Teaching How to Pay Attention

Attention takes many forms.  In a philosophy class, a student might attend to a text, or the logical implications of an argument.  A creative writing student might attend to the inner lives of their characters, or on the ramifications of word choices.   A biology student might attend to the rich subtleties of a large data set, or to observations of the natural world.  An artist may similarly attend to the natural world, but bring a different lens to the experience.

That is, when we, as teachers and scholars, talk about student attention, we are talking about how to attend rightly, that is, how to pay attention to the right things in the right way.  Telling a student to 'pay attention' may get them to momentarily force their attention on what we want, but it does not give them guidance on how to engage in the kind of sustained, rewarding, attentive process that we are trying to cultivate in our courses.

Indeed, not knowing how to do this can be frustrating for students.  Consider a discipline that you are not an expert in.  Imagine I ask you read a Chemistry research article and pay close attention to it, or to look upon a work of art for an extended period of time.  As a scholar, you are probably pretty good at focusing, and so for a little while, you might have a good deal of success focusing on the experiment the Chemist describes, or the choices the artist made.  However, over time, you are going to struggle to notice new things, and you are going to run into the limits of your own ignorance.  The article or the work of art is going to become less and less compelling, and the distractions that surround you are going to ask more and more of you.  This is some of what our students face when we ask them to pay attention.  If we do not know how to attend to something, and if we do not know how to find reward in what we are attending to, we will quickly find distractions more compelling.

To start teaching the skills of attention, then, we should begin with what we want students to attend to and what we want them to do in attending.

What to attend to

As we noted above, the objects of attention will vary based on the course one is teaching and the skills one wants students to develop.  Think about your ideal success - what would you want the student doing when they are out of the classroom?  Do you want them slowing down and paying attention to the world around them?  To their own experience?  To the word choices of a writer?  Or the framing of a scene?

Or you might approach this question by thinking about your own practice in your discipline.  One of the things that makes us successful in our chosen fields is that we have learned how to attend to the right things.  As a philosopher, I have learned how to pick out arguments when reading densely packed texts.  I often have to check myself when working with students - argumentative structure leaps out at me and I am surprised when it doesn't to students.  This shouldn't be surprising.  I've learned to pay attention to certain word choices and ways of structuring essays, to the broader conversation that an author is contributing to, and markers of inferences.  If a student is not able to recognize these features of the text, they are going to to have a hard time attending to what I think is important - the words I care about are just more words in a densely packed article.

In our disciplines, we are like Sherlock Holmes, rather than Dr. Watson.  Watson, like the reader, does not know which clues matter, and so it is easy to miss the solution to the mystery because we put our attention in the wrong places.  Holmes, by contrast, attends only to the most important clues.  You probably function similarly in your discipline with your expertise, while students are often like Watson, overwhelmed with all of the available information, relevant or not.  What is it that you are trained to attend to that students may not be?  

How to attend

Choosing what to attend to is only the first step.  What should the student do when attending to it?  Just as the objects of attention are various, so are the tasks we might engage in while attending.  In some cases, attention might take the form of analyzing data sets, looking for patterns or oddities.  In other cases, attention might involve carefully working through the algorithmic steps of problem solving.  In yet other cases, attention might be intensely focusing on one's own visual experience, trying to see it for what it is, and not what we expect it to be.

These choices are going to be dictated by your course, and your field. They are probably the skills you are already trying to teach!  The goal in identifying these skills is to articulate for ourselves and for our students, what a practice we might know deeply and intuitively looks like for someone just learning.  Instead of just describing the skills I've learned as a philosopher, I should try to spell out exactly what I do when thinking philosophically.  When I find an idea that inspires some kind of reaction - what do I do with it?  What does it mean for me to consider counter-arguments, or imagine alternative explanations, or try to follow logical consequences?

When we just tell a student to 'read this text and pay attention to what the author is saying' or 'look at this plant and pay attention to what you see,' we provide insufficient guidance for most students.  They look at the text, and perhaps they struggle to identify any meaning, and do not know how to move forward.  Or they find a superficial meaning and think they have finished the task.  As faculty, we are frustrated that the student has not dug deeper, and the student is frustrated because they don't know what we want them to do.  This miscommunication occurs because we've told the student to pay attention to something, but without telling them what it means to pay attention in this case.  Instead, we need to begin by clearly articulating what we want students to do, and teaching those skills.

Scaffolding to Self-Directed Attention

To begin, we can direct students attention.  We can give them the object to pay attention to, and develop guidance and activities to help them practice the skills of attention we care about.  I can make worksheets with guiding questions, or give students a task to complete based on what they are doing.  This is an essential first step to building attentive abilities.  The student learns how to attend in the way we want them to attend.  But, it is only the first step, for attention is a disposition, not a discrete skill.  That is, we want students able to pay attention to ideas, to texts, to the world, even when we are not there to compel or inspire their attention.

To do this, we need to motivate paying attention, and build structured practice. That is, we need a two-part scaffold.  One that helps students transition from encouraged focus, to their own desire to attend to things that matter.  The other is to help students build their skills so that they can practice attention even without us present to guide them.  Check out the links below to learn more.