Doug Lemov's field notes

 

In our forthcoming book on the Science of Reading, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I discuss the importance of attention to reading.

 

Short version: if nothing else, the smartphone, having fractured the attention of millions, has taught us that attention is malleable. This is especially important in reading, which places such intense demands on students’ ability to sustain periods of focus attentiveness.

 

The flip side, we argue, is that by attending to attention in reading classrooms—by bringing the act of reading back into the classroom where we can shape the experience of reading for students–could help rebuild students’ attentional capacity. To quote our own forthcoming book:

 

If we build a habit in which reading is done with focus and concentration and even, to go a step further, with empathy and connectedness, and if we do that regularly for a sustained period of time, our brains will get better at reading that way—more familiar with and attuned to such attentional states… We can re-build attention and empathy in part by causing students to engage in stretches of sustained and fully engaged reading. One thing this implies is more actual reading in the classroom with more attention paid by teachers to how that reading unfolds. Attending to how we read—thinking of the reading we do in the classroom as “wiring”—gives us an opportunity to shape the reading experience intentionally for students.

 

In light of this is was struck by this study by Christina Brown and colleagues: COGNITIVE ENDURANCE AS HUMAN CAPITAL.

 

“We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time,” the authors write and what they find is stunning.

 

“Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we randomly increase the amount of time students spend in sustained cognitive activity during the school day,” the authors write. Doing so, they find, “markedly improves cognitive endurance: students show 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in intellectual activities.”

 

“This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital.”

 

One of the key benefits good schooling can provide is the ability to sustain deep, focused attention. Acquired via the habit of being caused to engage via deep, focused attention.

 

Sadly the authors find that access to such environments correlates to wealth: “Globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the rich across field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches.”

 

So two takeaways from this very important study.

 

• In reading classrooms its urgently important to cause students to engage in focused reading for sustained blocks of time as a matter of habit. If you’re interested in this, there’s a whole chapter in our forthcoming book about harvesting attention in reading classrooms. Among other things it means bringing shared reading back to the heart of the classroom.

 

• It also means recommitting to orderly schools, something many educators have sadly abandoned in recent years. One of the things you need to be able to practice “cognitive endurance” is reliable and predictable quiet in which to focus your attention and stay on task without disruption. There’s lots of research on the frequency of low-level disruptions in most classrooms, I would only argue that it is “low-level” only in the level of noise it creates. It’s consequences are far from small.