Distracted
Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Keeping students focused can be difficult in a world filled with distractions—which is why a renowned educator created a scientific solution to one of every teacher's biggest problems.
Why is it so hard to get students to pay attention? Conventional wisdom blames iPhones, insisting that access to technology has ruined students' ability to focus. The logical response is to ban electronics in class.
But acclaimed educator James M. Lang argues that this solution obscures a deeper problem: how we teach is often at odds with how students learn. Classrooms are designed to force students into long periods of intense focus, but emerging science reveals that the brain is wired for distraction. We learn best when able to actively seek and synthesize new information.
In Distracted, Lang rethinks the practice of teaching, revealing how educators can structure their classrooms less as distraction-free zones and more as environments where they can actively cultivate their students' attention.
Brimming with ideas and grounded in new research, Distracted offers an innovative plan for the most important lesson of all: how to learn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lang (Small Teaching), an English professor at Assumption University, delivers an optimistic and useful guide to cultivating student attention. Soothing concerns that digital device dependency is degrading American classrooms, Lang contends that although the human brain has evolved to continually seek out novelty, teachers can harness this urge to get students to do the "hard cognitive work" of acquiring new knowledge. He tracks "anxiety about distraction" from ancient Greece to 17th-century London coffeehouses and the rise of video games in the 1980s, and debunks claims that the internet has permanently diminished human attention spans. Still, Lang acknowledges, "the people and devices who seek our attention have become better at soliciting it from us." His suggestions for dealing with the proliferation of distractions in the classroom include "context-specific" policies regarding smartphone usage rather than outright bans and employing "signature attention activities" (such as prompting students to write about how the course material connects to their personal lives) in order to restore and renew focus. Lang's lucid prose and dry wit make for a pleasant reading experience, and his evidence is consistently on-point. Teachers and parents teaching at home will find inspiration and insight in this sterling study of "the crucial connection between attention and learning."
