The more you know about a topic, the easier it is to get inspired and learn more. So there is a reciprocal relationship between learning, memory and attention, Watson said.
As a teacher, their role is to support memory development through assessment planning and revision. For what? The likelihood that students will be able to both learn and monitor their own attention is zero, he said.
It’s easy to blame students for their attention and memory deficits, but in reality, “learning is actually very difficult and takes up between most and all of the cognitive resources that my students actually have,” Watson said. For example, if his students are learning how to write topic sentences, they need to think about how to accomplish this difficult task, not how to stay on task—that’s something Watson can help them do.
Helpful Attention Strategies for the Classroom
High school teacher Blake Harvard integrates self-assessment into the learning process in his AP psychology class.
He uses simple assessments – like asking students what they learned the day before or even five minutes ago – to tell him what students are having trouble retaining or learning in class. The frequency of these information recall opportunities helps lessons stick.
An assessment is a learning opportunity, Harvard said, and “retrieving information – extracting that memory – and using it itself strengthens that memory.”
Harvard believes that teaching should center memory and that students should think critically about how they absorb and retrieve information. His new book, “Do I Have Your Attention,” presents research to teachers in an easy-to-digest way that has contributed positively to his own classroom practices.
To maintain the attention of its students, Harvard places them facing the front of the classroom, even when the classroom furniture does not easily support this configuration. His students are currently seated at tables instead of individual desks, so he’s had to get creative to keep everyone facing forward.
Decorations are also kept to a minimum in the Harvard classroom, and those that remain are all related to the subject of his classes. But “it’s not completely bleak,” he said. Cell phones are absent at all times during the school day, and he also encourages his students to take notes with pencil on paper, instead of transcribing them onto a computer.
Common classroom practices, such as movement, can be helpful in engaging students’ attention and memory, and the benefits of movement when learning are well documented. But Watson cautioned that the movement is not a panacea for students’ attention problems. “The problem is not that movement is a good or bad idea; it’s a very useful solution to an alertness problem, but it could make an orientation problem worse,” Watson said.
So if a student falls asleep in Watson’s class, he can ask that student to get up from his or her desk and complete a task, such as bringing a book back to another teacher’s classroom. But if a student seems distracted by a soccer game outside the classroom window and their attention is drawn away from the lesson — a problem with orientation and executive control — “movement might be a bad idea,” Watson said.
Give students time to think
The brain forgets, and this is a normal memory process, but sometimes students may experience retrieval failure. When its students have trouble remembering, Harvard helps them by providing context clues or reframing the definition of the concept they are having trouble remembering.
When reviewing material from a previous lesson, Watson takes a simple approach to boosting her students’ memory and memory retrieval. Instead of starting with a brief reminder of the topics covered the day before, he asks his students to write down what they learned in the previous lesson. He then walks around the classroom and monitors the students’ responses. “Now (students) practice by retrieving from memory rather than on my own,” he said.
If students don’t seem to remember what they learned recently, “it’s not their failure, it’s my failure, because I didn’t practice enough. What I need to remember is to include this thing in, let’s say, more frequent retrieval exercises,” Watson said.
The pressure teachers face from schools, administrators, and districts regarding standardized testing can be overwhelming, and students not being able to remember course material can contribute to this stress. However, Watson knows that establishing a good foundation in the first half of the year is critical to her students’ long-term success.
For example, Watson sophomores should be able to write excellent five-paragraph analytical essays by the end of the school year. Instead of following an accelerated teaching pace, Watson spends the entire fall semester on individual sentences and paragraphs. His students often ask him why their class is behind, because their classmates in other classes are already writing five-paragraph essays, but Watson reassures them that mastering the individual components of a five-paragraph essay first will make it easier to write longer papers in the spring semester.
