Blocking out distractions is key to classroom focus

“‘Focus’ lies at the root of success in almost every area of life, not least academic success,” Dr McGonigle says. “Our working memory and our ability to focus is very limited, so classrooms need to be set up with certain routines and practices that minimise distractions.

“I have regularly spoken to teachers about explicit teaching and cognitive load theory, which is closely tied to ‘focus’. Focus in class is absolutely critical for learning tasks to enter working memory and then be transferred into long-term memory.

“One of the strategies we are embedding into teaching practice is ensuring there is just one learning stimulus in the classroom. Research has proven that split attention with multiple learning platforms is ineffective and results in a student’s working memory being kept busy trying to decide which stimulus to focus on (eg. presenting Powerpoints with lots of text while also speaking to the class).

“Research has proven that split attention with multiple learning platforms is ineffective and results in a student’s working memory being kept busy trying to decide which stimulus to focus on.”

– Head of School Dr Julie McGonigle

“If you give students too much load on their working memory, they just don’t take it in and teachers can make that mistake; they think they have got to give students lots of stimulus but it simply doesn’t work.”

So what other strategies is St Andrew’s Cathedral School employing to improve its students’ focus and learning?

1. We are firstly explicitly teaching students how they learn (metacognition), so they learn how they learn. This is a proven strategy that has a high impact on improving academic outcomes.
2. We encourage students to have a strict time for learning at home each evening when their phone is switched off – letting their friends know these times, is a key to successfully implementing this strategy.
3. We encourage parents to be their child’s study buddy – helping them decide what they are going to study in a session, remembering bite-sized chunks is more valuable than too much content, and then to test them at the end.
4. Ensure breaks from study include physical exercise or a creative pursuit that doesn’t involve a screen, giving their brains a chance to refresh.

One of the most important things to remember is that focus can be improved,” Dr McGonigle says. “While we may currently have attention deficit, we can exercise and improve our focus using the methods above and this ultimately drives the achievement of our personal best.”

---

What is focus and how can we improve it?

The author of Focus: The hidden driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman, says we need to first understand how our brains work to truly understand what focus is. He directs us to, “two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems” within our brain. One of these systems is related to the sub-cortex, lower brain, and operates almost without us realising that it’s there. This is often referred to as the “bottom-up mind”: the part of our brain that executes habitual routines, intuitions and impulses. The other system is related to our neo-cortex, upper brain, and is the system which we are aware of operating. This is referred to as the top-down mind: the seat of self-control, effort, planning and new learning. This upper brain system has the ability to overpower our automatic routines and our emotionally driven impulses.

The ability to focus involves a careful dance between these two systems.

The conscious selection of something to focus on begins in our top-down mind. In order to do so we have to do three things:

1. Close down the sensory distractors in the world around us;
2. Minimise the amount that we are focusing on;
3. Close down the emotional distractors in the world within us.

The first of these points is familiar to most people – if we wish to focus on something we need to not be distracted by anything we hear, see, smell or touch in the world around us. For young people who wish to focus on their academics, a quiet, open space is ideal.

The second point relates to cognitive overload. Our mental system has a relatively small capacity and cannot hold a lot of information at once. At any one time this ‘top-down’ system can only hold around five pieces of information or foci. Cognitive scientists have proven that no one can focus on many things at once. Multi-tasking is a fallacy. Those who claim to be good multi-taskers are people who are able to switch from one task to the next quickly. However, the problem with this constant switching is that it saps attention, which does not lead to deep learning and in many cases, may lead to no learning at all. Also, the shorter our focus time, the shallower our thinking will be. 

The third part of focus involves the bottom-up mental system, which has a far greater capacity than the top-down system. Therefore, our conscious focus has to be extremely strong or we need to tame the bottom-up system and close down our emotional distractors in our world.

How do we tame the bottom-up system?

The bottom-up system is the seat of our emotions and the moment that we try to consciously focus on something, our emotional anxieties and uncomfortable or unresolved relationships will strongly fight for our attention. There are two kinds of people in this category – those who are able to box off their emotions and those who are positive, secure and at peace in their relationships.

Listen to author Daniel Goleman present on Focus – the hidden driver of excellence

Over the last decade a great deal of research has shown that if you wish to accelerate a students’ learning, they need to be emotionally at peace in the classroom. The same is true at home and amongst their peers. Emotional turbulence or anxiety will be a strong distractor from their ability to focus and, therefore, learn.

The good news is that voluntary strong focus can also overcome emotional turbulence and we are able to get engrossed in growing our brains. In the best cases, this leads to what is termed ‘flow’. This is when our voluntary focus aligns with what we enjoy. Of course this is a virtuous circle in that the more we have strong voluntary focus the more we will gain automaticity, which will lead to enjoyment and then alignment with our voluntary focus.