I need to start out by saying that the article I’m writing about here isn’t for everyone. It’s not like any pedagogical piece I have ever read, and I’ve read quite a few. My colleague Linda Shadiow put me onto it, and although the article
The June-July issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter highlights a study you don’t want to miss. It’s a meta-analysis of 225 studies that compare STEM classes taught using various active learning approaches with classes taught via lecture. “The results indicate that average examination scores improved
Students often think of class sessions as isolated events—each containing a discrete chunk of content. Those who take notes during class will put the date along the top and then usually leave a space between each session, which visually reinforces their belief that the concepts
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A lot of students are in love with their highlighters, especially those bright, fluorescent-colored ones. They use them to highlight course materials, sometimes underlining whole pages of text. When I first saw a text so fluorescent that it all but glowed, I wondered why in
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Cheating continues to be a pervasive problem in college courses. Institutions have policies designed to prevent it and faculty employ a range of strategies that aim to catch those who do. And still the problem persists. A study at a university in Australia, where it
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I’m figuring the best place
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We pay attention at different levels—from sort of focusing on something to giving it full, undivided attention, an intensely focused concentration that obliterates all but the relevant details. I am a knitter, and I always try to have on my needles at least one complicated knitting project. Right now that happens to be a Cookie A sock pattern, done in the round on four very small needles. I tackle these projects first thing in the morning, when the coffee and I are fresh. I count stitches, inspect what I’ve done, move the markers, find mistakes, fix them, finish a round, and start the next one. It requires serious mental effort—the kind I hope will prevent Alzheimer’s. Suddenly my husband shows up. It’s time for breakfast, and my coffee is cold.
“My mother, the scientist, taught me to see. She taught me attention to the complexities of surface detail and also attention to what lies beneath those surfaces.” (p. 221) Sullivan writes that at the time she didn’t think she was paying much attention and she’s quite sure her mother thought the same. Her mother did try to teach her, sharing Latin names and scientific categories. “I remember very little of what she taught me in this direct way. What I do remember is so deeply embedded in experience that it has entered my ways of thinking and perceiving, my very way of being, without the intermediary of language—at any rate, without language that addressed this learning directly.” (p. 222)
One of the central questions explored in the piece is how teachers might help students discover the power that derives from attention that is all-consuming. We regularly teach material that students don’t see as interesting or relevant. Typically teachers try to solve the attention problem by tricking students, entertaining them, using bribes or coercion. Less often do we purposefully show what can be learned and experienced when serious attention is paid to something, really to anything. At this point, our content simply becomes the example.
We want students to share interest in what captivates our attention. We want them to fall in love with bugs, rocks, literary theories, religious paintings, differential equations, Ohm’s law, or countless other phenomena. And regularly we are disappointed by students’ complete lack of interest in, if not disdain for, these subjects that hold endless fascination for us. Maybe we need to be less idealistic and more realistic. The article made me wonder whether teaching students to pay attention might not be the more enduring lesson they could take from our courses. If our demonstration of how to attend to detail and how to study, analyze, question, pursue evidence, and untangle complexities might not be the more powerful gift, the one that will enable them to pursue to the depths whatever fascinates them.
I’ll let Sullivan have the last word. “She [her mother] taught me the rhythms of tide and regeneration, and the syllables of the natural world rubbing against each other. In doing so, she made me a poet.” (p. 221)
Reference: Sullivan, A. M. (2000). Notes from a marine biologist’s daughter: On the art and science of attention. Harvard Educational Review, 70 (2), 211-227.
