In this article, we’ll touch on neuroscience insights about the brain’s attention-getting system. Understanding this process allows teachers to use specific techniques to capture students’ attention when introducing new topics.
The brain evolved to facilitate survival. Every second, millions of sensory messages from receptors in the eyes, ears, viscera, skin, and muscles enter the brain’s attentional portal, but only about 1% of the messages enter consciousness. The reticular activating system (RAS) is the system that determines what enters (i.e., what the brain pays attention to). The network of primitive cells in the lower part of the brainstem, through which all sensory input must pass to reach the higher regions of the brain, is essentially the same in your cat, your dog, your child, and you.
In the wild, an organism’s attention system serves well the things that are unexpected, ever-changing, and different from the usual. This is the key to the RAS attention gate:any perceived source of danger is prioritized. However, in the absence of threat, attention is directed to any changes in the animal or human environment.
Capturing Attention in the Classroom
Although surviving in the wild is not paramount for most people today, the RAS is still programmed to focus on perceived threats and changes. Students are less likely to focus on the classroom if they feel physically and psychologically unsafe at school or in the classroom. As mentioned earlier, in the absence of a perceived threat, our brains are especially receptive to the new, curious, or unexpected.
In school, students’ brains are always focused on …… just not always on the topics we teach! When students aren’t focused on a lesson or a textbook, instead of prioritizing input from the teacher’s voice or words, the RAS prioritizes input from other sights, feelings, and ideas that are more interesting or distracting.
To capitalize on the brain’s selectivity, here are six practical and proven ways to capture attention that you can use at the beginning of a new unit or lesson.
1. Surprise students
As the brain is drawn to novelty, do something unusual or unexpected to spark curiosity and turn on the RAS attention filter.
Example: Wear something unique, bring an unusual object, or play a song as the student enters the room to spark curiosity and thus focus. Tell students that there is a connection between the words in your clothing, object, or song and something in the text. Ask them to guess what it is.
At the beginning of a unit on negative numbers or the past tense in language, the teacher walks into the classroom backwards and then asks students to guess why.
2. Presenting strange facts, anomalies or inconsistent events
Fundamentally, the brain is a pattern-making organ. Building patterns enables humans to make sense of the world. However, when established or expected patterns are broken, the brain is immediately awakened.
Example: A science teacher blows up a balloon and then slowly pierces one end of the balloon with a sharpened wooden cooking skewer. To the surprise of the students, the teacher pushed the stick through the other side of the balloon without breaking it. The students were stunned and wanted to see the demonstration again!
3. Invite students to make predictions
The ability to make correct predictions is fundamental to survival, and the brain rewards successful predictions by releasing dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to predict how curious sensory input or other novelties will relate to the lesson. When this happens, students seek out information to help them make correct predictions and stay focused as their brains try to figure out if their predictions are correct.
Example: In a first-grade science class, children are asked to predict which objects will float and which will sink in a tub of water. A high school psychology teacher may ask students to predict the results of a school-wide student survey. In both cases, students are engaged and eager to know if their predictions are correct.
4. Ask a provocative question
A provocative question can be an “itch” in a student’s brain that they want to scratch.
What can I eat to prevent acne? Do farts contain DNA? Is aging a disease? What kind of superpower do you want?
The best leading questions are open-ended. They are meant to stimulate thought and discussion and open the door for further exploration. Give students plenty of quiet thinking time before answering the questions. Allow them to quickly write down their thoughts and/or share them with another student in a think-pair-share. After this personal engagement, learners may pay more attention to your teaching on the topic in question.
5. List a current event or issue that is relevant to your students
Students often have opinions about current events or controversial issues in their school, town, state, etc. These can be used to stimulate engagement.
Example: In a persuasive writing unit, a middle school teacher puts an article in the newspaper about a school board in another school district proposing to require students to wear uniforms. Students then discuss the arguments for and against, state their positions, and even switch positions to try to better understand the different points of view and offer counterarguments, all of which begin the persuasive unit.
6. Use of humor
Humor is a guaranteed dopamine booster and can serve as a great attention hook.
Example: A sixth-grade math teacher began a unit on ratios and proportions by showing funny celebrity cartoons. She asked students to describe why the pictures were funny, and they noted that various physical features of the characters (e.g., eyes, nose, ears, head) were greatly exaggerated. The teacher then showed Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to illustrate the idealized proportions of the human body.
Attracting and Holding Attention
We recommend that you rotate your attention-grabbing techniques to avoid being predictable. The purpose of using the above techniques is to capture the attention of your students, but the goal is not just to gain immediate attention. The long-term goal is to maintain that attention over time. There are many ways to capitalize on that initial attention by employing active learning strategies, including the use of authentic tasks and projects, inquiry-oriented instruction, collaborative learning, Socratic Seminars, simulations and role-plays, and design thinking (e.g., the use of makerspaces, where students can create tangible products), as well as allowing students to work on assignments and performance tasks with appropriate ” Voice and Choice” option in assignments and performance tasks.