Structured Attention Practice

Building the skills of attention aligns with what you may already be doing in your course.  After all, in the context of your class, paying attention is learning to think like a practitioner of your discipline.  The skills of attention are the skills you are already teaching.  As such, we can draw lessons from work on backwards design and scaffolding to build the structured practice students need.

Backwards design is the idea that we start with our goals, in this case, what accomplished practice of our attentive task looks like.  With these goals in mind, we then figure out what skills students will need to develop in order to achieve them, and then build our teaching practice to help students develop the skills.  Scaffolding is providing structure to practice that slowly transfers more and more independent practice of the skill from the faculty to the student, so that by the end, they are able to perform the skill on their own.

Start, then, with what you want students to be able to do. What are your goals for them? Do you want them to be able to analyze visual representations of quantitative data? To deeply read novels or poems, and know how to read these differently from each other, and from work in the sciences? To appreciate a visual artist's technique in how they've created their photographic work? At the end of the semester, what would you be able to reasonably expect an engaged student to be able to do with this task?

From there, break this performance down to the constituent skills required to carry it out. You, it can be assumed, are already quite skilled at this task already. How do you do it? What information do you look for, and what questions do you ask? This is not always an easy task for us, as we've acquired skill in our discipline through thousands of hours of practice, and likely can perform these tasks automatically. Students, however, will need guidance on the steps they should take.

There are two keys to an effective scaffold for the skills of attention:
 

1. The complex skill should be broken down into parts that students can practice independently before synthesizing.
2. You should be able to provide feedback on their practice of each of those specific skills.

Suppose, for example, that I want to help my students learn how to attentively read philosophical journal articles.  Some of the first steps in so doing are recognizing the author's thesis, and seeing how that thesis is positioned relative to the question motivating the article, and the other possible positions in the literature.  I might have a short in-class activity where students are tasked with looking at the reading for the next class and identifying the thesis, giving me an opportunity to give targeted feedback on how well they do so.  While reading that paper, with the thesis now in hand from their classwork, I might task them with writing a paragraph that explains the question the paper asks, and how the thesis fits into it.  In each case, I break the attentive activity down into small pieces that I can give targeted feedback on. Importantly (both for the students and my own time management as faculty), I am giving feedback on only the single component skill that students are practicing.

Attention as Part of the Practice

Here's the crucial point on how scaffolded skill development bears on student attention - a student's attention on a complex cognitive task needs to be consistently rewarding, otherwise the plethora of distractions available to them are going to be more compelling. A complex cognitive activity is rewarding when we feel like we are making progress (even when the task is difficult), and we feel it is worthwhile. If I'm a student struggling to read a philosophical article, I might feel like my efforts are pointless because I never really get the material, and that it's not even worth trying to figure it out because my professor will explain it all to me when I come to class.  

This means that our scaffolds need to be designed to match student skill development to the challenge of the tasks in front of them.  Easier said than done, of course.  To figure out what this looks like in your course, I recommend you try to identify (and ask your students about!) the encouraging signals and discouraging signals that their practice sends them.  That is, when do they feel good about the activity, and when did they feel like giving up?  Note that this is not the difference between when an activity was easy and when it was hard.  Easy activities can themselves be discouraging - they can be boring!  A hard activity is highly engaging when we feel like we can overcome the challenge and make progress.

Once you've identified your encouraging and discouraging signals, try to find ways to promote the former and reduce the latter.  Your aim is to make the practice feel rewarding so that, when students are working on their own, they practice attentive engagement at the same time they develop the skills of your course.

Let's consider an example.  Suppose I am asking my students to read articles in the Philosophy of Language. These articles often deploy symbolic language drawn from formal logic or syntax.  I can read this material, and when preparing for class I determine that students can understand the article without mastering it, so I feel comfortable assigning the piece.  However, my diligent students don't know whether it is essential or not, and try to understand it, but find it frustrating.  They start to think that they aren't cut out for this, that the readings are too hard, and that they'll just wait until I explain it.  Here is a discouraging signal - how can I alleviate it?  One option is to devote the time in class to helping the students understand these symbols.  Or, if I don't think it is the best use of my class time, I might prepare a reading supplement that students can turn to when they hit these sections, and which provides an explanation of what those parts of the reading mean.  The aim is not to eliminate the cognitive challenge of the work.  Quite the opposite in fact - the aim is to help students keep focused on the difficult cognitive task that I think it important they practice.

Let's bring this back to attention, and the pay-off of our strategy.  Consider the student who professes an interest in your discipline because they find YouTube or TikTok videos on the field interesting and exciting, but who loses that interest when confronted with the reality of the hard work it requires. By making the hard work accessible, this student is better able to find it compelling and worth paying attention to. This is a student who is prepared to independently pay attention - with proper motivation, they can now perform this task in a way that holds their attention.