After finishing the Lilly Online Conference recorded sessions from May 2021, I went back to the Elon Teaching and Learning Conference. The plenary of the conference was Dr. James Lang who I admire and follow. I missed the keynote and several other sessions of the Elon conference so I wanted to watch as many as I can in the coming weeks. The recordings will be available for six months (starting in June!). Tonight we start with the plenary and Dr. Lang.
Lang always starts with stories. He talked about doing work in a room next to his wife’s virtual kinder class. Lang quotes Yves Citton in The Ecology of Attention: “Teaching’s essential task consists in heightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important in what we are looking at.” Lang goes on to mention that attention is “a fundamental structuring element for teachers.” Then, introducing the work of Michelle Miller in Minds Online, Lang explains that attention is limited and that we should be “stewards of attention.” If something easier or more enjoyable comes around, the distraction takes over. Interestingly, Lang brings up a quote from Isaac Watts that coffee shops can lead to “trifling and wandering” much like we often hear that our devices are increasing our distractions. Lang asked: why are we distracted? His response consisted of “pushing and pulling influences.” It is hard to stay focused. One challenge is sustained attention over time. Student engagement with streaming videos based on several MOOCs (Guo et al. 2014) suggested students watched videos up to about 10 minutes. Lang described “pushes” that have been with us for a long time: our brain seeks novelty, for example. The challenge today is that our devices are really good at “playing at our distractable nature” said Lang. Further, Lang says that we should think of attention as an achievement, not the norm.
Lang argued that we can design a course structure for attention, and that if we understand what causes students to get distracted, it can enable us to be more effective in our pedagogy. I have heard Lang describe this workshop he attended in which they used index cards to describe activities and then shuffled the sequence of events. The beginning and ending of the class are important to get students engaged. Aisling Dugan’s microbiology class starts with a microbe of the day; an astronomy class starts with a NASA image of the day. Closing questions are opportunities to reflect on what was discussed and points that may need clarification. For the middle of the session, Lang suggests low-stakes engagement activities where students produce something concrete and get credit for the day. Lang mentioned two columns he wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education that explain why his rationale for grading participation with these activities instead of traditional ways. Transparent structure that includes audio and visual “signposts” that show and remind students of the structure.
Next, Lang talked about how to renew attention. The example that Lang used was a faculty member that has students revisit one work of art each week and writing a new response! Another instructor from theology has students work in pairs and read passages of the Bible sentence by sentence and ask: what do you notice, what do you think, what questions does it raise? Lang likes to use Connection Notebooks: once a week students write a response to a connection question that connects content to their lived experiences. The last suggestion Lang had was to invite students to teach their learning to a different audience. The example for this was a biology professor that prompts students to identify something they are passionate about or want to learn more about… and then identify a group of people who they think should care/know about the topic. They connect these two elements with a project. I can see ways of doing this and sharing openly.
For policies, Lang advocates for a context-driven policy: use devices when they are needed for the learning activities. Lang also talked about proximity: walking toward a student to engage them. I thought it was interesting that Lang thinks that mindfulness interventions are difficult and short classroom interventions have had mixed results. Thus, he suggests focusing on structure and renewing attention for now. Lang also mentions that reading student Connection Notebooks keeps him engaged. I agree: asking 3-2-1 and reflection-type questions keeps me interested too. Another great suggestion was to start class sessions with a “test question” and give students 2-minutes to work on before discussing. I want to try this! I recently learned that Lang has taken early retirement. I hope this means we get more great books and articles!
