The more you know about a subject, the easier it is to build on it and learn more about it, so there’s a reciprocal relationship between learning, memory and attention, Watson said.
As a teacher, his role is to support memory building by planning assessment and reviews. why the likelihood of students being able to simultaneously learn and monitor their own attention is nil, he said.
It’s easy to blame students for their deficits in attention and memory, but in reality, “learning is actually very difficult and takes somewhere between most and all of the cognitive resources that my students actually have,” Watson said. For example, if his students are learning how to create topic sentences, they need to think about how to complete that difficult task, not how to stay on task—something Watson can help them do.
Useful attention-grabbing strategies in the classroom
High school teacher Blake Harvard embeds self-assessment into the learning process in her AP Psychology class.
He uses simple assessments—such as asking students what they learned the previous day or even five minutes ago—to guide him on what class material students are struggling to remember or learn. The frequency of these opportunities to recall information helps the lessons stick.
Assessment is a learning opportunity, Harvard said, and “retrieving information—retrieving 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 perceive and retrieve information. His new book, “Do I have your attention,” presents the research to teachers in an easy-to-understand manner that has positively contributed to his own classroom practices.
To keep its students’ attention, Harvard makes them face the front of the classroom, even when the classroom furniture does not easily support this configuration. His students currently sit at tables rather than individual desks, so he had to get creative to get everyone looking forward.
Decorations are also kept to a minimum in the Harvard classroom, and those that remain are related to the subject matter of his classes. But “it’s not completely bleak,” he said. Cell phones are away at all times during the school day, and he encourages his students to do the same take notes with pencil on paper rather than copying on a computer.
Common classroom practices such as movement can be helpful in engaging students’ attention and retention, and benefits of movement when training is well documented. But Watson cautioned that movement isn’t a cure-all for students’ attention problems. “It’s not that motion is a good idea or that motion is bad; it’s a really useful solution to an alertness problem, but it can make the orientation problem worse,” Watson said.
So if a student falls asleep in Watson’s class, it can have that student get up from their desk and complete a task, such as returning a book to another teacher’s classroom. But if a student seems distracted by a football game outside the classroom window and their focus is diverted from the lesson — a problem with orientation and executive control — “movement may be a bad idea,” Watson said.
Give students time to think
Brains forgetand this is a normal memory process, but sometimes students may experience retrieval error. When his students struggle with retrieval, Harvard helps by providing context clues or rephrasing the definition of the concept they’re struggling to remember.
When reviewing material from a previous lesson, Watson takes a simple approach to prompting her students’ memory and recall. Instead of starting with a brief review of topics from the previous day, he asks his students to write down what they learned in the previous lesson. He then goes around the classroom and monitors the students’ responses. “Now (students) practice by pulling from memory instead of me telling them,” he said.
If students can’t seem to remember what they’ve learned recently, “that’s not their failure, that’s my failure because I haven’t practiced enough. So what I need to remember is to include that thing in more frequent, say, practice retrieval,” Watson said.
The pressure teachers face from schools, administrators, and districts around standardized tests can be overwhelming, and students not being able to remember course material can add to that stress. However, Watson knows that laying a great foundation in the first half of the year is essential to the long-term success of his students.
For example, Watson sophomores should be able to write great five-paragraph analytical essays by the end of the school year. Instead of following an accelerated pace of teaching, Watson spent the entire fall semester in separate sentences and paragraphs. His students often ask him why their class is behind because their peers 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 material in the spring semester.
