New book says there’s more to holding students’ attention than silencing phones

From the myth of multitasking to ‘attention contagion,’ high school teacher Blake Havard hopes to arm educators with the tools of cognitive science.


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Do I Have Your AttentionThis story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

Step into Blake Harvard’s classroom and you’ll find that Less is Decidedly More.

Sixteen tables, two seats to a table, all in rows, face front “because that’s where the instruction is coming from,” he said.

About the only technology in the room: small handheld whiteboards, dry-erase pens and small stacks of index cards. The walls are almost entirely bare. And phones are out of the question, stowed in backpacks before class.

It’s intentional, said Harvard, who teaches Advanced Placement Psychology at James Clemens High School in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville.

A recent image of Harvard’s Alabama classroom. He recently posted to X: “Getting ready to start a new semester tomorrow and just wanted to share my classroom setup. 16 tables. All students facing the direction of instruction.” (Blake Harvard)A recent image of Harvard’s Alabama classroom. He recently posted to X: “Getting ready to start a new semester tomorrow and just wanted to share my classroom setup. 16 tables. All students facing the direction of instruction.” (Blake Harvard)Over the past decade, he has become something of an expert in focus, memory, forgetting and distraction.

Harvard has put these principles into his first book, published last week, titled, appropriately, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning. 

Harvard hopes the book will offer practical advice to teachers on how to use the principles of cognitive science to create better learning environments.

The time is right for a new book about attention, said Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at the City University of New York and founding director of CUNY’s Futures Initiative. She said she’s excited to see Harvard’s work.

Davidson noted several indicators of rising inattention, from falling reading scores to the growth of media misinformation and the higher prevalence of young people who say they’re disaffected with traditional education. 

“I think people are really seeing that what it means to pay attention is important,” said Davidson, who wrote 2011’s Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

Harvard mostly focuses on more intentional teaching methods that reduce distractions and help students manage the vast amount of content they’re called upon to remember —  often called “cognitive load.”

These ideas are decidedly not on tap in most teacher preparation programs, said Harvard, who earned his master’s degree in education in 2006. His coursework contained “nothing on cognition — there was nothing on the brain, nothing on how we learn.”

‘Why don’t I already know about this?’

It wasn’t until 2016, a decade after graduate school, that Harvard happened upon the now-defunct Twitter account “The Learning Scientists.” In plain language, educational psychologists from around the world laid out the basics of cognitive science for educators. 

Blake HarvardBlake HarvardHarvard was gobsmacked. Instead of just shooting in the dark, he finally saw research on the effectiveness of various learning strategies. 

He found himself instantly hooked and soon began writing for the group. That led to his own website, which eventually became the popular blog The Effortful Educator.

Nearly a decade later, he’s traveling the world, speaking at conferences about strategies that affect students’ ability to channel ideas into long-term memory. He’s lost count of how many times he’s had to inform audiences that multitasking is a myth — humans can’t consciously focus on more than one thing at a time.

Harvard subscribes to something he calls the “SAR method,” an accessible way for students and teachers to think about memory. When they’re about to start a lesson, he tells students that memory follows a three-step process: Sense, Attend and Rehearse. 

“You can hear your teacher,” he said. “You can see your teacher. You can see the board. You can sense it. But are you attending to it? Are you paying attention to it, or are there things getting in your way? Are you trying to multitask? Is the person sitting next to you talking?”

Once a student attends to the material, the rehearsal happens. That’s perhaps the most important and tricky part. In the book, he likens it to an athlete’s ability to learn a new routine. If he or she doesn’t rehearse before the big game, he writes, “that would not be a good recipe for success on the playing field.”

Rehearsing in the classroom can take the form of a multiple-choice quiz, a discussion or a project. The key is to access the material from memory and use it appropriately.

Accordingly, he begins many classes by simply asking students to review what came the day, the week or even the month before. Retrieving those memories, he said, makes them more likely to be there the next time the brain goes looking for them.

Another principle he employs is “wait time.” When most teachers ask a question, they’ll settle for the first student with her hand up. But Harvard adds a step, ordering students to retrieve their handheld whiteboard. Before anyone can answer out loud, everyone must attempt an answer in writing.

“Now they’re committed to thinking,” he said. “They’re committed to writing something down. It seems like such a simple thing, but when you make the students do that, you give them time to think.”

As they’re studying, he’ll often give students a kind of slow-motion, three-stage assessment he calls “Brain-Book-Buddy” to offer a more honest take on what they actually know.

In the first assessment, they answer a series of questions from memory. Then they fill in the answers they couldn’t remember with the help of their notes. In the final test, they can talk to classmates.

“They end up getting all the right answers, but they’re also acutely aware of what they actually knew, what they knew with their notebook, and what they had to ask their buddies, their peers, about,” he said. “It’s an ongoing conversation of them thinking about their thinking.”

Read the full story on the 74.

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