particular item with a feel to it, it relates aesthetics, you can take the tshirt and related to almost anything in the world. The same is true for any other object you can come up with. Especially now as you think of what you might do with your online students, invite them to look at the spaces around them and find things in them that are fascinating that you can use as an avenue or window in new and creative thinking about your discipline this is kind of my recommendation here, about activities that would awaken or reawaken students and how can you see them in on a regular basis . The structure is talking about the onetime classroom experience and structure, talking more about the course. These kinds of attention activities everyday, you do Something Like this once a week and in the four times like when you know student attention legs over the course of the semester. I got think like a playwright. Think like a poet. I want to talk about the extent to which helps motivate attention. The first time i gave a talk about discussion, and throughout to the audience and said want you to tell me, what are your students paying close attention . Somebody raised a hand and said when they are taking a test. That got me thinking about attention, i believe there is a role that can help you work for us in attention. We might make a distinction in terms of motivation between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. We want them to Pay Attention and learn because they are interested in it in care of the matter. The extrinsic is the enemy of that, theyre just doing it for the grade and its kind of just an extra hundred motivator. Want to think about the fact that these things can work together. One kind of motivation will not reach all. With extrinsic motivation, its a role to play in directing the attention of your students. Id advise you to think about the extent to which this is often true in our life. Extrinsic motivators handinhand with these motivators like our own desires. That is why we think get things we know running is getting good for us, we know exercise is good for us, we should do it because we want to but how many of us do things like enter a 5k because its a extra motivation to get ready that performance . We give ourselves these kinds of motivators to help push us through when things get difficult. Thats why this motivator help engage us when we might feel tired or out of it or not as interested initially extrinsic motivation can push us into engagement and ideally, an interesting experience. Good learning extremes and once they are into it, that intrinsic motivation will kick in especially now, during this pandemic when students have so much to do and so much to worry about, i think this can be an equity issue as well. Putting a little bit of things youre asking for students to do in these sessions are out of class can help your students recognize where their attention will give them the most bang for the buck. You design your activities well, you know they are going to help. Why not reward your students for the work they do on the assessments distinctly for example, give low stakes, very low stakes on the regular in class work students do. If youre in class and having students do an activity, count it as a precipitation participation group. Worksheets, solving problems, sitting together in groups to do a particular task, help students out, actually. Help them focus their attention by finding a way to regularly award the things they put in to those things. I dont feel it as being in conflict because some students will be motivated by that and some might need that little nudge to get involved. The student who has a lot of other stuff going on saying okay, i need to check in and get working because this will help me. It will help my grade for the class and it will help them learn as well. What i am arguing is to think about engagement. The most important engaging activity you want your students to be part of next each week such as an attention activity. Collected on paper or electronic and have them contribute. This is something im always asking my students to do, annotations passages, we do this in class, i will put them in groups, a paper copy and i tell them annotate it. Write down everything you can think of, keywords, things it reminds you of, the goal is to brainstorm everything they can think of and relationship and once weve done that, we look at it together what makes sense in the things you want to pursue. I do this, the students, its a very low stakes in all that matters is you do it and put effort into your will to take the time to really focus on as much out of it as you can. It is an activity for them, so they will be better at doing it when i asked them to do it on purpose or exams. That is my basic argument. Assessment has a role to play with attention, either when they are doing their activities were preparing students for an exam might be in this will help you with the assessment, i think we should be doing that kind of thing. Direct attention to those thin things. Lets skip this one and try to wrap up now because i want to make sure we have time for discussion. We talked about three things. Structural renewal assessment, the idea is when students have more structure, when you talk about the experience, with attention in mind, it helps a better job of keeping your students attention span. We talked about renewal, attention activities playing a role in renewing the attention of your students over the course of the semester and the last thing, as has a little so low stakes affecting engaging activities direct the attention of your students and can help promote their learning by getting them to focus on the things that will help them but we didnt discuss today are these three elements, these are sort of other chapters in the book so if youre interested in getting more, you can find more in the book. How communities support attention, curiosity can drive to support attention in the role this can play in student attention, i know people are always curious about this one. In the book i argue i think my influence can be helpful, but i think it is more helpful for the teacher to think about their own mindfulness on their own and try to expect students to become practitioners of mindfulness. The research is very complex in terms of the role of mindfulness in the classroom is you can get into all that detail in the book in my argument there. I want to just finish mary all over again and note that i have really come to believe is the classroom and learning experience and be a retreat, and intention retreat. I said in the beginning, distractions in which the ocean, the tension arises out of the ocean. Paying attention and getting focused and losing ourselves in this work can be a source of wellbeing. Research on providing a good demonstration of that, we want to think about the fact that classrooms can be a place where we retreat from the distractions around us and have the opportunity to focus on something thats important so thing about your classroom as a place where attention is valued, cultivated and sustained. Thats ultimately the endless work of the teacher. These are three books i recommend. A focus on dedication and work. Distracted mind as an overview of destruction and attention today in my book where i talk about history and these principles are just shown you. Going to wrap up their. Stop screen sharing and see what kind of discussions we have, the questions and comments. Weve got a lot of wonderful questions for the chat for q a. I hope we can get to all of th them. I know there have been posted in the chat as well. They are buried in the comments they so try to go through those, to. We have several people asking how this relates to our current environment with covid. First related to the idea of getting up and moving around and that type of thing obviously counters the advice we are getting from those who know more about how the disease spreads, we should stay in our bubbles. Any suggestions . Sitting and looking around right now is probably not the way to go it is a difficult situation so so many things we cant do right now. In this book, it is an offer a variety of things, and always going to work in every context. There are one or two things we can do a little bit only. Not everything pick a couple things, if you get one thing away from this book to help make attention better, i think that would be great. You cant expect everything to work in every context, especially right now. Another kind of relevant question related to that, to what degree the predictability needed right now for students in this age of chaos and uncertainty, balance that need to mix it up to refocus . The one thing that can be helpful kind of applies to both the change and comfort part, make the structure and experience clear to the students. In facetoface classroom, one thing i like to do for typically take the side of the board, one, two, three, four, heres wishing to happen in the class. And always put times on there but i talk it through. We should be doing the same thing in the classroom. I like to say for people, youre sitting in a conference session, imagine yourself in a regular conference in the good old days, in the future, right . The presenter is going on and on and then they say okay, this is my last part. He should take out okay, you kind of put up with that. For the presenter says heres my first idea and im going to move on to the second. Those are the moments in which our attention perks up, we realize theres a change so planning that out gives us a sense of comfort and predictability, i know whats going to happen here but it also gives that sense, we plan a change to happen. That leads into several questions about timing and attention spans, how long should whether the video in your online class or lecture or facetoface class b . Someone that the time should be no longer than the age of the students. I like that for five euros. [laughter] i have never heard that. I will have to look that up. Here is what i would say. You saw in the video, i cant give like a scientific answer but this is what i have in mind. Still, it is probably shorter online and is in the actual classroom so if you have a 45 minute lecture video, break it up. Theres no reason not to. First of all, this acknowledges the difficulty paying attention difficult thing online. The other thing is things might be coming out. Ive got i took an online class this summer because i wanted to see my students were expanding. It took us. Spanish class. One thing you didnt do was break up the lectures. There would be a one hour lecture i had to watch and multiple times i went i dont have time for that. Maybe i didnt get back to. If it had been broken up, i might have said i can do the first one right now and the second on later tonight. So if you break it up, you get the opportunity for that to happen. It helps students who might otherwise have difficulty getting to the full hour. The other thing is in terms of the actual classroom, it probably goes on a little longer and depends on how energetic are you, how much are you willing to get off the draw attention . I think we all just have to kind of find our sweet spot. I can be pretty energetic in the classroom. Im willing to go 20 to 30 minutes of talking but thats about as far as ill go. Some folks have a lower level of energy so you just have to know yourself. Along that same line, in a classroom, and i see this in our questions, the ability to gauge the intention for students, looking at them standing in the classroom but on resume, often the videos, they were recommending that. Any suggestions or ideas on how to engage their attention . I dont really know what you can do that. For privacy reasons, of course Everyone Wants the camera on, you can purge people to do so in the chat. Multiple ways of engagement. Lets say you have a session that youre going to do 50 minutes of talking and then you will put students in a shared dock. From the beginning, you can say Something Like 15 minutes, he will be on a google doc and to do that, you got to follow what we are doing here. You need to follow. That is the best i can think of. And in the chat, or let me know you understood by saying that in the chat. Thats all i can think of for this. We are in a challenging situation right now, we all are. As far as research about attention, is there any issues regarding multilingual bilingual students that require cognitive capacity. That is another reason maybe to think twice about yes, obviously a second language, of course, that will take up some of their attention. Think about a bucket, there is only so much that can go in at once. Anything else taking up space, there will be less space for whatever the content is so i just saw something come up in the chat, by the way, i dont know if others saw that. Taking notes and submitting notes, this was in the last question but of course, you want to think about things like you recorded make it available for them to watch afterward, making sure you use captions, for example, if you give a presentation in the classroom, maybe make sure the students have access to translations, they have their devices to use them for translation, you just have to think about that. Some other stuff, resources are being used up so they do probably need a little more help. Book to be on cspan2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Sunday 1 00 p. M. Eastern, from the recent schomburg center, literary festival, rhonda in her book, coming for circle from jim crowe to journalism 2 00 p. M. Eastern, black lives matter cofounder, her book, when they call you a terrorist. Activism and the beginnings of the black lives matter movement. 9 00 p. M. Eastern on afterwards, the Washington Post critic, offering his thoughts on the volume of books written about donald trump and his presidency in, what were we thinking . A brief intellectual history of the trump arrow interviewed by book review editor, paul. Watch book tv this weekend on cspan2. Heres a look at Publishing Industry news. Miles taylor, former chief of staff, department of Homeland Security divulged that he was the anonymous author of 2019 book critical of president tru trump. Mr. Taylor served two years under former home and security, Kristin Pearson and left the department in june 2019. Poet diane, died at the age of 86, the author of 50 books of poetry and part of the movement in San Francisco in the 1950s. Editor daniel has also died, he was 79. The longtime fiction editor at the new yorker, before becoming executive editor in chief of random house he worked with monroe and daniel silva to name just a few. He authored several books including a novel memoir, also in the news, scan reports print book sales continued their strong year, up 13 with the week ending october 24. Nonfiction sales were up 6 for the week. November is National Model writing there promoting the exercise for 21 years. The goal is to write up to 50000 words by the end of the month. The hopes of producing a novel. More information can be found online. Book tv will continue to bring new programs and publishing news. You can watch past programs anytime booktv. Org. Hello and welcome to the History Centers virtual author talk series