Why Educators Should Pay Attention to Attention
- 8 hours ago
- 14 min read
by David Burns
During my first year of teaching in the United States, I received a surprise visit from my principal while I was in the middle of teaching my first-period class. I assumed he was there to observe my lesson and offer feedback. Instead, he stayed for only a few seconds. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed him slowly scan the room before quietly walking out.
After school, he summoned me to his office.
"Your classroom is too plain," he said.
When I asked how I could better meet his expectations, he walked me over to a colleague's classroom. Upon entering, I was immediately struck by the visual overload. The walls were covered with inspirational posters featuring celebrities, two life-sized Harry Potter cutouts stood in opposite corners, colorful anchor charts occupied nearly every available space, and a bulletin board overflowing with student work competed for attention beside the large whiteboard at the front of the room.
"This is what an engaging classroom environment looks like," he remarked.
He then directed my attention to my colleague's seating arrangement. Her students sat in five groups of four desks facing one another.
"Students need to face each other so they can negotiate the learning together in groups," he explained. "A classroom with lots of talking and noise tells me good learning is happening."
Classroom environments like the one described above reflect a well-intentioned but often incomplete understanding of how human attention works and, more importantly, how attention shapes learning. Indeed, some instructional practices, although rooted in a genuine desire to support students, inadvertently compete with the very cognitive processes that make learning possible.
Attention: The Gatekeeper of Learning
Learning is constrained by the limits of our cognitive resources, and one of the most important of these constraints is attention. Although we often assume that we attend to most of what reaches our senses, the truth is quite the opposite.
As I write these words, my environment contains an enormous amount of sensory information that I am completely ignoring so that I can focus on typing out the ideas in my head. There is the fence just outside my window, the sofa in front of me, the clock ticking on the wall, the air conditioner cycling on, and the fan blades spinning overhead as the pull chain lightly taps against the metal base. All of these stimuli are present in my environment. They briefly enter what cognitive scientists call sensory memory, but because my attention is directed toward writing, they rapidly fade from awareness, almost as though they were never there.
What we attend to is determined partly by the environment. For example, while typing, if I suddenly caught a glimpse of an unexpected fast-moving object flying across the room, my gaze would reflexively shift toward the unusual visual stimulus. This is an example of external attention. At the same time, attention is also guided by internal factors, including our goals, prior knowledge, and past experiences. Regardless of whether attention is captured by something in the environment or deliberately directed by our own intentions, one fact remains constant: we can attend to only a limited amount of information at any given moment.
The limits of attention are perhaps best illustrated by one of the most famous experiments in cognitive psychology. In a classic study, Simons and Chabris (1999) asked participants to watch a video of six people wearing black and white shirts passing basketballs while moving around the screen. Before the video began, participants were instructed to count the number of passes made by the players wearing white (see video below).
Many participants correctly reported the number of passes (15). Remarkably, however, they completely failed to notice a person dressed in a gorilla suit who walked into the middle of the scene, stopped to beat his chest, and then casually walked away. If you missed the gorilla yourself, it was because your attention was fully occupied tracking the white-shirted players while keeping a running count of their passes. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as inattentional blindness. It serves as a striking reminder of the limits of our cognitive resources. When attention is fully engaged by one task, other information is not merely forgotten—it may never be consciously perceived in the first place.
The same principle applies to learning. Like the gorilla, information that never passes through the gate of attention is unlikely to be encoded into a learner's long-term memory. Put simply, if students do not attend to instructional information—whether it is a passage in a book, a demonstration, a video, or a teacher explaining a new concept or procedure—it is unlikely to be learned (Leong et al., 2017).
Neuroscientists have found evidence for this when examining patterns of neural activity. When our attention is directed to something, the corresponding patterns of neural firing become stronger and more sustained. This increased activity strengthens synaptic connections that support learning and memory. As the familiar neuroscience adage puts it, neurons that fire together wire together. Unattended information, by contrast, produces far less neural activation and is therefore much less likely to result in lasting learning (Seitz et al., 2005; Watanabe et al., 2001). These findings have important implications for the way we design classrooms and instruction.
What This Means for Teaching
So far, we’ve examined two fundamental principles about attention and human cognitive architecture.
What we attend to is what we learn. Information that never receives our attention is not learned.
Our attentional resources are limited. At any given moment, we can consciously attend to only a small portion of the information competing for our awareness.
The instructional implications of these two principles are profound.
Designing Learning Environments
Consider classroom decor. Although it may be tempting to cover every available inch of wall space with anchor charts, posters, student work, and other attention-grabbing displays, doing so may inadvertently compete with the very learning we hope to promote.
A classroom like the one pictured above presents students with a constant stream of competing stimuli. As the teacher explains a new concept, a student's attention may drift from the lesson to the celebrity on a poster, the giant cutout in the corner, or an anchor chart from a lesson taught three months ago. The moment a student's attention shifts to those displays, it is no longer directed toward the current learning. Indeed, young children in highly decorated classrooms have been found to spend more time off task, become more easily distracted, and demonstrate smaller learning gains than children in classrooms with fewer visual displays (Fisher et al., 2014).
This does not mean classroom walls should be barren. Rather, it means that displays within students' direct line of sight during instruction should be purposeful, minimally distracting, and, ideally, directly related to the learning currently taking place. Student work and other displays still have an important place in the classroom, but positioning them toward the back or sides of the room can reduce unnecessary competition for students' attention during instruction.
Designing Instructional Materials
The same principle applies to PowerPoint slides and other instructional materials presented during a lesson. It may be tempting to add a humorous GIF, an eye-catching image, or an interesting anecdote to liven up a presentation. However, if these additions are unrelated to the learning objective, they may hinder rather than help learning. Researchers refer to this as the seductive details effect—the finding that learners exposed to interesting but irrelevant information often perform worse than learners who receive the same instruction without those distracting details (Rey, 2012; Sundararajan, 2018).
Why does this happen? Every irrelevant image, animation, or story competes for learners' limited attentional resources. As students devote their precious cognitive resources to processing these seductive details, fewer resources remain available for processing the information that actually matters. The irony is that the very additions designed to motivate students or to make a lesson more engaging can reduce what students ultimately remember.
Seating with Attention in Mind
The same principles also apply to seating arrangements. During explicit instruction, when the teacher is introducing new knowledge or modeling a skill, students should be facing the learning. Many classroom layouts permanently arrange students in groups because collaborative learning is valued. While collaboration certainly has an important place, constantly facing classmates also introduces unnecessary distractions. Students become part of one another's visual field, and in some classrooms many even have their backs to the teacher while instruction is taking place.
Rather than making students do extra work to direct their attention toward the lesson, consider making it as easy as possible for them to engage. Arranging desks so that every student naturally faces the teacher, the board, or the demonstration removes one more barrier to learning. This does not mean students must remain in rows throughout the entire day. In fact, one reason I prefer individual desks over tables is their flexibility. Desks can easily be grouped together whenever collaborative learning is the instructional goal and just as easily returned to positions that maximize attention during teacher-led instruction. Tables, by contrast, offer far less flexibility.
Thoughtfully arranging the classroom is only part of the solution. Teachers also need routines that intentionally direct students' attention toward the learning. When students' attention begins to wander, simple prompts such as "Track the speaker," "Track the board," or "Track your partner" immediately communicate where attention belongs. Just as importantly, teachers should resist the temptation to continue teaching until every student's eyes are where they need to be. Waiting until every student is attending communicates that the upcoming learning is important enough to deserve everyone's focus. Over time, this simple practice helps establish what I like to think of as a culture of attention and cognitive engagement within the classroom. I will return to this idea later.
When Noise Helps And When It Hurts
Visual distractions are not the only competitors for students' limited attentional resources. Noise can be equally disruptive. Many educators agree with my former principal, who believed that a noisy classroom was evidence of authentic learning. At times, that is certainly true. Rich classroom discussions, partner conversations, and other opportunities for collaborative learning can be powerful learning experiences. But noise, by itself, is not evidence of learning.
Background chatter requires students to continually inhibit competing speech while simultaneously trying to concentrate on the task before them. Because the human brain is highly attuned to spoken language, we process speech even when we are not intentionally listening to it (Katlowitz et al., 2026). This constant competition for cognitive resources can make sustained concentration considerably more difficult and lead to decreases in performance (Rios- López et al., 2022; Poncetti et al., 2025).
This does not mean classrooms should resemble a silent monastery. On the contrary, structured opportunities for students to think aloud, discuss ideas, and explain their reasoning are essential for both language development and learning. The key is intentionality. When discussion serves a clear instructional purpose, productive noise is a tremendous asset. But when students are expected to listen carefully to new information or work independently on cognitively demanding tasks, a quieter environment is often far more conducive to learning. Sometimes silence is indeed golden.
Should Students Listen to Music While Working?
Many teachers enjoy playing music while students are working, yet whether it facilitates or hinders learning depends largely on the nature of the task and the type of music. If students are engaged in reading or any activity that relies heavily on language processing, music—especially music with lyrics—has been shown to interfere with recall (Salamé & Baddeley, 1989) and reading comprehension (Perham & Currie, 2014; Zhang et al., 2018). One proposed explanation is that the brain is attempting to process two streams of language simultaneously. This creates competing streams of phonological and semantic information, requiring the brain to inhibit one while consciously attending to the other. For this reason, if you choose to play music during group or independent work, it is generally best to select unfamiliar instrumental music, which has been found to be considerably less distracting (Souza & Barbosa, 2023).
Attention is Social
Creating a classroom that minimizes visual and auditory distractions while intentionally directing students' attention toward the learning is not always easy. One reason is that attention is not simply an individual phenomenon—it is also social.
Researchers have begun to examine a phenomenon known as attention contagion—the tendency for one student's attentiveness or inattentiveness to influence the attention and learning of others. Most experienced teachers have witnessed this firsthand. One student begins looking around the room, another notices, and before long several students who are typically attentive have disengaged from the lesson.
Research suggests that this intuition is well founded. Studies have shown that when even one learner exhibits off-task behavior during instruction, classmates notice that behavior and subsequently demonstrate lower levels of engagement and retention (Forrin et al., 2021). Conversely, when learners are paired with an attentive classmate, they become more engaged and retain more of what they learn. Remarkably, these effects have been observed even when the off-task student is not directly within the other students' line of sight.
The implications are significant. Protecting students' limited cognitive resources is not simply an individual responsibility—it is a collective effort. Every student has the potential to either strengthen or weaken the classroom's overall culture of attention and cognitive engagement.
Cultivating Sustained Attention
The ability to sustain attention is one of the most important skills students can develop. It predicts not only academic achievement but also later educational attainment, career success, and even aspects of mental and physical health (Caspi, 1998; Moffitt et al., 2011; Gallen et al., 2023). Yet we live in an age of fractured attention. Our phones are always within reach, tempting us with notifications, text messages, and endless streams of new content. Social media platforms are designed to reward frequent shifts in attention, making it increasingly difficult to sustain focus on tasks whose rewards are often delayed, such as reading a challenging novel or solving a complex multi-step math problem.
I do not mean to imply that digital media is directly causing shorter attention spans. I find cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham's perspective on this issue particularly insightful. He argues that the problem is not that today's students are incapable of sustained attention, but that many have grown up in environments that provide immediate novelty and gratification. By comparison, activities that require prolonged concentration often feel less rewarding—not because students are unable to sustain their attention, but because they have become less accustomed to doing so. Digital media rarely requires it.
This places an important responsibility on educators. We can respond by continually adapting instruction to students' preference for constant stimulation, or we can deliberately cultivate the habits of sustained attention that deep and meaningful learning requires. The latter is undoubtedly more difficult and, at times, less popular, but it is necessary if students are to reach their full potential both academically and personally. In a world increasingly designed to fragment our attention, helping students to direct and sustain their attention may be one of the most valuable lessons educators can provide. It’s certainly worth paying attention to!
Further Reading and Practical Resources
If you are looking for practical strategies for designing classrooms, lessons, and routines that support attention, cognitive engagement, and learning, the following books and resources have significantly influenced my own thinking and practice.
Books
Teach Like a Champion (3rd Edition) by Doug Lemov
This book is filled with practical, teacher-tested techniques for establishing classroom routines, directing students' attention, maximizing cognitive engagement, and creating a classroom culture in which every student is expected to participate. Many of the book's strategies align remarkably well with what research tells us about attention and learning.
WalkThru Series by Tom Sherrington & Oliver Caviglioli
The WalkThru books and accompanying professional development resources provide educators with clear mental models and highly practical instructional techniques. Many of the strategies promote sustained attention, cognitive engagement, effective questioning, retrieval practice, and other evidence-informed teaching practices that align closely with the principles discussed in this article.
Do I Have Your Attention? by Blake Harvard
Blake Harvard does an outstanding job translating complex research on attention, memory, and learning into short, highly accessible chapters for classroom teachers. As a practicing teacher himself, he consistently bridges cognitive science and day-to-day classroom practice with clarity, insight, and practical wisdom.
Executive Functions for Every Classroom: Grades 3–12 by Mitch Weathers
Designed for teachers of older students, this book introduces practical systems and routines for developing executive function skills such as organization, planning, goal setting, self-monitoring, time management, and accountability. Throughout the book, Mitch Weathers emphasizes three keys to teaching executive function skills—clarity, routine, and modeling—bringing each to life through impactful classroom examples and practical strategies for fostering students' attention, self-regulation, and academic independence.
Executive Functions for Every K–3 Classroom by Mitch Weathers & Sarah Oberle
After publishing Executive Functions for Every Classroom: Grades 3–12, Mitch Weathers frequently heard from K–3 educators who wanted similar strategies adapted for younger learners. In response, he partnered with Sarah Oberle to write this book specifically for K-3 teachers. The book provides an accessible yet scientifically grounded introduction to executive functions and their role in learning. The authors explain the core executive functions—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility—and offer numerous practical suggestions for developing classroom routines, facilitating instruction, and designing learning environments that align with what we know about attention and learning.
Articles & Online Resources
Designing Great Slides to Reduce Cognitive Demands by Lucy Rundle
This excellent article explains how to design instructional slides that reduce unnecessary cognitive load and help students focus on the information that matters most. It also includes an embedded classroom video demonstrating these principles in action, making it especially valuable for teachers looking to improve their instructional presentations.
This article provides an accessible overview of research on music as it relates to attention and concentration. Although some claims should be interpreted cautiously, it offers a useful introduction to how different types of music may influence attention during a variety of learning tasks.
References
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Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922
Fisher, A. V., Godwin, K. E., & Seltman, H. (2014). Visual environment, attention allocation, and learning in young children: When too much of a good thing may be bad. Psychological Science, 25(7), 1362–1370. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614533801
Forrin, N. D., Huynh, A. C., Smith, A. C., Cyr, E. N., McLean, D. B., Siklos-Whillans, J., Risko, E. F., Smilek, D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2021). Attention spreads between students in a learning environment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27(2), 276–291. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000341
Gallen, C. L., Schaerlaeken, S., Younger, J. W., Project iLEAD Consortium, Anguera, J. A., & Gazzaley, A. (2023). Contribution of sustained attention abilities to real-world academic skills in children. Scientific Reports, 13(1), Article 2673. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-29427-w
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*Published 7/27/2026
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