Teachers must get students' attention and use it wisely, writes Blake Harvard in his new book, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning. Harvard, an AP Psychology teacher and author of the Effortful Educator blog, has written a "short and sweet" book on how to apply cognitive psychology to reach often distracted "digital natives," writes Holly Korbey.

Teachers should be wary of Kahoots, Quizlets and other apps, Harvard tells Korbey. All those "bells and whistles" can make teaching more complicated.
"Attention is limited," he tells her. "Simpler is going to be better. Anything that can steal that attention away, whether it be technology or not, is really bad for learning.”
For example, students are more likely to pay attention and to learn more if they're facing the teacher, research shows. If students are sitting at a table facing each other, not the teacher, they're likely to be distracted.
Teachers should tell students they won't get much from studying at home unless they're willing to put their phones away for at least 20 minutes, says Harvard. “I tell them: no ear buds, no cell phone. I get it if you need your computer to do the work, but don't use your computer to be on another website. Just focus for that 20 minutes and then go get your reward for five and then come back.”
Teachers should introduce new topics by giving students "the big picture," he says. Again, keep it simple. “Don’t start off a new concept by doing this fun activity they’ve never done before,” Harvard said. “Do you want them thinking about the concept, or do you want them thinking about the activity? They can only probably think about one of them."

Johann Hari's Stolen Focus looks at the effect of the "bloodsucking attention economy" on adults as well as children, writes Rebecca Birch.
Hari points out that many proposed solutions to our attention leakage are “cruel optimism," she writes. "Solutions like, 'Just put limits on your phone,' often tend to come from wealthy tech execs who send their own kids to Montessori schools with a dumb phone."
However, Birch isn't impressed by Hari's belief that structured schooling stifles creativity, while student-led, unstructured models are the solution.
As Brandon Hendrickson writes, That ignores "the essential role of knowledge acquisition, cognitive science, and the privilege required for such models to succeed," she writes.
The book extols "an alternative school where students decide what they want to learn and there are no lessons," writes Birch. "Children create origami and build forts in between snippets of learning Hebrew or whatever they fancy. The fees are around $10,000. Cruel optimism much?"
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