Classroom actions

Because learners often lack the instinct to intuit the desired focus of the class’ attention, teachers must explicitly call attention to the important parts of the class. Telling students to “pay attention; this is really important” is not cheating; it is being clear.

– Tokuhama-Espinosa (2014:124)

At the start of your lesson

• Classroom Action 1
  • New or unexpected things attract our attention. Think of something unexpected or unusual to start your lesson with. You can, for instance, use an interesting picture or video related to the subject matter of your class. Or you can give students an intriguing question, problem or unusual perspective that might trigger their attention. At the same time, you also trigger students’ engagement (see module 3) because you create an information gap they will want to fill.

• Classroom Action 2
  • Students pay more attention to things when they are meaningful and relevant to them. Think of how the subject matter relates to students’ real-life experiences and/or current affairs. Make the relevance explicit at the beginning of your class and repeat it at important moments during your class.

Throughout your lesson

• Classroom Action 3
  • Use warning cues to announce explicitly that important information is about to follow:
    • You can verbally call attention to important moments, g. “This is something very important”, “Now pay attention to …”
    • You can use visual warning cues. For example, you can give the slides of your PowerPoint with essential information a different background colour. When students see this colour, it triggers their alertness and attention.

• Classroom Action 4
  • Try to keep distractions such as noise, chit-chat, smartphones, confusion, other students who happen to be passing by your classroom,  etc., down to a minimum. Make a list of things you have noticed to distract your students and think of possible interventions to grab your students’ attention.

• Classroom Action 5
  • Make sure students feel safe and respected in your class. Embrace mistakes as opportunities to learn. When students feel unsafe, their attention might be distracted by possible “threats” in their immediate environment. These distractions trigger an avoidance response and impair learning (see module 3 on engagement).

A teacher’s job is to help the student choose the right focus by explicitly calling attention to what he considers important.

– Tokuhama-Espinosa (2014:32)

• Classroom Action 6

  • State the learning objectives explicitly and show what success will look like (Hattie, 2012). These learning objectives help orient students’ attention to what you want them to learn. When relevant, repeat the learning objectives throughout your class. In this way, students can redirect their attention. Last but not least, try to assess the learning objectives during your class and give students feedback so they know what steps to focus on next.

• Classroom Action 7

  • Highlight important and key elements to draw attention to this important information:

    • Provide a visual cue (e.g. an arrow or a frame or …) that directs the attention to the information you want your students to focus on.

    • When working with pictures or diagrams, also physically indicate where students should look when you explain something.

• Classroom Action 8

  • Think of possible external distractions and try to keep them to a minimum.

    • The learning material should look carefully prepared and structured. Students should focus on the content, not the flashy layout or irrelevant images. So do not overdo it and try to keep your material somewhat “sober”.

• • • Keep your PowerPoint Just visualize keywords, and avoid (extensive) texts as much as possible. Use pictures instead to tell your story.

• Classroom Action 9

  • Avoid “double assignments” in your exercises or assignments. Make sure you practice (in the first instance) what you want to practice on. When students master the knowledge or skill, you can interleave with “distracters”.

The previous classroom actions are meant to support your students’ attention and learning. Of course, we would like our students to do these things alone without our help. Knowing when to pay attention and which task-relevant information to select are essential skills for lifelong learning. Nevertheless, students often struggle with regulating their attention and, consequently, their learning.

If we want them to succeed in lifelong learning, we must offer our students opportunities, support, and feedback to develop and optimize their executive attention network. It might also be beneficial to model and make explicit how you, as an expert, approach a learning opportunity or how you solve a problem (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999).

It is clear that EFs [= executive functions] can indeed be improved and that is true at all ages from infants (e.g., Kovács and Mehler, 2009) through elders (e.g., Williams and Lord, 1997). However we do not know how much EFs can be improved. Does training simply nudge EFs slightly higher? Are benefits closely tied to specific types of tasks or contexts or do they generalize further than that? How long do benefits last? Are improvements just superficial and ephemeral, yielding no enduring benefits? 

– Diamond et al. (2013:42)

• Classroom Action 10

  • Design authentic learning opportunities and activities in which students really need to:

    • make a plan of action
    • select task-relevant information
    • inhibit distractions
    • initiate action
    • monitor behaviour and keep it on track
    • switch strategies (if the ones chosen do not work out)

     

  • As Vermunt & Verloop (1999:274) note: adequate diagnoses of students’ learning and thinking strategies are a necessary condition to avoid these frictions [i.e. destructive friction] and to be able to tailor teaching to those strategies students do not master or master insufficiently.

     

  • When designing learning opportunities, also think of

    • how you are going to scaffold your students’ learning
    • how you might provide students with prompts to reflect their ongoing learning process
    • how and when you are going to give your students feedback.