Motivating Student Attention

In my dreams, my students come to my class excited about philosophy and the world of ideas; they dive into readings and class conversations because they care deeply about the right answers to the questions we ask.  I don't need to motivate them to care - they already think my field is exciting, interesting, and worth their effort.

Beyond being false, this is an unfair expectation.  Interests are cultivated, and even if students have encountered our disciplines before, few have practiced them in the kind of depth required for collegiate study.  The question is, how do we help inspire in our students the interest and excitement that we ourselves have for the material?

Inspiring this interest takes time, and it takes skill.  A class, let alone a career in our subjects, requires a substantive commitment of attention and energy.  It requires going beyond fun and interesting conclusions to look at the methods by which those conclusions are reached.  It requires thinking not just about the finished artwork, but the hard and exacting work needed to produce it.  A student is only going to successfully build the kind of interest that can sustain that level of commitment if they have enough skill to find practice of it rewarding.  Our goal in cultivating attention should be to use our classes to motivate the initial attention required to build sufficient skill for rewarding continued practice.  This is the ground from which motivation grows.

So how do we motivate that initial attention?  Here are a few places to start:

Modular Class Design

One way to refresh student attention in class is to shift your teaching approach.  Think about all the different modes you use during a class.  You might move between demonstrating a skill, lecturing on ideas, facilitating discussion, eliciting information, challenging student ideas, and guiding group work, among others.  Each mode has its purpose, and an effective class uses the right mode for what you are trying to accomplish in that moment.  When we stick to a single mode for too long, however, attention is likely to wane.  This goes not just for the long-winded lecture - activities that run too long inevitably lead to off-topic student conversations, and class discussions can become increasingly difficult to follow the longer they run.

Switching from one mode to another helps refresh student attention, and it gives students who are falling behind a chance to reset and refocus.  When designing an individual class session, I recommend building it as a sequence of teaching modes.  For example, you might begin class with a 5 minute discussion aimed at priming students to think about the subject of the session, followed by a 10 minute lecture, and another 10 minutes solving a practice problem.  This approach will not only help you maintain student interest throughout the class session, but it foregrounds your goals by asking you to think about what you are hoping to achieve in each small section of the class.

The Learning Environment

Consider your physical space.  When you are teaching, what is the focal point?  Where will students attention be drawn?  Where do you want it to be drawn?  Most of our classrooms are designed for students to focus on us, the board, and perhaps a screen.  For lectures, this is probably exactly where you want students focused.  Suppose, however, you are transitioning into a discussion, but the space remains configured for a lecture.  Often what results is a discussion that feels disjointed, a series of conversations between individual students and you as the instructor, because the students remain focused on you.  If you want students paying attention to their peers, to a group, or a text, consider ways you can move students around so that the environment encourages them to pay attention to what you want them to attend to.

Name and Gain

The importance of learning student names is an old adage of effective teaching, and for good reason.  Using student's names helps them feel seen and known by their faculty, contributing to better relationships and a greater willingness to participate in class.  Hearing our name also grabs our attention.  It is an example of what is known as the cocktail party effect - if you are in a crowded room with people chatting merrily, and someone at a distance says your name, it grabs your attention even if you had no idea what that person was talking about beforehand.  So too with our students.

But not only should we learn names, we should also, where possible, encourage students to use each other's names in discussions.  This is typically done by asking students to preface their contributions to discussion with a reference to the student whose ideas they are responding to, building upon, etc.  Not only will the regular use of names encourage student attention to their peers, but it helps build a classroom community.  We all find it easier to pay attention when we consider ourselves part of a shared endeavor, rather than an outside observer.

Your Content

Foreground the questions your discipline asks, rather than the answers.  It's easier said than done, as simply phrasing your topic as a question can still foreground the answer.  Suppose you are at a professional conference, and are asked to describe your scholarly work - how might you answer?  If you are like me, you might have answered by placing your project in the context of disciplinary debates, using the extant theories scholars in my field rely upon.  It would not only be a big jargon-y, but it would have presumed that my audience would care about things like the justification for believing seemingly obvious facts about language, such as that "snow is white" means that snow is white.  Consider some ways I might introduce a research question from my field to students:

• Where does our knowledge of the propositional content of sentences come from?
• How do we know it is true that "snow is white" means that snow is white?
• Does the cognitive etiology of our linguistic judgments play a role in justifying their use in linguistic methodology?

It would hardly be a surprise if these questions don't elicit a great deal of student interest.  They are a mixture of too technical ("propositional content," "cognitive etiology"), too 'insider' (linguistic methodology), and too unclear as to why they matter (such as explaining how we know something that feels stunningly obvious).  Even though I've used a question, I've still foregrounded the answers that my discipline uses by assuming knowledge of the theories, terms, and motivations of philosophers of language.  Instead, I should highlight the hook for someone relatively ignorant of the material, and then only sharpen the question as we try to answer it:
 

• If I ask you what a sentence in a language you are fluent in means, I bet you can tell me the answer.  But, suppose you disagree with someone about what a sentence means.  How could you defend your answer without just saying, 'well, that's what it means'?  

I can strengthen this even further by motivating the question, that is, by helping students see why answering that question is important.  I could do so by connecting it to real world stakes, such as disagreements about the meaning of Constitutions and laws.  Or, I could use a demonstration to highlight something odd or unusual.  In the above case, I often do so by drawing their attention to a fact they know about language that they can't explain, such as the fact that they - and probably you - know that in 'Jim believed he got the promotion' that 'Jim' and 'he' could be the same person, but in 'he believed Jim got the promotion' they could not.  One of my favorite methods is to give students a short problem that they are not yet equipped to answer, but which pushes them to run into the question we are going to answer.  That is, if we can get the student to ask the same question we are, we get them to a place where they want to know the answer.  We can supply the disciplinary framework to ask that question in a more precise way later.

Stakes

Finally, there is one tried and true method of getting student attention that you probably know well: grade them.  But, this is a double-edged sword.  Graded work focuses student attention, but often not in a sustainable way.  Students might be attending only as a means to the end of a good grade, and indeed, might develop some degree of resentment about the material.

However, using grades strategically can be a valuable strategy in building student attentive skill.  Low-stakes grades can provide the extra bit of buy-in from students to get the necessary engagement to see why a potentially difficult task is worth doing.  Higher-stakes grading can be used to really push students to build the foundational skills needed for higher level attentive work.  That is, we can use grades to focus student attention, and we should do so in cases where the skills they build will make further practice more rewarding.