Adam Robbins Education

Schools choose all sorts of different foci to help them raise the standards of education their students receive. Often these can be woolly and convoluted, full of caveats and clauses as they try to encompass the complexity of schools in a few sentences. I get it, you need to have about 3-5 foci, but everything can get better. It’s a classic case of everything being priority number 1. I’m not writing a blog about school improvement priorities, how they work and what they should be. I’m writing a blog about what I think one of those priorities should be.

I have always been a fan of trying to focus my improvement targets on a simple singular statement. For example my teaching and learning philosophy as Head of science was driven by ‘memory is the residue of thought’. Everything we did was underpinned by this principle.

I tweeted an idea that attention may be a potentially powerful driver for school improvement the other day so I thought I would blog a little bit to expand my thoughts and also ensure I credited the people who have helped bring this to my attention (pun intended). If I was to think of a singular statement to wrap around this idea it would probably be “attention is the gatekeeper of learning” <insert tweet>

School improvement prerequisites.

The following things are prerequisites that need to be in place before a school should focus on the idea of attention.

1. Disruption-free learning. Lessons should be calm and the teacher should be able to teach without needing to devote lots of time to managing classroom behaviour. 
2. Checking for understanding. Teachers should routinely be checking for understanding and ensuring that students are ready for independent work through high ratio techniques.

If your school does not have these in place then it is worth making them the foci first as they are more powerful drivers of improvement than attention.

What areas could an attention focus help us improve?

I now want to look at the two key areas I think a focus on attention might really support.

Behaviour policy.

To achieve disruption-free learning schools need to focus their sanctions and rewards on compliance and the ability to not distract others. This can lead to schools tolerating students opting out. You may see things like students with their heads on desks or avoiding work, but not necessarily disrupting the lesson. These students can often be left to their own devices if the system is not designed to focus on them. A shift to attention brings these students clearly into focus. Work by the pastoral team can focus on messaging what being attentive is and why it is crucial. Certain strategies like SLANT and STAR are used by some schools to codify what paying attention looks like. While I have never used them myself, I can see the advantage this level of clarity has. SEND departments can train staff in the limits certain students might have in their ability to fulfil whole school routines and how to best support them. Routines for drawing students attention to the teacher and back-pocket phrases like ‘empty hands’ can be shared and adopted to ensure all teachers have similar and effective strategies in place. Behaviour leaders can analyse the ‘culture of participation’* in the school and identify opportunities for groups of students to demonstrate social cohesion through tutor time and assemblies to create a feeling of belonging. This will foster psychological safety within the groups and make the students more comfortable with being asked to participate more and be less passive.

Teaching and Learning. 

While behaviour systems can support and encourage students to pay attention there are plenty of things that a teacher can do to support a student to focus on the most important information in a given moment.

For now I am going to assume you are fully aware of the working memory model and the role attention plays in learning, I don’t have space to make the case that it is vital. The idea of attention in teaching and learning can be broken down into a few key areas:

1. What routines does the teacher use to ensure students are able to pay attention to the key things? This is the classroom enactment of the behaviour policy does the teacher have clear routines to gain silence and an ‘invisible ladder’ of informal strategies to support students who are struggling to comply before leaning on formal sanctions. How many opportunities are there for praise and what are the criteria for rewards? Do they actively promote positive participation and attention?
2. How has the teacher designed resources and explanations to support attention? Have they considered their presentations so they apply appropriate understanding of cognitive load theory, avoiding the split attention and redundancy effects? Does the teacher know how to structure an effective explanation to ensure attention is given to the important information and not distracted by seductive details? These ideas can be taken broader to look at the types of activities the teacher uses and how the students attention is focussed on the correct thing. At a high level this could be interrogating the questions written in tasks to check the students have to pay attention to all the validity conditions of an idea. At the lower end it could be making a case for a cut and stick activity being ineffective due to more attention being paid to cutting than the content.
3. What questioning strategies does the teacher use to support students to pay attention and draw students attention to the most vital information? This is where Pritesh Raichura’s work on checks for listening comes in. By using checks of listening (CfL) the teacher does two things. Firstly they create a ‘threat of inference’**  i.e. the teacher will be able to determine if the student has paid attention by how they perform in a CfL question. Secondly they encourage repetition, either through students repeating the information in their answers or via choral response. This increases the students exposure to the key information and increases their chance of paying attention to it.

What about other areas? 

I am sure there are plenty of areas that could be squeezed under the umbrella term of attention in school improvement. Feel free to suggest some in the comments or on threads, twitter or linkedin. I just wanted to think of the two key areas that might benefit. Fortunately I think those two areas are huge levers for improvement.

* I won’t go into detail on this right now, i’m still forming my thoughts on this over the year as I try different things out. All I will say is I think schools really benefit from engineering opportunities for students to participate and crucially be seen participating by their peers.

** While it may sound draconian, the threat of inference is a common motivation technique in classes. I first heard this term used by Professor Becky Allen at a research ED leicester in 2022. Simply put it is the idea that creating a condition whereby the teacher will be able to infer if the student focussed and worked hard at a later date motivates the student to do their best. The most common way this happens is when a teacher says “This will be on the test”. However there are loads of things schools use the ‘threat of inference’ to help with.