Attention-Friendly Teaching Techniques for Secondary Classrooms

I recently observed my students during “morning duty,” which takes place before classes formally begin and we institute a school-wide phone ban for the remainder of the day. As I walked through the cafeteria, I saw students standing in line for breakfast, scrolling on their phones. Other students sat at cafeteria tables, chatting with their friends, many of whom also had their phones out.

Educators (myself included) bemoan the effect that smartphones have on students’ attention spans. But on this particular day, as I looked around, I had the opposite reaction. Though students were engrossed in short-form content, they were also extremely attentive to their devices. I started to think about how I could utilize these contrasts—short-form content and prolonged engagement—in service of deeper learning.

My investigation showed me that there’s a whole science to keeping our attention. I realized that I don’t need to make everything into 20-second sound bites or completely eliminate cognitive effort, but I do need to make the path into higher-level thinking rewarding, clear, and well-organized. Here are a few techniques I’ve tried.

Keep Them Guessing By Varying the Content

Students (and adults!) spend an astonishing amount of time scrolling through content that might not even be relevant to their interests. Why? One reason is dopamine, which is more than just the brain’s “pleasure chemical,” as it’s often described.

Dopamine plays an important role in motivation and seeking out rewards. It’s the possibility of a reward, not the reward itself, that engages the dopamine system. When students are on their social media feeds, they don't know exactly what’s coming next. One video is boring. Another is hilarious. Another is weird. The possibility that the next video might be even better keeps students scrolling.

Classrooms can also activate reward-seeking behavior! I’ve found that using different modalities—having students demonstrate their understanding by writing, explaining, modeling, drawing, or creating something—encourages enough choice and diversity that students are willing to keep trying. Sometimes I switch up student groups instead; students rotate through different partners or teach each other. Other times, I break a topic into sub-topics and have students choose the order.

Variety creates multiple opportunities for engagement and keeps students on a “reward-seeking” pathway. Our job as teachers is to curate and organize engaging opportunities in a way that reinforces the structure of the material that students are learning.

Create Logical Structure With Chunking

Imagine you need to remember this string of letters: FCIABIASNA

That's pretty difficult.

But reorganize the exact same letters into familiar groups: FBI | CIA | NASA

Suddenly, it's much easier.

That's chunking, or organizing information into meaningful units, rather than asking the brain to process a long, undifferentiated stream. Social media feeds utilize chunking by showing short, cohesive videos. We can do the same in the classroom by breaking up content into coherent components and providing reflection time in between.

For example, instead of immediately running through an entire lesson about balancing chemical equations, I first teach how to interpret subscripts, then give students time to practice, then move on to the next step of analyzing coefficients.

I often provide a graphic organizer to help students physically see the connections between different content components. Graphic organizers provide a visual map of where pieces belong and how they relate to one another. Rather than imagining the entire structure of a lesson, students can see it on the page.

When designing lessons with chunking, I think of each chunk as an episode. I give students enough information to understand their task, let them do something about it, and then give them a clear transition into the next episode. Just like you might have a commercial between episodes, breaks in learning also provide the opportunity to reenergize students’ brains.

Consider Incorporating Movement

Movement is not just good for the body. Getting out of our seats is good for the brain, too. Physical activity supports attention and cognitive performance, and brief opportunities to move help students manage fatigue. I strategically build movement into lessons without losing valuable instructional time. A few techniques I’ve successfully tried: 

• Total physical response: I introduce a new term, then students physically respond to vocabulary or concepts. I’ve had students do plate tectonic dances and make up hand signals that accompany physics vocabulary.
• Gallery walks: I post student work, problems, images, and questions around the room. Students move from station to station, then respond to what they see either verbally or by writing notes on whiteboards in the style of the thinking classroom.
• Scavenger hunts: I place questions, clues, or examples around the room, then have students move to find and solve them. Scavenger hunts are especially useful for breaking up repetitive test preparation. 
• Station rotations: Instead of bringing every resource to every student, I ask students to move through different tasks, examples, or applications. This simultaneously ensures students have the opportunity to interact with equipment that’s otherwise limited by supply.

The movement in these activities is purposeful. I’m not asking students to move around simply because I’m worried they’re sleepy; movement is really another way for students to interact with content in an attention-promoting manner.

Reinforce Cognitive Effort With Retrieval Practices

There’s so much content on social media feeds that it’s almost impossible to keep up with it all. Unless, of course, something goes viral or becomes a meme, at which point it tends to stick in our brains.

The most memorable content is something that can be recalled organically, rather than engaging with it via an external reminder. Cognitive scientists call this “retrieval practice,” a technique that isn’t just looking over notes. Retrieval practice means actually closing a notebook and pulling the information back from memory. In doing so, students are going deeper in their neural pathway to ensure long-term encoding. 

I build retrieval into my lesson “feed” as a chunking activity. I mix up the structure with different timing and techniques. I might:

• Begin class with three questions about yesterday's material.
• Ask students to write down everything they remember about a concept for 60 seconds.
• Put a problem on the board and ask students to solve it before reviewing the procedure.
• Stop halfway through a lesson and ask, "What are the three most important things we've learned so far?"

I space these opportunities throughout the lesson and across multiple days. Retrieval practice can be frustrating for students when they don’t remember something, but this frustration provides an opportunity to remind students about having a growth mindset. Mistakes are information and opportunities for learning, not failures. 

Remember That Students Are Paying Attention

Phones have not destroyed attention spans. The question is what captures a student’s attention, and what we do with it once we have it. We can use the same attention-grabbing techniques—varied content, organized flow, and short breaks—while building in other brain-friendly strategies like movement. In combination, these strategies can go a long way. Our classrooms aren’t going to be quite as addictive as TikTok, but they can at least be attention-friendly enough for our students to eagerly engage.