Do I have your attention?

An educator’s new book provides evidence-backed ways to harness students’ overtaxed attention (and maybe our own)

Hey there Bell Ringers—we’re in deep January here in Nashville. Everyone’s sick, it’s stupid cold, *but* I’m hoping this letter brings you a little light nonetheless. I’ve got another book talk for you this week, lots of new science of learning books are coming out! This one’s with high school psychology teacher Blake Harvard, author of the great blog The Effortful Educator, about his new book Do I Have Your Attention? Understand memory constraints, maximize learning.

Are there stories you’d like to see in The Bell Ringer? Are there evidence-based practices happening in your district (or maybe not so evidence-based) that you’d like to tell me about? Changes? New happenings? Share your news—email me!

What to read to next:

* A new series on teachers teaching books. If you’ve been following along on The Bell Ringer about how to get more students reading more books despite the obstacles (here and here), then take a look at what writer and educator Spencer Lane Jones is doing over at her Substack, “In the Schoolhouse.” She’s just launched a new project interviewing teachers about their favorite books to teach, as part of a larger look at teaching books in school. Read more about it, and maybe submit an idea for an interview—I know we’ve got some Bell Ringer readers who’d be perfect.

* Is there going to be a “knowledge revival”? Educator, author and AEI fellow Robert Pondiscio launched a Substack this week, “The Next 30 Years: The Future of Education Reform.” He started off with an essay about the new (and free) book Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival, from some education luminaries of the research world like Dylan William, Nuno Crato and Paul Kirschner. “If American education understood, not superficially but to its core, the importance of knowledge and its foundational role in human cognition, teaching would look and sound very different,” Pondiscio writes. Read more here.

* Study alert: A new survey of nearly 400 14- and 15-year-olds in the UK shows that most students are using less-effective study methods, like reading their notes and highlighting, and know little about evidence-based study tactics. “Our findings also suggest many students do not have a complete understanding of the strategies that are known to have higher utility (i.e., retrieval and spaced practice).” I’m wondering what those numbers would look like here in the US, where much less is known about the cognitive science of learning. Read the whole study here.

Meet me in the Big Apple for researchED NYC

Please join me in New York City on March 29, 2025 at Grace Community Church for this great event—a day of informative sessions on evidence-based teaching and learning practices. I’ll be speaking on a topic dear to my heart, “Communicating the science of learning in an age of distrust.” Get tickets from the QR code above, or just click here.

I’d love to meet The Bell Ringer readers in person—please give me a heads up if you’re going to be there!

Do I Have Your Attention? Do I?... Hello?

When I was first getting started as an education reporter in the very early 2010s, I picked up a book by Duke cognitive scientist Cathy Davidson called Now You See It: How the brain science of attention will transform the way we live, work and learn. Davidson had made a bit of a stir in 2003 for an experiment in which Duke University gave every incoming freshman an iPod, because she believed that young people were going to harness all this new technology to create a new kind of attention.

What did this new brand of attention look like? “The iPod experiment was not an investment in technology, It was an investment in a new form of attention, one that didn’t require the student to always face forward, learn from on high, memorize what was already a given, or accept knowledge as something predetermined and passively absorbed,” she wrote. This new kind of attention, according to Davidson, was fragmented and student-driven, enabled by technology, and, she suggested in the book, was going to unleash much greater learning.

Davidson was essentially right when she predicted that attention was the future. Tech has transformed our attention, and students’ attention—just perhaps not in the groovy ways that she’d hoped. Our collective attention has become, some now suggest, the world’s most precious resource.

“Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention,” writes journalist Chris Hayes in an excerpt of his new book, sounding the alarm on the “colonization” of our attention and how to win it back. “It is now the defining resource of our age.”

“We used to colonize land. That’s where the money was to be made,” said comedian Bo Burnham. “We colonized the whole earth. There were no other places for business and capitalism to expand into. And then they realized: human attention! They’re now trying to colonize every minute of your life…Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone and they could be gathering information to target ads at you.”

Getting students’ attention in class has always been a challenge. No doubt my attention drifted after lunch in high school chemistry, toward anything but those equations on the board—birds out the window, the cubbies of glass equipment lining the wall, the cute tennis player in front of me. But arguably all the technology—all the beeping and buzzing notifications from phones, watches, laptops and tablets—and the way it’s re-shaping our minds has made keeping students’ attention much harder. Studies show students are spending more time on tablets and laptops than ever inside classrooms, and the movement to get phones out of classrooms is only beginning to take off.

But getting and keeping students’ attention is the educator’s main concern, writes AP psychology teacher Blake Harvard in his new book, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning, coming out January 29. If teachers better understood how attention and memory work, they could be more effective at helping students learn.

Harvard, author of the popular The Effortful Educator blog focused on how to apply cognitive psychology to teaching and learning, has written a short and sweet 101-style book to help teachers, parents and even students understand how attention works, what the blockades are that hamper it, and what cognitive science has to say about how to maximize learning once you’ve focused it.

Research has shown, Harvard told me in our conversation, that not only was Davidson’s bet on “new forms of attention” misleading, ideas about “digital natives” that have pervaded classrooms over the last couple of decades have made paying attention to academic material even harder for students.

Here’s what Harvard had to say when I asked him about evidence-based ways to help students maximize their attention, both in classrooms and when they’re trying to work at home.

Hint: there are no iPods.