I’m really good at multitasking, Miss!

^{A bi-weekly T&L bulletin for staff at Community Schools Trust}

No. No you’re not. Multitasking is merely task switching and each task is being completed slightly less effectively than if you were attending to them, one at a time.

But I doubt this explanation will be accepted by our students, who insist on writing as we explain something important, or swear they are talking quietly about the work as they complete the independent task.

Today’s post is about attention and its crucial role in performing, well, every function in our day to day lives.

In the classroom, whilst there are lots of poor proxies for learning, one better proxy we should strive to achieve is making students think hard (Coe, 2014).

But to think hard, students must attend to what they should think about.

As teachers, it is our job to steer students’ attention to that which they should think about, and minimise distraction to that attention.

This is no easy job. 

Our students are quite practised at not paying attention. For example, smartphones by design grab attention in a multitude of ways.

In Lemov’s ‘Reconnect’, we learn that ‘the prefrontal cortex – the region of the brain that exerts impulse control and self discipline – isn’t fully developed until aged 25.’

‘In other words, any time young people are on a screen, they are in an environment that habituates them to states of low attention and constant task switching.’

I can personally attest to this – as I write this post, I have allowed myself to be distracted countless times by my screen. And that’s with a prefrontal cortex that is (hopefully) fully developed by now…

Lemov ends the section with this chilling message: 

‘At first, our phones fracture our attention when we use them, but after a time our minds are rewired for distraction. Soon enough our phones are within us.’

But fight this we must…

Luckily, in Community Schools Trust (CST), phones are banned. Students know they are not to have their phones out and if it is seen, it is confiscated. 

That gives us a great opportunity to gatekeep their attention in the classroom. For 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 6 weeks at a time, we can counter the habituation of constant task switching in our lessons, by practising attending to learning for sustained periods of time.

We have the mechanisms to facilitate this in our lessons:

• We use SLANT to call for attention (sit up, listen carefully, ask/answer questions, never interrupt, track the speaker – these are all proxies for paying attention)
• We have distinct conditions for our learning activities which we define in our instruction: eg. for this task, you will have 8 minutes and you will complete this independently, in silence
• We have an extended independent practice phase in every lesson (SLOP – Shed Loads of Practice)

These are all great but is it enough to combat the insidious effects of hours of daily doomscrolling? 

I say we need to be much more precise in our efforts. When juggling the myriad of stimuli in our classrooms, as teachers, it is easy to slip up on the small stuff – but it is the very small stuff that means learning is happening.

Allowing students to write as we speak

This is probably the first thing I notice when I visit a lesson.

In the classroom, our words are gold dust. We are the experts and so when we speak, it is worth listening to. But if students are writing as well as listening, it is highly likely they are overloading their working memory and will not process effectively what is being said (or written) – this is known as the redundancy effect, part of cognitive load theory.

Often, students are eager to get down your words of gold and so will not heed your instruction to SLANT. Lemov calls this ‘sins of enthusiasm’, which I love, but however well intentioned it is, we must direct their attention accordingly.

How do I combat this high frequency error?

1 Front load your instruction with your expectation but peg it to what you have noticed:

I’ve noticed some of us like to write when I am speaking. Remember, I don’t want you to miss out on important information so I expect complete attention please – that means nothing in our hands when I call for SLANT.

2 Allow take up time when calling for SLANT:

Be seen looking. 3…all pens down now, 2….sitting up and tracking me, 1…just waiting for 2 people, thank you… and SLANT.

3 Follow through and enforce your expectation:

That’s your reminder Billy, remember we’re in SLANT now – I will give you a chance to get this down in a moment. 

If you can perfect this expectation, you are guaranteeing sustained attention for the following regular components of your lessons:

• Providing an instruction
• Introducing new materials
• ‘I do – we do – you do’
• SLOP
• Whenever you check for understanding

This week then, fight the attention fracturing phone effect with your high expectations in the classroom: do not allow students to write or speak when you are addressing them. It won’t happen straight away. Persevere in your enforcement of it. Habituate your students in this practice. 

Know that once you have perfected it, you are not only ensuring learning is happening in your classroom, but you are playing a small part in countering the insidious effects of task switching on the prefrontal cortexes of our young minds…

Have a fantastic final week.

Thahmina