A decade ago, James Lang banned cell phones in his classroom.
Frustrated by how easily they could sidetrack his students, Lang
sought out a distraction-free environment, hoping it would help his
students pay attention to his lessons. But after just a few years,
Lang gave in. Not only was his no-cellphones policy ineffective
(even his best students ignored it), he realized that he, like many
of his fellow teachers, was missing an important point. The problem
isn't phones. It's our antiquated notions of the brain. In
Distracted, Lang makes the case for a new way of thinking about how
to teach young minds based on the emerging neuroscience of
attention. Although we have long prized the ability to focus, the
most natural way of thinking is distraction. Our brains are
designed to continually scan our environment, looking for new
information, occasionally wandering off in different directions in
search of new insights. This is not to say that iPhones are not
good at distracting us, but that what they represent is in
principle nothing new, because sustained periods of intense focus
are not what humans are good at. Of course, we still do need to pay
attention to learn. The problem is that we think of learning as a
matter of managing distraction, when we should instead think of it
as actively cultivating attention. This starts with letting go of
technology bans, which are little more than a fig leaf applied to
the objective difficulty of paying attention. But it involves more
active ways of rethinking classroom conventions too. For example,
rather than structuring lessons as 45 or 60-minute blocks of
lecturing, teachers could segment their classes into a series of
smaller lessons, with regular shifts in focus, appealing to the
brain's interest in novelty. Simple changes can drastically improve
students' performance, and in Distracted, Lang takes readers on a
sprawling tour of how some of America's best teachers are improving
student performance using concepts such as modular classrooms, flow
states, and student-directed learning. Together, these insights
offer a new way of thinking about how to not only more effectively
teach a lesson plan, but to teach students the most important
lesson of all: how to learn.
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