The Principles of Learning: It All Starts With Attention
Note: This is the first post in a new “Principles of Learning” series. Each post will cover one of the 10 different principles that come directly from research and instructional practices and help all of us learn. This series is not about students. It is about all learners. Colleagues, employees, coaches, leaders, parents, teens and yes kids, can all benefit from applying these principles to craft meaningful and worthwhile learning experiences. What we’ve seen in the past couple of years specifically, is that the public often has misconstrued ideas on what it means to learn, and how we (as humans) can learn best. This series will hopefully shed some light, in a non-academic way, on principles that form the foundation of engaging and empowering experiences that foster deep learning.
Learning Principle #1: Learning Doesn’t Happen Without Attention
At the very basic level, learning is all about attention. We are wired to learn. Yet, we cannot learn without our attention (and senses) tuned to the environment and medium in which learning can take place.
When you want to learn how to drive, you have to pay attention to the road, your wheel, your feet, and everything that is happening around you.
Same with riding a bike, learning how to swim, shooting a basketball, playing the piano, etc.
Yet, when it comes to “formal” learning experiences, we often teach in ways that require little to no attention. Sit and listen. Sit and watch. We may cover all the content needed and share a hundred examples of what the skills are, but without attention no learning occurs.
This article is broken down into four short sections, that quickly point out something most of us know: Attention matters if you want learning to occur.
For those who may be in the “too long, didn’t read” crowd (I’m in that group a lot), here is a short summary of each section that we go more in depth on throughout the article:
1. Learning starts with attention. It’s almost impossible to learn if you aren’t paying attention. And whatever you are giving attention to has the ability to turn into learning.
2. Attention happens for two reasons: Necessity and interest. Nature uses necessity to drive quick learning feedback loops. When we try to manufacture necessity (think: you must learn this because of a pop quiz tomorrow) a culture of compliance follows. When we allow for interest to drive attention, commitment to the learning process follows.
3. Relationships directly impact attention, and therefore, learning.
4. Learning happens inside our head. Understanding is demonstrated outside our head. However, what happens outside our head gives lots of clues to whether or not we are learning. Attention is a very big clue.
Join me in diving deep into the first principle of this series, and the one that drives all the principles that follow. Because, without attention, learning cannot happen.
Learning STARTS With Attention
Chances are if you’ve read this far, you are interested in this topic. Or, maybe someone is making you read this for a class, course, or another reason. In any case, this is how learning starts. You, the learner, must be actively paying attention in order to learn something. There is no other way around it.
Here is Peter Nilsson describing the four stages to learning on his blog, Sense and Sensation:
So how do people learn? What are the mechanics of memory? Can we distill thousands of articles and books to something that is manageable, digestible, and applicable to our classrooms?
Yes. In brief, the cognitive process of learning has four basic stages:
1. Attention: the filter through which we experience the world
2. Encoding: how we process what our attention admits into the mind
3. Storage: what happens once information enters the brain
4. Retrieval: the recall of that information or behavior
Almost everything we do or know, we learn through these stages, for our learning is memory, and the bulk of our memory is influenced by these four processes: what we pay attention to, how we encode it, what happens to it in storage, and when and how we retrieve it.
This is why we start with Attention. Most of the time we pay attention for two reasons: Interest or Necessity.
Our brain is flooded with information from a multi-sensory world that is throwing sounds, sights, feelings, and everything else at us in rapid succession. With all of this information coming at us we tend to pay attention to things that we are curious and interested about, or information that has a direct correlation to our physical, emotional, or psychological well-being.
The problem is that our attention can be pulled in many different directions. If you are reading this on your phone, maybe a text pops up or an alert from social media, or a phone call. If you are reading this on your computer, maybe a new email just came in from someone at work or at home. Someone could call out your name while you are reading, or maybe you just lost interest and want to go watch a video, play a game, read something else, or take a walk. All of these things are normal parts of life, and they can distract our attention from learning one thing, and put our focus on something else.
Why Attention Matters (And How To Get It)
We’ve spent a lot of time learning about how to get kids attention and motivate them in learning experiences. We have spent less time on the research of adult learners, however, there is so much crossover that much of the recommendations work for both adults and youth. In a recent NPR article the author dives into some of the Deci findings:
Although neuroscientists are just beginning to understand what's happening in the brain while we pay attention, psychologists already have a pretty good understanding of what's needed to motivate kids.
Psychologist Edward Deci has been studying it for nearly 50 years at the University of Rochester. And what does he say is one of the most important ingredients for motivating kids?
"Autonomy," Deci says. "To do something with this full sense of willingness and choice."
Many studies have shown that when teachers foster autonomy, it stimulates kids' motivation to learn, tackle challenges and pay attention, Deci says.
But in the last few decades, some parts of our culture have turned in the other direction, he says. They've started taking autonomy away from kids — especially in some schools.
"One of the things we've been doing in the American school system is making it more and more controlling rather than supportive," Deci says.
And this lack of autonomy in school inhibits kids' ability to pay attention, he says.
So, how can we build on the idea of autonomy and choice? It sounds so simple, yet most of our workplaces and schools do quite the opposite, focusing on compliance. The simplest way is to actually give folks choice in what they are learning:
If only it were that easy Calvin! While we may not always be able to give learners choice to drive attention, we can focus on autonomy, ownership, and agency as driving factors.
A question John Spencer and I ask in our book, Empower, is “What decisions am I making for learners that they could be making for themselves?”
That one question can lead to a lot of attention and pull us out of a compliance rut.
When we are constantly telling learners what to do, instead of allowing them to make decisions on their own, we take the air out of the experience. And when we provide autonomy, there are so many more conversations about the learning that will happen, in turn which leads to better relationships and growth throughout the process.
Relationships Impact Attention
We know that relationships impact learning, but the main reason why probably won’t shock you. We pay attention to people we have relationships with. When we know someone, trust someone, and enjoy being around someone, we are more likely to pay attention when learning with them.
In the Journal of Student Engagement Lauren Liberante writes:
“The teacher–student relationship is one of the most powerful elements within the learning environment. A major factor affecting students’ development, school engagement and academic motivation, teacher–student relationships form the basis of the social context in which learning takes place (Hughes & Chen,2011; Roorda et al.,).
Teacher–student interactions are not only influenced by a number of aspects including gender, but in turn also influence a student’s academic outcomes and behaviour. Supportive and positive relationships between teachers and students ultimately promote a “sense of school belonging” and encourage students to “participate cooperatively in classroom activities” (Hughes & Chen, 2011, p.278).”
Liberante’s research (and many others) make the case that the relationships in our education system may prove to be the most effective way to improve student engagement. All of us that teach and work with children understand the importance of relationships. We know that spending time helping a student 1-on-1 does more than in a small group setting. Yet, we often forget how much influence we can have on a student’s learning.
Back To The Basics
The main goal of the Principles of Learning series is to focus on what actually works in learning. In 2022, there is a constant battle for attention going on wherever we are thanks to digital technologies that are seemingly an “outer brain” connected to our everyday thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This juxtaposition is laid out perfectly in a recent journal article, The Role of Attention in Learning in the Digital Age by Jason M. Lodge, and William J. Harrison:
Probably the most critical element of attention that is relevant to how information is processed in digital environments is its restricted capacity. Humans have only limited neural resources to process the complexity of the surrounding environment. Moreover, there are an infinite number of ways in which we could act in any given situation at any given time. The cognitive ability to allocate our attention selectively allows us to prioritize only some elements of the environment while filtering out others. A now classic example of such filtering is known as the “cocktail party effect” [26,27]: when standing in a room full of people speaking to one another, relatively little effort is required to tune into only a single speaker of interest. In such an instance, the selected speaker can be understood easily while all surrounding conversations turn into incoherent background noise. This phenomenon, selectively attending to only a single auditory source amongst many, demonstrates the cognitive capacity to voluntarily filter information according to our internal goals.
In some cases, however, our attention is captured involuntarily. Consider again selectively listening to only one speaker at a cocktail party, but, seemingly from out of nowhere, you hear your name being spoken by someone you had previously been ignoring. Auditory filtering would automatically shift to tune into this new speaker, making their conversation clear while the previous speaker’s words become incoherent. Thus, although attention can greatly focus our thoughts and actions on only some aspects of our environment, the ways in which we allocate our attention depend on both our internal goals as well as external factors.
This is why all the standards, goals, and trivial aspects of learning do not matter unless our learners are actively paying attention. Therefore, when planning learning experiences the first goal should always be, “How can we capture the attention of our learners in meaningful and relevant ways?”
When we do that, learning will follow. As they say in the Mandalorian, “This is the way”.
