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Thursday April 18th, thanks to funding from the Mellon Our Shared Humanities grant, and the tireless efforts of Denise Snyder (and others) we had the treat of a visit from Jim Lang, professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College.

Teaching Distracted Minds

In his lunchtime plenary Jim discussed the foundations and findings for his current book project “Teaching Distracted Minds.”  His review of historical literature as well as recent research on attention suggests a few things.  First, attention is scarce and fleeting, but can be cultivated and curated.  Second, concerns about distraction are not new.  As far back as Aristotle observers have been alarmed about the ways that social and technological change are eroding focus (from Aristotle’s lively lyceum to the Victorian’s cacophonous coffeehouse to the cellphone in your pocket).  But there is some sign that the “pull” of the electronic device is a more omnipresent and omnipotent distraction device.  The practical implication of this for us as educators is that we have to struggle against both the natural inclination toward inattention and the siren song of social media and shopping.

 

 

A few practical suggestions for cultivating attention included combining short, focused lectures with application or practice, breaking up classes into shorter topic blocks, and mixing in narrative storytelling and humor as ways of sustaining attention.

Small Teaching Seminar

After a brief break, the afternoon seminar on Small Teaching presented and practiced a series of small changes that can be used to incrementally improve instruction.  Drawn from his book by the same title, Lang offered a series of short lectures and interactive activities designed to illustrate ways to improve student learning.  These included using assessments that encourage high-utility learning  strategies (elaborative interrogation, distributed practice) and discouragement of low utility practices (summarization, highlighting, keyword mnemonics) the use of “connection journals” which ask students to draw connections between course content within a class period, between classes in a course, between courses, and between the course and the outside world.

Lang also spoke about the “Best Teachers Summer Institute” which will be held June 18-20 in West Orange, NJ.  There are still a few spots available.