Getting Students to Attend to the Right Thing

Read time – 6 minutes 

I’m going to need you to bear with me at the start of this blog. It will, eventually, get to teaching, and in particular, ensuring that we are getting students to focus on the piece of learning that we want them to be focused on. But first, let me tell you a tale. 

It’s hardly a tale as old as time. In fact, it’s just the tale of a Saturday morning; this Saturday morning. The sun was shining, but washing needed to be done, a food shop completed, a visit to B&Q to buy some garden supplies squeezed in, and all of this before 11.20 when I needed to take my eldest off to a birthday party. My priority was being on time, as well as getting all of those bits sorted before we needed to head off.  

I therefore thought nothing of the fact that my eldest chose shorts and a t-shirt for his outfit. In fact, I wore exactly the same (its 22 degrees in the UK, most people probably did!). 

Fast forward a couple of hours, and we arrived at the party. A pottery making party. A pottery making party where we had been asked to wear long sleeved tops. The party girl was in her long t-shirt, as were most other (but not all) party goers. I’d had so much on my mind this morning, I simply hadn’t attended to the party details, besides the time and the location (and we were late, too!).  

This got me thinking, why had I forgotten all about the clothing directive, but the party girl’s parents hadn’t? It is because I hadn’t attended to this information. To me, it was a piece of information that was washed away in a sea of other information. The party was important, but purely in terms of arriving, collecting and ensuring we had a present and card. So why then did the party girls parents remember? They had attended to this information. They probably also had a lot of information to consider this morning, but very little more important than the party, and that included the dress-code.  

This may seem (and possibly is) a long-winded and convoluted analogy or narrative to set the scene, but I think it tells us something very important. 

As a teacher, we know exactly what information we need the students in our class to attend to. We are the experts, we have planned the lesson, we know exactly what is important. Students, meanwhile, don’t. They’re not experts, they’re having copious amounts of new information thrown at them, and the new steps we want them to consider when re-writing their English assignment probably aren’t as high a priority as we’d like them to be.  

We’ve all had it. We’ve had it every single day, I’d imagine. Students may be focused, they may be listening, they may even be working hard, but they’re not quite getting it. They’re not quite focused on the specific thing (declarative or procedural knowledge) that we want them to be, and it is holding the learning back. We know what’s important, and they’re not quite sure. It’s the pottery party all over again! 

So, there’s your analogy, and there’s your problem, what are the solutions? (Caveat – none of these ideas are new or special. They are, however, proven high-quality teaching techniques. They may be obvious but getting them right is far from easy. It’s like the cold calling debate all over again…) 

Small Step Teaching 

Break down the modelling of new knowledge into small, bite size chunks. Allow students to attend to each new piece of knowledge in turn, rather than throwing many pieces of new information at students. If a student has one new piece of information, they will attend to that piece of information. If you give students three new pieces of information, but you know only one of those pieces of information is crucial now, you’ll struggle to have more than a 1 in 3 chance that students are attending to the right piece of new information. 

This small step teaching can then be re-enforced with small step deliberate practice. If you want students to attend to a new stage in a process, then tell them, show them, and get them to practice that new step. Small-step modelling will be a step forward in getting students to attend to what you want them to attend to, but this progress will not be strengthened if student deliberate practice is not focused to the one new piece of information that you want students to attend to. 

Removing Overloads 

Once again, if we are only wanting students to attend to one piece of information, we need to remove other things that may draw away that attention. In the previous suggestion, that was through changing our approach to modelling. In this suggestion, it is about ensuring that focus is on that one piece of information that you have chosen. 

That means, don’t have new facts whizzing in with the latest PowerPoint animations. Don’t have pictures of cute cats on every single slide (unless the new information is on cute cats). Don’t have graphics that aren’t required (dual coding mutations!). Keep it simple, keep it focused. Attend to that one piece of information that you want students focused on.  

Ensuring Prior Knowledge 

You’ve done the previous two steps, and everything is going well. But what happens if students don’t have the required prior knowledge needed in order to understand the new information and build it into their schema? Once again, they’re not going to be attending to the new information. They are going to be attending to the fact that they don’t understand the new information or that they know that they don’t understand previous, relevant knowledge, and are stressing about that. Equally, students may just be ignorant to the fact that they don’t know they don’t know. 

Whatever it may be, we have got to remove this issue too. This is not the blog for it (and there are many, many out there), to consider how we ensure prior knowledge, but without ensuring it is there, we again end up increasingly the likelihood that students are not attending to the information that we need them to attend to. 

Avoid Red Herrings 

Last, but far from least, is avoiding red herrings. By this, I mean we need to avoid presenting new material in contexts which may contradict that new information. 

This may be best presented through an example. I’ll provide one from the Maths classroom, and solving equations where brackets are present (with a variable on one side). 

Take the following: 

2(x-4) = 8 

If you are trying to introduce students to the idea that they can expand the bracket (multiply the contents of the bracket by the term in front of it) to solve an equation, rather than just dividing by the coefficient of the bracket, then this would be the wrong example. 

Given the equation: 

2(x-4) = 8 

You would only ever, reasonable, divide by the coefficient (resulting in x-4=8). Therefore, using this example to introduce the procedural knowledge of expanding first, wouldn’t be wise. 

Rather, utilise an example such as: 

5(x+2) = 12 

Here, you could, if you so wish, do 12/5, but that wouldn’t be reasonable, or the first thought of most students. Given this example, students are unlikely to have a natural way of solving it, are therefore more likely to attend to the new procedural information that you are providing them with.  

A brief conclusion. We naturally attend to the information we determine to be more relevant or higher priority (for me, the time and location of the party). But sometimes, we need to attend to other information (dress code). These issues impact us when teaching. It is so very easy to have students silent, listening and working hard, but not attending to what we need them to attend to. This piece has discussed four solutions to this: small step teaching; removing overloads; ensuring prior knowledge; avoid red herrings. These things will hopefully improve your classroom practice (and, if I’ve written the article well, you will have also attended to the information that I needed you to!).