Transcripts For CSPAN2 James Lang Distracted 20240711

The resume or via cspan who has asked to broadcast the keynote today. 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 with more than 17 campuses in broad expanse of our metropolitan region. They and others are volunteering their time and energy during those two days to ensure it goes smthly. We would normally ask them to stand and be recognized but that is not possible this year and if as you see them helping in various capacities please take a moment to thank them for their work. I would also like to take a moment to recognize the enormous effort taken by our assistant director jennifer and office of elearning director of instructional design henry for leading this years conference. These amazing women are so talented and creative im overcome with pride and i know them and get to work with them. Its incredible to see the creative [inaudible] we would like to personally thank the support of the university of sta high value on teaching and learning at our university and without the support we cannot do what we do so please help me welcome our provost to share a few words and introduce todays keynote speakers. All right, good morning everyone and thank you and thank you cspan for broadcasting. I hope everyone is doing well this morning and staying healthy and sane safe. Its my sincere privilege to welcome you to the university of missouri st. Louis on such a beautiful and exciting day and i would love to welcome you to a repeatable campus and to the vibrant st. Louis region in person. Our region is rich with history and has an inspiring set of institutions of Higher Education all with creative and innovative faculty, staff and students. Together we make the metropolitan region as strong as it is and it is my understanding that this is the 19th annual focus on teaching and Technology Conference and that is remarkable. Conferences like this one where we can exchange ideas, Learn Together and network are how we maintain our strength and excellence in the region against challenges that many institutions of Higher Education across the nation are facing. During this unprecedented times teaching with technology has certainly helped us continue to keep our students engaged and on track for graduation. We all know that hasnt been easy. Under normal times its often not easy. Sharing ideas and strategies through venues like this one make this job later and thanks to all of us for devoting your time to think about how to use technology to improve student learning, teaching and research. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our keynote speaker doctor james lang, professor of english and director of the Morris Center for teaching excellence at Ascension College in massachusetts. He is the author of several books in the most recent of which are small teaching everyday lessons from the signs of learning and teaching distracted mines. Im sure we will all agree that our minds have been a little more than distracted these days and i believe you more details about doctor langs background so without further delay please join me in giving a warm welcome to professor laying in leading todays keynote address keeping distracted minds old challenges and new contacts. Im thankful for your presence and im sorry i cant be in st. Louisut my wife is from st. Louis and i got my masters at the university and i would love to be there with you l im grateful for your presence i know how difficult i is to stay focused o zuma meetings and webinars and i was just listeng to my wife to do this with mike and garden cla and i will count thiss a success if no one raises their hands and asks me to show me their catch. The bar is pretty low inerms of what we c do here but imagine when youre magic when my wife is dealing with and trying to get fe yearolds to stay on that zoom call and be focused. I will share my screen here and i would like to be start our session today by talking a little bit about getting you to think philosophically about what it is that we why attention is important and why we need to make attention and value in our teaching. Thats where i want to started re in terms of thinking more about the Bigger Picture and i would suggest to you this year that we would think about the idea that in some ways attention is the very fundamental part of what we do and it use the ecology of attention argues that teaching in a sense is the art of directing the attention of our students. The essential tasks of teaching consist in tightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important and what we are looking at. I would encourage you to think about that the extent to which, for example, you discipline has a kind of potential toain and that your job as a teacher is to identify what i most important that terrain and direct the attention on that material and that content in those skills. We can think about the idea here that attention is fundamental in rms of how we conceive of ourselves as teachers and how we conceive of our fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters in our disciplines and classes. [inaudible] is a author of a new book called, how we learn, and i will argue but he argues today that we should be pd more attention to attention. Students arent attending to the corrt information or the right things in terms of the skills and the content in the qualities we are trying to instill in them its unlikely they will learn anything. Our greatest talent and our greatest challenge is challenging or channeling and capturinthe attention of our students. Im not going to get so muc into the cognitive theory but one of the things we know the research on how people learn is that process starts with attention and students do not payttention to whatever it is they are trying to master they will not even get to the later steps of learning so attention is a really fundamental part o the learning process and its the rst part of the learning process but i would argue that this is the value you have t make and be really deliberate abt our teaching and then we have to think carefully about how we are cultiting and sustaining the attention of our students and thats especially true now and everyone is mediated through our devices and we got this Global Pandemic raging around us and faced personal and professional challenges but its true of any moments well. When we get back to our classrooms one hopes nt year then we wl still need to be thinking about how do we cultivate and sustain the attention of o students. I will finish this opening b being philosophical here and ting that not only is it our challenge to capre and sustain human aention but that challenge is made difficult by the fact that attention is a limited Capacity Resource weve all experienced this o our resume calls and in our everyda lives as well on paying attention to this and im not paid attentiono that and the fact that attention fatigues over time and attention is more difficult to pay and certain kinds ofontext so weve all had these experiences on a regular, everyday basis and so we want to think about ourselves as it is argued here and shes a cognitive psychologist fro Northern Michigan university that we are students of our students attention and she argu here thatttention is the foundation for every sgle one that we do as instructors butithin the cognitive system its a precious limited resource. Since we are the designers of learning experiences we need to think about ourselves as stewards of the aention of our students and what kind o stewardsp are we offering to our students and what are we doing to support the attention of our students in the classroom and prior to the pandemic when we, the biggest question i got when i spoke to people about attention and distraction was what to do about the devices in our room and that question is being pushe aside in our current context but the question sort of still is always what ewardship are we offering to r students, right . Are just saying no, but the devices away and students ct Pay Attention anymore or are we trying t take a proactive positi stance and say im here to help support you andour efforts to Pay Attention in this classroom and i want to be a partner with you and thinking about how we do that together. That is part of what i will argue here and what i argue in the book as well. Okay, i like to begin our conversations about in attention and distraction by giving Historical Context. There is a lot of concern today about the extent to which our devices are slowly degrading our ability to Pay Attention in making us into creatures who can no longer Pay Attention because we are so used to the sort of constant stimulation of our phones and devices so i think its worth steppingack a little bit to get Historical Context on that and help us think more carefully about the kinds of solutions that we use in order to help make attention stronger value in our teaching so we can go back long way to aristotle and people who are passionately devoted to the flu arent able to Pay Attention and they theynjoy the flu plane more than presely occupies them. You might substitute here listening to arguments as being in her classroom and flutelane is due to videos o your phone. So we conceive going back almost as far as we have pple writing about the mind and goes back aristotle that people were exprsing concerns about our ability to stay focused escially on the stay focused onomething cognitively challenging like listening to following along in our green with externalemptations, along about things that are more easier f us we tend to default to those things and we step away from the challenging things and we go to the easierr more [inaudible] thing so we can see augustine ites us about this while in a lot of ancient writers wrote about this problem of our inability to Pay Attention to the way we want to. We have the dese to listen to the argume and we know it will be helpful and yet still we cant ignore that flute pying in the distance john donne english poet wrote about the extent to which he found attention in his prayers and notes about what he now dow in the chamber to pray i put myself in the position and i asked god toend the angels and when the arrived i neglect god as angels as a fly in a coat outside this vote splits into two part and i identified two ways in which we are distracted. One is the external stuff whether flute plane or tha flight but theres a second partier which ishings that come inse my head. A memory of yesterdays easures, fear of tomorrows dangers. Anything, nothing, a fancy, all of these things struggl with hi prayer. What you will see a we noticed ere are two kinds of things that can distract us, things outside of us of things that are inside our own heads. We probably notic during the pandemic that a lot of the distractio has been rings side our own head as we think about global issues in our personal and professional challenges and that is making it morend mor difficult for us to stay focused. Okay, i lovehis one is an example of how we start to worry abou the technological distractio that arise and so this is a cartoonor the british magazi punch and its from 1906 and a series of cartoons that are giving forecasts for what wil happen in 1907 so you have two sort of natalie dressed and horny and looking at the telegraph machines are not, as a result, paid attention to one another. It striking to puthis picture and think about it in relationip to the pictures we see of teegers all huddled over their phones at a restaura table and weve theres a ctural lament that we dont talk to each oer anymore and not looking at one another in the eye or communicate with one anotherut this is another concern we have the goes back a very long way. Then ouroderators will let yoknow what is coming in and ill stop to respond to me of those, and the second halfill bethe same thing. You can submit questions to the chat and we will discuss them at the end of session. Okay. What we see here is a kind of new element that the external distractions that for example whatever it ght be, we have this sort of application of the technology drawing our attention tohem. My favorite quote is from a novel from pvincial lady in lond, ovincial lady was a series of novels about a woman who was aling with all the challeng of household management while e was trying to start a literary career as well a one of the novels of provcial lady of london s writes about attending a literary conference for the firstime and says im sorry to find attention wandering two entirely unrelated topics , difficulty in securi authors and ubles down on her intentions and tries to stay focused by taking notes and then later they discover that the not, she was getting postcards from her children, a memorandum finding her local bankers and in case she runs out of money so this is from the 1930s so if youre distracted at any point, just know you are not alone that experience. You are the provincial lady shares your pain. Im ing to get now to the kind of wrapping up this sort of itial historical overew by showing you kind of sort of a before and after quote in terms of the way our contemporary technologies efctive the way we think about technology and distraction. Thiss a quote from 1741. Isaac kloss wrote a book called the improvement of the mind and onef the things she writes about is the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the coany of distraction, it makes you a more distractible person. But what hes arguing hereis about people going to coffee shops. You might know this is the 17thentury, coffee shops have swarmed intengland and europe more generallin these woplaces of activity, buzzing with people talking, newspapers,meetings, all kinds of stuff like that. Dont go to those places if youre trying to study because all of the things that strike your eye and your ear have a ndency to steal the mind away from the steady pursuit of any sject so that the normal distractions we all experience but he argues hear somethg different. Anthereby your soul gets into a habit of wondering. In oer words you spent alot of time in the compa of your distractions, you become a mo distracted person. Now, once you see what isaac argues in the 18thcentury , it can give us context f the arguments made by people like Nicholas Carr in the shadows in 2010. Using cholas carr arguing in the shallows that arguing abt what the internet has done to our abilitto Pay Attention,ur distractibility. Called, focused, t linear mind is typified by a new kind of mind, one that taken and doled out information in shortdisjointed overlapping bursts. And you can see now about 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 we see the extent to which these concerns, even having these concernsfor a long time no. Another thing i hope youve seen in the course of what ive shown you already is weve never really had a calm focus on distracted linear mis. Thats not the waythe human mind works. The idea that we had this sort of relapsed state in whicwe should quarrel sort of calmly sit and focus on things along as we wanted, thats kind of a myth. We never d a mind like that so i want you to think about this knowledge as we go rward. So the idea of this talk, teaching distracted minds aze the fact that all our mindare distracted so as a result we need to think carefully about how we preach to a distracted mind. One striking thingbout all these historical quotes and the book has a bit more of it with a variety of cultures and time period and one striking thing youll notice is all those, we are unhappy about the fact that our minds are easily distracted. We seem to want a mind that is better able to Pay Attention and engage in long periods of sustained focus and when we talk about our distractibility we seem be unhappy about it. Thats a very interesting thing to notice about all these comments about our mind thatshould make us wonder a little bit. Why do we have ese distracted minds . Why ha we evolved these minds at we wish were a bit different , th we wish we had this ability to push away our distractions and lock into focuso i want to talk about that as well , where biologists tell us about why we have this distractible mind so one nice instructi of this comes from a psychiatrist and author of the divided brain and this comes from an animated video lecture that he gives , you can see it and he gives the exple here of a bird trying to pack out a seed against diffult background and as he points out the bird has to have two different forms of attention. He needs to be able to focus and pick out the seed against that background. At the same time there hato be aware of s surroundings because its got to be potential for predator for others around him. It 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 and we also need to be aware of whats going on around us for fries, enemies, dangers. We dont quite havthese predators coming out us in the same way think about the way in which we evolved and that evolutionary process. It was iortant for us to not only be able to track an animal or to be able to start a fire to the aware of the potentl dangers around us as well ashe potential positive things. New food sources, new social groups, all that kindf thing so for a long evolutionary history theres very good reason we have develod this focus as well as the ability to, the capacity for awaness d to be easily distracted that might actually be helpful to us. The striking thing about timing and some her animals as well is that the tent to which they had best divided ability to focus intensified by the fact that we especially e drawn towards novelty. And so in a distracted mind whichwas one of my favorite books about this issue of distraction in a more general way , ill show you the end ofhe talk. They argue that we are information seeking creatures. And that when Research Shows that in addition to kind of foraging for food and ink, our breed evolved to forge you information d continually be curious about new iniration so close again, for our longistory, was useful for uto say im ing this but i want to return ovethere. Or maybeif i tried this a little bit differently someing different will happ. Though its kind of continually pushing ourselve to ask questions as a kind look f novelty and see what things areto ask ourselves questions, to nder and to take rabbit holes andpathways that mht lead somewhere unexpected and its ultimately helpful for us. What has happened recently, and this is i wanted to show you the first part of this process, but i also dt want to balance the fact that our technologies are tually Getting Better and tter at treating these aects of our mind so what we havenow at we are dealing with these are machines that have been carefullydesigned in order to appeal to our desire for knowledge. And i want you to think about what your mind does for you in terms of providing you novel information. Its constant. So its always available for something new when you are looking for something. You can check your email, see what all these emails are but now you can pop over to twitter and you can see thes bound to be something new on twitter. When twitter is tapped out you can go to instagram and see whats available there anby the time youre done you probably have some work so if yourelooking for novelty, its kind of a perfectly designed machine in order to provide you with that. Not only that but you should consid the fact that this is ailliondollar, many billiondollar industry tryingo capture your attention through ese devices. And so theres a t of energy that has en 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 aspec of our mind that have always been there. So the companies are getting tter at this as a put time and energy and work power into it. Now, the question then becomes how they gotten so good that we can rewire, that you hear people say in this all the time, im noonger able to Pay Attention. Im my students are no longer able to payattention. Somehow thesedevices are kind of rewiring our minds. My favorite, one of my favorite psychologists Dave Willingham at the university of virginia and willingham i think and other, everne else ive read suggests that we probably should get back from that concern because of the fact that attention is so central our ability to think that imagine if somehow in the course of a few years, its undergone a significant deterioration. That would require all kinds of as says retrofitting of other cognitive functions. That kind of reorganization of ourrain at a kind of species level is going to have more evolutionary time and notjust because we started playing with our smart phones. So it can change in an active way. In oer words in a moment for a short time while were with technology or afterwards its a deep rewiring of these sort oweee people talking about that y may be concerned about for urself. There doesnt really seem to be good evidence that happening, those kind of post architectural levels of our braiso i think thats great news. What tls us is that our brains are still there as they always have been. Theyre distractible because they always been distractible but they are also able to attention when we, the circumstanceare right and when we are, when we put the effort into it to bring our attention to the task theres Still Available for attention so whathis all leads me to is the idea that if we nt the attention of our students we have tohink about how we are cultivating it. And if theres one thing i want to take away from this talk tay its what you see on the screen here. We need to think, start thinking about attention as an achievement. Any attention is an achievement. Its not default mode. So i think time to think about tension as we fall away from it in straction area im going to suggest i think the research suggest that our normal state is distraction area our thoughts are swirling around in our heads anwe may be thinking about one thing and maybe somethg else at the same timand when we are able to rise out of that and pay atteion, thats an achievement. Its something were ae to do and not that we do ever time. Multiple steps are needed to ensure that we get, we start payingattention and that we stay on track. I really would like to this concept from daniel wheford attention is an achievement. And if attention is achievement, that mns we need to think about how are we helng students achieve it. What are we doing in to support their attention. Over the course of the learning experience. So thats our goal for thinking about this, thats what i want to do for the second half of the discussion. Is to think about the pedagogical strategy we are using that can either support this attention or that might push students away into distraction. Lets just sort of review the First Principles. The first thing is to remember that the human mind is a distractible mind. Like i said theres a chapter in the book goes throughout this historical, all these historical examples. I showed you two of them already one thing if youre reading, i was doing the book and reading as inormally read. About philosophy that sort of thing and i just sort of noticed when people talk about attention and distraction will see it everywhere and youll see it about as far back as you can read. The human mind is indeed distractible mind. Our Current Technology is intensifying to create this condition so these two things represents what i view as a kind of righteous historal attitude towards it. Weve always been distracted but we are facing some special new challenges because of the fact that our Current Technologies are so good playing on our distractible nature. So thats kind of to me the two halves of thatequation. Attention is a hard one and frile achievement and i think there are two things about that. First of all, in a classroom setting we first got to win the attention of our students. We have to do things in order to draw them into the experience but its also fragile. Its easy to fall away from it so we have to figureut what we are doing in order to sustain attention. Lastly this leads us into the second half ofthe talk , is attention, theres a t of good arguments for th when we think about when we review the timing of literature. We have to cultivate. We havto make this a value in our teaching. And i knowoure probably thinking i have all these other things i need to think about. I would suggest that if you kind of, we can do a lot of these things through the lens attention. So one of the things that weve all been talking a lot about recently is the importance of community in the classroom. We faced some specia challenges with that nowand many of us are teaching all these online classes. And were nohaving this normal opportunity to cultivate communy in our classrooms as we did in the facetofaceclassrooms. But you can ink about this through a lens of atteion as well. In the classroom communityone of the things that we try to do for one another is attend to one another. I Pay Attention to you as individual, 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 thinkabout unity , attention can be an avenue for creative thinking about how we are livinin unity in the classroom. Are we getting ourattention to one another. How are we ensuring that when a student spks other students are giving that attention. So a lot of the challenges and problems we face in higher edution i think can be viewed through the lens of attention and the lens o attention inking creatively about potential solutions to some of theselongstanding challenges. Usually when i began thought, and i started gettg these thoughts about something thati was working on in the book , the issue at people always wanted to talk about was devices the classroom, at do i do about the devices. That is less of an issue right now obviously because so much of our teaching and learning is happening to our devices so im not one to talk so much about that day. I ju going to say one thing about. That is to invite you to consider the extent to which yo students partner in helping you think about how to support and susin attention in your classrooms. Yourtudents are in three or four or five other classrooms that have lots of other rooms in your upperclass studentsthat have plenty of other classes already. Theyve been in five, 15, 20 or 30 classroom environment which the teachers have different aussies about vices, about attention but it teaches you different strategies in order to try a support and sustain their atteion so they have a wealth of experience in terms of solutions about how to cultivate and sustain their attention. Theyre sitting through a zoom session all the time now. And webinars like this one. What is helping them, what is driving them away, what is the moment they turn away from the screen and turn to their phones. Answer these questions and see whs are the solutions they might offer that will best help them sustain their attention throhout whatever it is youre asking them t do. Its nearing the end of september here. s a great time to sort of student that have three or fo weeks in your class already. I have three or four weeks of classes in our other classes, the scene creative futures trying to do Different Things. Asthem whatasnt helped. Your css, and their other classes and maybe in other classes that happened over the course of their high school and college experiences. In terms of ideas they migh be able to offer you in terms of what you might be doing in the classroom. If you normally do a midterm evaluation make sure its a great time at thesesame kinds of questions. I did this with my own students prior to e pandemic. Last year asking them didnt help give me solutions for what would make them most, what i could do their help best support theirattentio in the classroom. It gave me several ideas for things i never would have thought of. Things that had i had seen some of my colleagues ing that i never would have had access to that. So consider what we can learn from your students about how to support their attention and id also iite you to think about your o experiences in sessions just like thisone. Whats the point at which you start to fade away and what can you learn from about what youre going to do with your own students. Bring this lens of attention to yourself and think about your own distraction. When you get distracted and what aws you back in to a session like this one. Speaking of which, now is the time i want to pau and see what potential questionsmight have come up here. About the first half of this presentation. So jen, i dont know if theres anything in the chat we should address if you want to respond to any particular thing class we have a couple of questions in the chat. The first one was about people with adhd or add and some of the struggleswith that. One of our attendees mentioned its kind of like continuously being in a coffee shop even when there is an isolated room. A coffee shop all your own,right . As a part of my research for the book i looked at the literature on attention deficit disorders or adhd. Essentially what i kind of drew fm that is the solutions that help us Pay Attention, that help anyone Pay Attention can help those students. Its of course more challenging for those students but the basic principle and pathways are ing to be similar. One of the things that i recommend the book for example and its a facetoface classroom so this is most of us are not worried about this particular semester but one of the things in the book i talk about is the idea of theirs this invisible plane in the classroom. Theres the desks and many teachers do not cross the invisible plane. I did a lot of observing teachers for researcon the book as well and i cant tell you how many teachers i saw that stay between the first desks and the board. One of the easiest things i think you can do in a facetoface classroom in order to pay better attention to your students is to break that plane. If you get out there in the states, walk around, address individual students. Talk from different corners of the room. One of the things that first got me thinking about that was as i mentioned earlier my wife is a Kindergarten Teacher and when she has students come and they have to attention problems in their individual plan one of the first recommendations is the physical presence of the teacher actually helps support the attention of that student and wean sort of start there. That was specifically designed to help the students but we can generalize that into something that helps everyone. If we were in a Conference Room right now, i would be standing right next to you right now and the person i was sitting next to wouldbe very attentive. Actuly trying to move around the room in order to make sure evybody has the time speaking directly to their area. You see that in the theater as well, i can actually speak to that so one of the things im trying to say is the principle im going to argue for i think can help support potential for those students even though of course its going to be more challenging. This kind of directly ties what you were saying that. There was a question about standing up versus heading down. When youre lecturing. And in a facetoface room . Either, they said are you standing up now or youre speaking down today , most o us are sitting dowwhere you while youre lecturing. I am standing up now and i do that in order to help my own energy out. I think that is a challenge especially in thefacetoface environments. I wrote a book about teaching by video and camera your energy. I know that when youre doing a session like this i have to try to be especially energetic and thats one of the many reasons why its especially exhausting for stents and teachers is because theres a kind of energy, i think i have to bea little bit more energetic doing. Course going to be us yearoveryear the recipients , its probably going to help as well. Getting a little bit more blood flow going, gives you back and forth a little bit, that kind of movement of course else cognitive functioning but , so im standing , im alwaysstanding. The human brain has evolved to filter out redundancies and irrelevant information. How does that fit in with the concept of attention in the modern classroom. Thats a big one. At a complicated question. To filter out sort of redundant stuff , going to depend upon what the person thinks is, so the framework the brain experiences is going to help them determine what sort of relevant or redundant or illirrelent or not. And thats probably involves more kind of pedagogical thinking about the context that you create in the learning environment. How do you help the students recognize what matters and what doesnt matter. Its probably more about the design of the content and anything specifically thinking about cultivating and sustaining attention. So thats maybe like a deeper pedagogical question and im going to pointed out. This question here also, theres positive aspects and i often engage in mobile activities especially when the tasks on monday. So a few things about that, first of all as we all know, we all have this, theres so much written about the myth. We we are able to do very well. And there are lots of comments trying to show us that were not actually good as we think. However, were not good at it when were doing a similar kind of thing. And when both things require thought. More like acquire our attention, you can watch tv. You can have a conversation and do something that doesnt require a lot of your attention. Thats why a lot of us, while we do feel like we can look at, we often can if were doing things that are not requiring us our full attention read where we wanted to problems is when youre trying to listen to a webinar forexample and also respond to email. Both of those things require your attention. Theres thats going to diminish your ability to retain something from the webinar as well as write a carefully constructed email with no typos. So thats the way to think about it, is where good at multitasking when the tasks require our attention. Having said all that i think a distractible brain can be good in important ways. First of all it drives our curiosity so the fact that i want to say what happens if i do this differently, im going to chop junk down this radical for a little while, that might lead tosomething interesting. Its also the case that creative thinking also is the result of somehow two Different Things and thats why i feel like im doing this and suddenly i think about my project that im going to be stuck on for a long time while Something Else comes up. That can be a really creative and productive thing that our distractible brain is doing for us. Jump out of the current paradigm into some different place and i recognize these things might come together. So the distractible brain is great for curiosity and we can focus the structures and activities in the classroom to support that and i also write about some of those in the chapter on connecting in small teaching so those of you who are in the section on small teaching in the afternoon we talk about some of the strategies because i think we can channel the distractible brain into some really interesting ways through structured connection activities. If we have time for one more question. I think this is a really relevant point as well that someone brings up about this, aspects of attention having enough to eat for being dehydrated, i notice myself if so, does this become an equity issue in the classroom. All those things are going to interfere with attention. If youre hungry, if youre worried about your taking care of your sibling, any, everything. Anxiety, all these things. So of course we want to think about timmy again, this is where not really going to talk about. Theres six kind of principles that i argue for and think that we can use in order to sustain attention one of those is thinking about community. Absolutely its an equity issue when we think about how we are getting attention to our students in particular challenges they are facing. Attention is reciprocal and youre more likely to Pay Attention to me so we need to Pay Attention to those two challenges they are facing. Im not going to talk about that issue so much but in the book, i will talk about actually the cultivation of communitymore in the afternoon session. But i absolutely, we need to be aware of all the things that are drawing away the attention of our students and that is students who have things like for example anxiety, orattention or learning challenges. Ultimately its especially true now with all the stuff thats going on in the world around us including maybe a teachers paying closer attention to our students and the challenges they arefacing. The questions keep coming so i dont know if you have a certain time for questions. Lets do the second half. I think ill be able to do it in 28, 20 to 25 mines of themost. That will still gi us time. You got until 1030. For more questions and conversation. I believe youre addressing some of these. Good. So were going to now start to think about the solutions. And about what we can do in order to help cultivate and sustain that atmosphere of atntion and i want to argue in this partular thought for three things you want to think about structure, about how were structuring the experience, we want to think abt the fact that attention succeeds over time to what we ing to renew it on a regular basis and then im going to talk a little bit about the role that i think assessment can play in the attention process. So im going to make the argument that we shouldthink about it like a playwright , and like a poet. Its goingto be an easy thing , hanging your hat on in terms of what you want to take awayfrom discussions. And think about the idea of the fact that the attention of our students as less. But thats true not only of our students but all of us really so attention is a limited Capacity Resource and its cookies over time. One of the great sort of demonstrations is from e study that came out in 2014 which looked at how long it students engage with video over for large groups, their being conducted for multiple yearthough i believe this data comes froSomething Like 7 milliousers. And they looked at how long do students actually watch the videos that were a part of the movi . How long did they stay on the video before they signed off and did Something Else . What youll notice is riking. When students had to watch an online course, which is connected entirely online its up to about 10 minutes and watch the entirevio. Between nine, 10, 12 minutes they started to watch only about half of it. And when the videos got nger than 12 minutes, they would want only about 20 percent of it. So what you can see here is the extent to which attention that fades over time and i want to kind of give you the more cognitive statement of that. Psychologists like Stephen Calhoun tell us when we are asking students in o classroom to pay directed tention directed attention the captain argu here provides, requires effort. Itlays a central role in our abityto focus. Some of the time at least we were talking about you can throw it away from us but the one here is the one i want to focus on that. Its susceptible to tea so attention gradually fades over tim it requires more and me effort for us to Pay Attention overhecourse of an experience. This is true of any kind experience. It varies in intensity, some more than others. They s students cant Pay Attention er the course ofa 70 minutlecture, they cant but their attention will also fade over thecourse of the 70 minutediscussion. Thats just how our attention works. Prolonged effort leads to directed attention fatigue. So we want to thk about that. Course , great article that organizers post from Harvard Business review pnt out this is especially true of zm fatigue and one of the things i love in the article is the fact thaon resume reading or resume classroom, we a looking at fas the entire time and this is not normal for us. Reale how often we stand and stare at their face, almost never because that sort of constantaze makes us uncomfortable and tired and were talking to peoe in real life we look around all the me. We think andmake a point and we return our gaze. Were looking t the window but when were on the video calls, when it students are on their cameras in the classroom we all recognizif i look away, it looks like im nopaying attention. We dont make that me judgment when its facetoface conte. You might recognize here larry david and Jerry Seinfeld and o of the gags is larry david from curb your enthusia is they want to know whether someones lin get very close into their face andlook them right in the eye like that and of course the joke of that is we all see that happening because wedot want people getting up ose and looking at our eyes like that. But thats what were doin in these zoom calls or in a class being conducted through zoom. So those kind of special ways in which we start, the Current Situation is causing us tension right now. What i want you to think about as youre creating a learning experience for your studen is whether thats happening seriously and if its online orou get back into the classrm and hopefully the next year. And if you think about the ct that for 2000 years playwrights have been havi to think about how do i capture and sustain the atteion of human beings over the course of two or three hours when they are forced to sitin their seats and just look up at the front . I think we can learn something from what strategies they havedeveloped in order to do that. Its quite a few things. First of all, that program tells you how the experience is going to unfold. I think that theres a stro value that to be able to say to the students this part were going to talk for 20 minutes. The conversation may go a little longer and after 20 minutes we do this activity d then im going to talk to you for about 15 to 20 minutes at a mi lecture. But being able to he people understand how long do i need to be presenand sustain my focus, one of the greats have been accomplished so being able to lay out the structure and the experience requires us to be a little bit more ganized. It, the attention of your studts is important to you its worth thinking about. They have seen changesthey have to ask and they have permission and the action rises and falls. They start with something to draw the attention of the audience. And just when things are getting inresting theres a break. I want you to think about this as go through these next examples. I mentned earlier talking about the fact that questions are really important to starting a learning experience. Thinabout the way a playwright draw the audience in through initial actions or something mysterious or whatever it might be. Wehave our articles and one argues that a lot of the times teachers come into class and just Start Talking about the answers and the bi questions but in fact what we need to do is do a little bit more servicing the questions. Whats the interesting question that our class is designed to answer today and beginning with that get the attention of our students. Actually daily questions, she begins every class by showing the students on microbe, shes a microbiology class and asking them to quickly jump on their phones and devices and find everything they can about that microbe and then together the class kind of compiles a little overview of that microbe for the day. Its a great way of each class she uses that as a way to draw the students in, to capture their attention and use their devices, this is not about their devices and then she uses that to what they discover tolaunch into her lecture. She knows things theyre going to find and then she takes those and pushes them forward into the class for that day. So how are youbeginning in a way that draws the students in , captures their attention . What lessons did you ask at the beginning . Secondly, how are you offering change . It may be active versus passive engagement. As i said i think the important thing here is not so much to say im not lecturing, i dont think lecturing even on resume call is a bad idea as you can tell right now but we maybe need to think about how were doing that lecture and stopping and going back to that, maybe if youre doing lectures or videos break those up into smaller class discussions, if youre doing things online as youre having students do activities dont always go to breakout groups. Maybe sometimes you have a whole class discussion, maybe sometimes you have individually, maybe youll have a google doc, whatever it might be think about how your varying activities that youre having students doing. In the classroom, i think its not a bad idea for example to have students go up and move their desks just as a way of reenergizing and recapturing their attention. So what are the transition moments, i think we do need to provide breaks and the howard businessreview article has a good recommendation for that. And then on and off camera, so students are not spending 75 or 50 minutes looking at faces the entire time. They can do an activity where they can turn those cameras off and do an engagement activity that you created for them. Change in views attention. Change renews attention so how are you offering change in order to help renew and reengage . You need to do this organically, dont just do Something Different every five or 10 minutes but two or three shifts over the course of a class will go a long way towards helping us reengage. I said in a workshop once with a colleague of mine who did a really interesting thing. She had us write down all our Teaching Strategies that we normally use on indexcards. I wrote it down here for some of mine and then she had us start shuffling them around. So seeing what was the pattern that would be most likely to promote learning and for me i was interested to see what was the pattern likely to help support and sustain attention but im encouraged to do Something Like this especially if youre struggling with your teaching right now in terms of getting attention and engagement, write down all the things you could do on asynchronous cloud and put them on different index cards. Start shuffling them around. See what emerges. What is the best way for me to kind of create an experience that would sustain theattention of my students over this course . I also like to talk about the fact that no matter what we do attention is going to abate sometimes. So we might be in a great discussion and things are going well. Its going on a little longer than it should. Were ending the book where we see here, talked about the idea of pedagogy and i really love this, she sort of talked about the extent to which you can learn from experiences about how to reengage attention. It talks about the extent to which house he observes lectures and sometimes when they notice these , they would pause and say cani get an amen and they would do that two or three times. Everybody shouts back and suddenly everyones back in the room. I would encourageyou to think about something more appropriate for your classroom when you get back to it. What are the strategies that you have to stop and reengage in themoment . So we should have structured things that we are doing that help support but we also should have a couple things that are in our pocket like this where we can say lets stop here. I want everyone to write down these two things or i got an image here on the screen, lets take a look at it together and see what we note. Heres a new problem that ive kind of reserved for when things got a little slow here. Now the time for us to look at it or like i said, were going to be in the group now, id like everyone to move their desks and its an opportunity for us to break and reenergizeourselves. So you want to think both about how you structure the experience of attention but also what do you have in your pocket that is going to help reengage students in the moment . So thats thinking like a playwright. Thinking like a poet, what i mean by this is to think again about the fact that our Attention Spans over time not only are in the experience but also become more and more familiar so founding and we tend to pay less and less attention to it. Your students are use to coming into classrooms, sitting down, listening to teachers, seeing the same kinds of basic activities that the classrooms always do. Lecturing, bookwork, discussion, writing, all that kind of stuff so i would encourage you if you want to capture the attention of your students to start to think like a poet. One of the things that good poetry does for us in the same way a lot of parts do for us is to renew our attention to the everyday world. Mary oliver is sort of the poet of the book because she has so many poems she wrote about attention and i love her one hurt here, instructions for living a life. Pay attention, be astonished and tell about it and this is a great sort of guide for what we want our students to be able to do. We want them to Pay Attention to the course material. We wantthem to be astonished because this is amazing stuff and then we want them to talk about it. Whether thats a discussion or through their assessments, through theirpapers, whatever it might be we want them to talk about the wonder they have seen. In order to accomplish that i argue for something called the signature attention activity. Signature attention activities are things designed to reawaken your students to the wonders of their discipline and take a connection to the everyday world and this is where you should practiceyour most creative pedagogy yourself. Thinking creatively about teaching methods and thats the goal, the goal is to get you to see something with brandnew eyes in the same way a still life painting tries to get us to see that in a new way or gets us to think about an everyday experience a new light. The goal of asignature attention activity. What i mean by this . Heres a few examples. In the book i talk about our historian at holy cross who died a few years ago who gave her students thisincredible consignment. She asked them to go to the art museum nearby, every week and look at the same painting and write a new response to that, a 1 to 2 page response for every week and they had to write 13 papers about the same thing and she described it, she wrote about this. If you get these papers they begin in superficial ways and they have to look and keep looking over and over again and it was astonishing what they were able to notice how they were able to start making connections between this work and their own lives , the world around them based on what they had learned in other classes. So you got deeper and deeper in their analysis of it because the teacher had created this fascinating assignment that was designed to really get them to slow down and look. I had a opportunity to observe a teacher on my own campus teaching a geology class, introduction to the bible and what she did was to me another great example of that kind of signature attention activity. She was having Students Learning about the book of genesis. The first book of the bible. What she did was she had her students sit across from one another in pairs and they had to read the text aloud, just the first few paragraphs and pause after every sentence in order to think about the extent to which they had noticed something new. Something thoughtprovoking, something fascinating in that sentence. And i observed this for 20 minutes and the things that students were able to draw attention from, even the first few sentences of genesis were really remarkable. It was because she hadcreated an activity that forced them to slow down,look at it and think about it in a new and different way. Lastly, john dewey , one of what john deleted recommended for teachers was to have the students do kind of a day everyday objects and think around them and toreally dive into them more deeply and think about them so drawing from that , i like the idea here of a kind of everyday objects analysis or something you might have students even in their own homes try and do analysis of by asking these three questions. First, what is it . What is this thing . Take a close look and described. What is important aboutthe same, what does it connect to, what can i learnfrom . How does it connect to the course . Weve been teaching other things that they know about solastly now what , what can i do with that . What questions to ask about it . What can i write about in relation to this thing . Jessica from Brown University , i provide a little bit more detail about that but just think about a teacher, then i have appeared. This teacher with some factory on the other side of the world like people working underdifficult Labor Conditions , there are trade policies related to economics and yet its a particular item which has an appeal to it which relates to aesthetics. You can take that tshirt and you can make it relates almost anything in the world and the same is true for almost any other thing. So especially now as you are thinking about what you might do with your own life, what extent could you invite them to look at the spaces around them and find things in those spaces that are fascinating that you can use as an avenue or window to new and creative thinking about your project. This is kind of my recommendation here and try to think about what are the activities that would awaken or reawaken students to the wonders of course content and how can you see those in on a regular basis. So the structure that were talking more about the onetime classroom experience , thinking about the structure of that, this is more about the whole course these kinds of signature activities, you try to think about doing Something Like this once a week or in the four times when you know that student attention starts to lag over the course of the semester. So think like a playwright, think like a poet and the last thing i want to talk about very briefly. I want to talk about the extent to which it helps motivate attention. We talk about distraction the first time i queued up the audience and i said i wanted to tell me how students are getting the most attention in our class and one raise their hand and saidwhen theyre taking a test. That got me thinking about new research about the role of intention and i believe it has a role to play, tell do some work for us in attention. We like to make a distinction in terms of motivation, intrinsic motivation is what we want and paying attention and learning because theyre interested, they care about the subject matter and its portrayed as the enemy of that, theyre just doing it for the grade and thats an external motivator but what we want to think about actually is the extent to which these things can work together. One kind of motivation is not going to reach all of your students. And as intrinsic motivations can be, can have a role to play indirecting the attention of your students. And i want to invite you to think about the extent to which this is often true in our everyday life as external motivators go handinhand with internal motivators like our own desires. Thats why we get things like 5k, we know running is good for us. We know exercise is good for us. We should do it because we want to but how many of us did things like enter a 5k because it gives us a kind of extra motivation to get ready for that particular performance even though we dont care about how we did . We give ourselves these intrinsic motivators to helplessness through when things get difficult and thats what i think and intrinsic motivation like an assessment can do. It can indicate just when we might be feeling tired or out of it or not as interested in initially. The assessment can push us into that engagement and then ideally an interesting experience, if youve created a good learning experience once there into it theyre going to have intrinsic motivations. Especially now during this pandemic when students have so much to do so much to worry about, i think this can be an as you as well. Putting a little bit of steak on the things that you are asking your student to do during that session or out of class can help your students recognize where their attention is going to give them the most bang for the buck and if you are planning your activities well you know theyre going to help. Why not reward your students for the work they do on those assessments through things like for example giving very low stakes, putting very low stakes on that kind of regular in class work that your students do . If youre in class and youre having students dosome kind of activity , give a participation grade and i think its these kinds of things that you have your students to like for example worksheets, solving problems, getting together in groups to do a particular task. Help your students out. Help them focus their attention by finding a way to regularly reward the effort that theyput into those things. I dont view this as being a conflict with intrinsic motivation because some of these students are motivated by that and some of these students might need that. A student who is, got a lot of other stuff but going on might say i need to check in and get working here because this is going to help me. This is something that is going to help migrate for the class but if its welldesignedits going to help your learning as well. So what im arguing here is to think about low stakes engagement. Its the most important engagement activity you want your students to do each week such as attention activity, collected on paper electronically and have them make a minimal contribution towards the grade of each student. Heres something i always am asking students, annotations of passages. We do for example in class ill put them in groups. They get a paper copy and i would always tell them to take the crap out of that thing. Write down everything you can think of. A keyword, things it reminds you of. The goal is to just kind of rainstorm everything you can think of in relationship. Once they come that we look at it altogether and see what makes sense and what kinds of things we want to be able to pursue but when i hear this kind of thing it gets a little, i count it as a low stakes thing and i think all that matters is you do it. And you put effort into it and youre willing to take the time to focus on this and get as much stuff written there as you can. So i know thats a Healthy Activity so if they Pay Attention theyregoing to be better at doing that when i asked them to do it on their papers or an exam. Thats my basic argument about assessment is assessment has a role to play in attention. Either when theyre doing their activities or when you are preparing your students for an exam or whatever project, the idea is to say this is something thats going to help you on the highstakes assessments, i think we should be doing that in order to help direct dunes assessments to the things that are going to be helpful. Lets get back one and try to wrap up as i want to make sure wehave time for discussion. What we talked about todayare three things. Instruction, renewal assessment so the idea is that students have more structure, when you factored in liberty about the structure and the experience, with attention in mind, they can do a better job of keeping their students and their attention over the course. We talked about renewal, how attention activities can play a role in renewing the attention of your students over the course of the semester and we talked about the fact that assessment has a role to play here and so low stakes assessments, engagement activities can help direct the attention of students and can help promote their learning by getting them focused on the things that are going to help them. What we didnt discuss our, these are other chapters in the book so if youre interested in hearing more on this you will be able to talk about these things in the book. How Community Supports attention, how curiosity can support attention and the role that mind influence can play insupporting student attention. I know people are always curious about this one, in the book i argue that while i think influence can be helpful i think its more helpful for the teacher to think about their own mindset in the room and to try to be expecting students to suddenly become practitioners of mindfulness. The research on it is very complex in terms of what the role of mindfulness in the classroom is but you can get into all that detail in the book and see my arguments there. I wanted to finish here with mary oliver again. Just note that what i really have come to believe over the course of this research is that the classroom and the learning experience can be in retreat. Like an attention retreat. Just at the very beginning the distractions are kind of the ocean in which we swim. Attention rises out of those, that ocean like islands. And paying attention and getting focused and losing ourselves in some kind of intellectual positive work can be a source of wellbeing actually. Haley has research on flow and i provided a good demonstration of that so we want to think about the fact that our caution can be a place where we retreat from the kind of distractions around this and have the opportunity to really focus on something thats important. So think about your classroom as a space where attention is valued. Ultimately sustain. And that that is ultimately the proper work of theteacher. These are three books i recommend. The distraction which is focused on education and work, the distracted mind is a scientific overview of attention today and there you have distracted, my book where im talking about a little bit of the history and biology. Im going to wrap up their. Stop the screen sharing and see what instructions we have an what comments we have class we got a lot of wonderful questions in the chat and in the q and a and i hope we will be able to get all ofthem. I know theres been few posted in the chat as well. They were buried in some great comments so at this time ill go throh those two. We have one, some people asked me how this relates to our current environment with covid. Related to the idea of getting up and moving around and moving chairs and that type of thing counter the advice were getting from those who know more about how to view these things, that we should also have a sort of bubble and anysuggestions . Getting up and moving around right now is probably not the way to go. So some of the things we can doright now. When i told you in this book as i did is its awkward with a variety of things, where not all going to work in every context. There are one of two things that we could do a little bit thats designed to cultivate attention, by all means not everything, take a couple of things. If you get one thing away from this presentation in the book thats going to help make it more valued, that would be great. You cant expect everything to work in every context. I think another kind of relevant question related to that is to what degree does the comfort of the systems in applicability mean right now for students of this age of chaos and uncertainty. Balance with that need to mix it up to focus attention. The one thing that can be helpful there is actually kind applies to both the change part and the recovery part and that is to make the structure of the experience. In a facetoface classroom one of the things i like to do is off the side of the board,1234, heres whats happening in the classroom. I usually put times on there but sometimes i talk it through. I think we can be doing the same thing in the classroom. And again, the example i like to give to people is your sitting in a conference session. Imagine in a regular conference session in thegood old days or in the future , and th is my last point. You kind of perk up at that moment. Heres my first idea and now let me move on to the second. Let me move on and our attention tends to perk back up as you feel something is portant and its changed so cleaning that up to us the sense of comfort and predictability. I know whats going to ppen here it also gives us, we planned in such a waythat changes going to happen. That perfectly leads into several questions about timing and attention span. How long should whether its a video and an online class for your lecture component in your facetoface class b and someone thought there was one system thats no longer than age of students, i havent heard that one before class lets see if that works. Ive never heard that, thats interesting read im going look thatup. Heres what i would say. You follow the videos, i think i cant give a scientific answer to that but two things to keep in mind. First of all its probably shorter online than it is in the actual class area so if you have a 45 minute video lecture to bring to your students, rake it up. There is no reason not to do 215 minute lectures and theres a number of things that does. It acknowledges the difficulty of paying attention to a difficult cognitive thinonline. The other thing it does, it lets you, if ive taken online class this summer, i took a spanish class, the instructor did a lot of great things but one thing he didnt do, sometimes i would want to say theres a one hour lecture i had to watch and some of the times i went inside. And maybe i didnt get back to him. I was outside so its okay. But if i had broken it up i might have said i was in the second one later tonight area so if youre breaking it up and giving that opportunity, for that to happen that is maybe even going to hook some students who have difficulty getting through that full hour. The other thing i would say in terms of the actual classroom, you could probably go a little longer and it kind of depends on you. How energetic are you, how muchare you willing to get out there and achieve , draw attention and i think we all just heto find our sweet spot there. I can be pretty energetic in the classroom so im willing to go 28 to 30 minutes of talking but thats about as far as ill go. Some folks are quieter or have aower level, you kind of just have to know yourself here. Along that same line in a classroom, and i see this in the questions i hear this a lot from our other faculties, the ability to gauge the attention of students looking at them in the classroom but on zoom, often the videos are imitating things, many other reasons recommending, any suggestions or ideas for how to gauge their attention when were thinking of this . I dont know what you can do about that red for reasons that we talked about, forcing everyone to have their camera on, you can encourage people to dosomething in the chat. Multiple modes of engagement and i mean, lets say youve got a session which youre going to do 15 minutes of talking and put these into a shared document and do something together. From the beginning you say in 15minutes , youre going to be on the google doc and in order to be able to do that you got to follow what were going to do here. Thats the best i can thinkof , is the question on the tap on the way or let me know that you understood by saying that in the chat. Thats one of the things ican think of for this. Again, were in a challenging situation right now. We all are. As far as your research about the tension, id say if youre providing bilingual or multilingual students that may reire a little bit more cognitive capacity from the contents of things. Thats another way maybe to think twice about yes, i would say a second language, of course thats going to take up some of their abilities so think about attention. Theres only so much they can go in there at once. Theres going to be less space for whatever the content is. So i just saw something come upin the chat which is a good suggestion. While taking notes and sitting notes in the class, that would be another idea. But on this course, you want to think about things that if you record it andmake it available , making sure that you are committing to captions, if youre giving a presentationin the classroom , maybe making sure those students to have access to translations on their devices so ty can you have help in translations. Youve got to think about that. Some other stuff, their cognitive resources are being used up so they probably do need a little bit more help andsupport. Here are some of the current non bestselling nonfiction books according to politics and prose bookstore in washington dc. Helping list in First Principles journalist thomas rich said how greek and roman philosophy and politics influenced americas founders. Then Pulitzer Prize winning author isabelwilkerson explores what she calls a hidden caste system in the united states. Thats followed by after actor Matthew Mcconaugheys memoir green lights. After that its the best of me, a collection of stories and at the essays by author and humorist david sid harris and wrapping up our look at bestselling books according to washington dcs politics and prose bookstore, Alice Georges biography of the late astronaut andsenator john glenn in the last american hero. Some ofthese authors appeared on book tv. Whats their programs online at booktv. Org. During a Virtual Event hosted by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco Susan Eisenhower discusses life and leadership of her grandfather , dwight eisenhower. Eisenhower was conscious of what it would be to be a diminished president. We have to remember that president wilson was really almost a scandal that people in the country didnt know how bill that president was so ike was determined not to find himself in that situation for the good of the country and after he had three illnesses during his presidency and after each one of them he would give himself a very arduous test like a round the world trip or a trip to europe that required lots of meetings and lots of stress and hed always tell his advisers, if i dont perform at top level you have to tell me because then ill resign. In any case, that never happened. He became actually a rather adroit at managing his time, managing his stress and generally positioning himself to get through his second term. To watch the rest of this Program Visit our website, booktv. Org and search for author Susan Eisenhower or the title of her book how ike led using the bar at the top of the page. [music] hello everyone and welcome to todays virtual Commonwealth Club program and im here to be your moderator for today. Im so excited to be here but i have a few things before we announce our beauful wonderful sunny hoin. As the club continues to host events they are grateful for your continued support and of other members and donors so we hope youll consider mamaking a donation. You can do it online or text donate