Students Don’t Decide Whether to Pay Attention

Although attention appears to be like a switch that students can choose to turn on or off, it’s more accurately a largely unconscious filter. It sorts through millions of pieces of sensory information: Every second, each sensory nerve ending (from taste, smell, touch, pressure such as your arm on a chair, heat, cold, vibration, each retinal cell) and every internal organ reports whether they’re activated or quiescent. Most of this is unimportant to the individual, but each nerve cell is just doing its job. The information falls to a structure in the low brain called the reticular activating system (RAS) to rapidly determine if the input is accepted or ignored. This enormous task for the RAS is guided by its built-in priorities.

Our Attention System’s Priorities

Perceived danger is the first priority through the RAS, followed by novelty, curiosity, emotional intensity, and, especially for teens, social relevance. Thus, a teacher’s facial expression, a phone vibration in a pocket, or an overheard hallway conversation, rather than a lecture, is likely to get priority attention. This is especially true because teen brains are guided more by immediate gratification than by a consideration for long-term goals.

This normal behavior of attention switching is often misdiagnosed as intentional misbehavior, attention deficit, low motivation, or low intelligence, when it’s the normal attention filter working as it was designed to do—prioritizing information that’s likely to promote survival or potential reward. The problem challenging students’ attention is most likely their RAS programming rather than what to let in.

Their brains are “paying attention” to something that has a greater attention system priority than what teachers are saying because teen students have yet to develop adequate neural networks of sustained focus on the things we want them to let in. They are paying attention, but not to us, and that is manageable when we know the rules of the RAS and work with them, not against them.

Understanding the brain’s priority for attending to cues related to threat, pleasure, novelty, the unexpected, and that direction of focus is largely outside conscious control. This helps teachers to understand the importance of promoting safety and curiosity and to have more influence over the signals that are available to be captured and ultimately promote ours to be the desirable ones.

6 Strategies That Help Capture Student Attention 

Attention and emotion are entangled from the first moment of sensory intake. When students feel safe, teachers can make sensory input more curious without increasing perceived threat from any change.

You can’t talk a brain out of its programming to attend to novelty or curiosity. What you can change is which signals are available to be caught in the first place. The brain seeks changes in pattern, so building curiosity and then inviting predictions gets the RAS in teen brains to admit what you want it to attend to. Try the following methods to engage your students’ attentiveness.

1. Employ curiosity-driven predictions. Start a history lesson with an unattributed curious quote and written student predictions. Continue instruction and allow prediction changes until the reveal.

2. Use contrast to surprise students. In a science class, students notice unexpected outcomes, such as when an orange previously dipped in liquid nitrogen shatters when it’s “accidentally” dropped on the floor. Novelty would also apply in most subjects, such as opening class with an unexpected but true quote from a famous person in history.

3. Prioritize peer-enhanced learning. Students are very peer conscious. Take advantage of this, rather than having it become a class distraction. Groups take turns with different individuals being the leader. The leaders meet with the teacher, learn the gist of the beginning of the lecture, and share it with the group. There’s significant power in hearing information from a peer. Additionally, the comfort of asking questions of a peer in a small group allows for participatory interactions and holds student attention when they go back to complete the rest of the lesson with the whole class.

4. Signal escalating importance. Use physical cues to signal important material. Put on a fun baseball-type cap (I use one with a brain) to signal importance in a lesson. Turn the cap sideways to indicate even more important information, and turn it backward for the most critical content. A visual signal that students in the room learn to read directs attention faster than any verbal instruction from you. After a few weeks, reduce this cue and invite students to bring their own caps for the next week. Ask them to turn the caps themselves when they hear or read something important. Encourage this as an option when students are also doing homework assignments.

5. Introduce color-tiered note-taking. Students have three of the same color pencils as you have board colors. When you pick up one of the colors to write with, they use the same color in their notes. They understand which color is the highest value, and these notes are a study aid. The process itself engages the RAS by four of its biggest openers: novelty, change, color, and peer interaction. It is not long before the students become independent in using colors for level of importance, so teacher modeling becomes unnecessary as students continue the strategy in school and with notes taken at home.

6. Take a meaningful pause. For example, if your class is exploring natural selection, stop just short of explaining a curious adaptation and put the question to the room instead. Hold the answer long enough for real uncertainty to build. A fact that would have arrived flat shows up as a small mystery instead, and the brain seeks to solve mysteries and close gaps just as cliff-hangers draw our interest to the coming episode.

In your classroom, if you find that conversations continue after the bell, phones are “snuck” under desks, and attention drifts out the windows, now you know that it’s not intentioned inattention, rudeness, or low motivation that shifted your students’ attention, but rather the unconscious pull of stimuli that rule the RAS filter.

To counteract this and engage your students, invite their predictions and have learners take turns describing content to introduce the social pull that used to compete with your voice. Later, have everyone write on an exit card the big idea that mattered most. You’ll learn what got RAS passage to guide your subsequent lesson. Share some of these comments the next day for review.

Lockers still slam and heads will still turn. Attention can’t be won permanently, but you can influence the speed of the return and the chosen items for the attention spotlight.