It’s no secret that students are distracted. When I conduct workshops and deliver keynotes, I like to ask teachers about their successes and their current challenges. Overwhelmingly, teachers describe the challenge of teaching to a distracted generation of students. I see a similar pattern when I observe members of my cohort teaching or when I volunteer in K-12 classrooms. I’ve experienced it firsthand in some of the courses that I teach as well. It’s a common challenge at both the K-12 and university levels. We are living in a distracted world. That’s no secret to anyone.

However, I’ve also seen examples where students engage in deep, sustained, focused work. In a sea of distraction, there are islands of focused work and deeper learning. I’ve witnessed innovative strategies that I have implemented into my own classroom practice. And that’s what I want to explore. I want to focus on the solutions.

With that in mind, I’m starting of a series I’m calling The Concentration Code. It’s still a bit fuzzy in my head but the main concept is how we can help students engage in sustained, focused learning in an age of distractions. I’ll be sharing practical strategies based on research, experimentation, and observations of teachers who designing learning experiences that lead to this type of focused work.

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Intentionally Avoiding Distractions

I’m sitting on the couch tapping away on my laptop. I’m lost in a world of ideas. At times, the words flow easily as I tell stories and share insights. Other times, I hit a road block and rework entire paragraphs. I move from frustration to excitement to a calm sense of enjoyment. My stomach rumbles and I glance at my phone. How can it possibly be past noon?

“Just ten more minutes,” I tell myself.

Besides, I’ve got a 160 pound Great Dane with his head on my lap. I can’t disrupt his slumber. So, I keep going.

I eventually get truly stuck trying to determine how to organize my thoughts. A little background here. I’m working on a new PBL book and this particular challenge has me stumped. So, I make a quick lunch and I daydream. I work through my outline with no phone or television nearby. I’m in the zone and I feel like I could lose it at any moment. I empty the dishwasher and then go for a walk. When I come back inside, the solution flashes through my mind and I return to my frantic typing. I later lift weights and go for a run and then settle back down to another final ninety minutes of writing.

The day flies by and suddenly it’s three thirty. I pick up my daughter from school, chill out with my kids, and then head out at night to do an observation for a university faculty review process. Students arrive and, despite the stereotype of device addiction, they mostly just chat with each other. The professor introduces the movie Minority Report as the latest installment in a series about the history of film, AI, and social change.

To my surprise, the students are riveted. They lean to watch the movie. They keep their phones in their pockets. They laugh at the humor, gasp at the suspense, and remain focused on the film. When it ends, they engage in a deep Socratic Seminar about the movie’s themes, motifs, and historical connections. And I’m amazed by this. No devices present whatsoever.

As I drive home, I am struck by the slower, deeper pace of the day. True, I answered some email. Yes, I attended a meeting. But the whole day seemed to counter what we often experience in a distracted world. What I’ve just experienced is a full of sustained, focused work.

 

What Is Focused Work?

While both of these examples are different, they point toward a similar idea of long-term, slower work where you can focus on a key idea, project, or learning for an extended period of time. It might be hours spent organizing my thoughts and writing an initial draft of a book but it might also be a device-free three four-hour block of watching a movie and engaging in a collaborative Socratic Seminar.

This is a concept that Cal Newport refers to as “deep work.” It’s what happens when you delve into meaningful, sustained work that requires full cognitive attention. Newport argues that the constant interruptions of email and social media reduce our attention while also increasing cognitive load. This ultimately reduces our ability to get into deep work. Note that deep work can be collaborative and social or it can be solitary. It can be more analytical but also more creative. It can involve synthesis of information but also divervent thinking. It can look active or more sedentary. But the unifying idea is sustained work toward something that requires our full mental attention.

Cal Newport, who describes deep work as the ability to engage in “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.” Newport contrasts deep work with “shallow work” — tasks that are non-demanding, easy to replicate, and often done in a distracted or interrupted state, like checking emails or attending brief meetings.

When you engage in deep work, you are more likely to hit a state of flow.  If you’ve ever been “in the zone,” where you tune everything out and hyperfocus, you’ll know what I mean. You feel fully alive, fully connected, and fully focused. Time seems to fly by. Here’s a brief video exploring deep work:

This state of flow is admittedly rare but a key piece of it is the sense of sustained focus on an engaging task. This is what Schlechty described as the authentic engagement, where you are both focused and committed to the task at hand. So, what we are really aiming for is the highest level of student engagement.

Deep work allows people to fully engage with complex, cognitively demanding work without distractions, which can lead to better problem-solving and creative thinking. In a distracted age, this is more important than ever.

I’ve written before about how the corporate ladder has become a maze. And as our students navigate this maze, they will need to be resilient. In an age of machine learning, they will need to solve “sticky problems,” where the solution to a problem often leads to a new problem. They’ll need to develop deeper contextual knowledge and analytical thinking that goes beyond the algorithm. In other words, they will need to be really good at what AI can’t do and really different with what AI can do.

Students will not develop those types of skills without engaging in deep work. This type of deep work is a mindset that embraces focus over distraction and long-term goals over immediate gratification. It recognizes that learning is about more than just speed and accuracy. But deep work is also habit. There’s a sense of discipline in choosing to focus on sustained deep work when surrounded by instant amusement. I can tell you that just yesterday, I had to fight off doom-scrolling about the election. I had force myself not to turn on Netflix while writing.

Deep work is deeply counter-cultural. We inhabit a world of constant distractions and instant media, where the constant pinging from our devices beckons us from one urgent task to the next. This sense of deep work has become both vital and challenging in a world of incessant distractions. If we want students to become deep thinkers, they need to engage in deep work. If we want them to become makers and philosophers and researchers, they need to have the mental endurance to stick with a task long-term.

 

We Are Facing a Distraction Epidemic

We live in a distracted world. While pundits often label as generational, I’ve seen it with my peers and even with my parents. But let’s focus on students. According to the research, student distraction is heavily linked to the prevalence of social media and phenomena like Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Studies reveal that FOMO drives students to stay connected, even during academic activities, creating a persistent internal conflict between engaging in long-term learning tasks and jumping onto social media (although there’s a really interesting counter-argument to be made in It’s Complicated, which suggests that students aren’t addicted to social media so much as craving necessary social stimulus).

Research indicates that students with higher levels of FOMO tend to engage in social media more frequently during class, driven by a fear of missing out on social updates, which correlates with higher levels of distraction and lower engagement in learning activities (Al-Furaih & Al-Awidi, 2020). Note that this is a correlation and not causation. It’s possible that students who are struggling academically are seeking out social media as a result of disengagement rather than the social media leading to disengagement. However, the relationship remains.

What’s worse is that these distractions are often exacerbated for students who lack resilience. In other words, those with lower resilience levels tend to experience more significant negative emotional responses to social media and find it harder to refocus on academic tasks (Chen et al., 2023).

Students with higher resilience tend to manage their FOMO by minimize distraction and engaging in deep work.  Resilience not only helps in countering FOMO but also supports emotional regulation, reducing the likelihood of academic burnout and disengagement (Liu & Cao, 2022). But this is increasingly becoming an uphill battle. When I visit classrooms and talk with teachers, I am struck by just how often they share the challenge of student distraction and a lack of focus.

When I’ve talked to university students about the distraction epidemic, many of them describe the fear of missing out and the habitual nature of scrolling. Some of them have developed phenomenal strategies for maintaining concentration amid so many distractions. But they’ve also described it as a significant challenge.

“The thing is, I start eating breakfast and the nearest thing is my phone. Then I’m scrolling and scrolling more. I don’t think that’s bad but social media is like The Never Ending Story but instead of Fantasia disappearing, it’s your life. Or maybe your attention. I don’t know.”

Another student described social media as this party and there’s laughter in the other room and if you’re sitting there getting work done, it’s hard not to think about the party, even if you are enjoying the task at hand.

 

Why I Am Hopeful

We’ve all seen it before. A classroom where students flip through short videos on their smart devices, oblivious to the learning task at hand. We’ve seen those moments where students struggle to stay focused for more than five minutes of direct instruction. We’ve lived the experience of students who lack reading endurance or who give up too easily when a task becomes mentally challenging.

However, I’m a little skeptical of the “kids these days” argument. Distracted learning has been an issue for decades. When I was a kid, we were the “channel surfing” generation. We might not have mindlessly scrolled through 30 second videos but we certainly flipped through hundreds of cable channels without giving it much thought. When I taught middle school, my students had a hard time staying focused at first. Although we had a few class discussions and the occasional direct instruction, our mix of project-based learning and design thinking meant that students spent the entire class period focused on one larger task and one major project. Many students lacked creative endurance. They struggled to hit a state of flow in their work, so they spent the first week going to YouTube or checking their Instagram feed. I also saw how these same students grew resilient and focused when I integrated key strategies (an idea I’ll be sharing later).

It’s easy to blame the devices. Just take the smartphones away and we’ll be fine. I, for one, support screen time limitations and longer periods of time spent in a more analog mode. But I also think it’s a little more complicated than just, “Kids these days don’t have any attention span.” While technology has certainly exacerbated distractability, I think the rise of long-form podcasts and the desire to engage in meaningful hobbies both point toward a Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha desire for something deeper and more sustained within an instant culture. I think about the volunteer work I’ve done with my son’s Mock Trial team in high school. There’s a desire for deep work.

The issue isn’t solely with the technology. It’s the way we passively consume it. It’s what happens when you scroll through a feed without choosing to be present. It’s what happens when you binge-watch Netflix as you work. It’s not just the passivity. It’s also the constant barrage of interruptions – the little red numbers that pop up on the phone and the always-open tab beckoning you to watch a cat video. It’s the fear of missing out beckoning you back to SnapChat.

As educators, it can be frustrating when students seem distracted and when they lack the endurance to stick with a task long-term. I’ve seen it when modeling lessons in a K-12 environment or observing teacher candidates during a lesson. I’ve experienced it in virtual settings where I can read the body language of students who are suddenly checking email or opening a new tab.

But I’m actually hopeful. I’ve seen high school students get lost in a collective sense of flow as they engage in mock trial prep or engage in a rehearsal for a musical or stay present in the moment as they debate ideas in a social studies class. I’ve seen students move away from their devices as they pursue their curiosity during a science lab. I’ve watched students who supposedly can’t stay focused past the thirty second slot of a Tik Tok video get lost in a fictional world of silent reading. I’ve seen elementary students who are members of the iPad Generation hit a state of hyperfocus in an outdoor learning activity.

And yet, I also know that these moments are the exceptions rather than the norm. So, I’d like to explore what we can do to help students learn the skill, the habit, and the mindset needed to engage in this sustained, focused work.

 

Nine Strategies for Incorporating Focused Work in the Classroom

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be sharing insights into how we can design learning experiences that improve extended, focused work in the classroom. I’ve been exploring research and talking to educators to see what teacher-tested strategies actually work. The following is a quick overview of where I’m going with this series. I expect this to evolve as the weeks progress and I expect this initial article to function as a hub where I will link the additional articles as I publish them. But for now, this is my initial list of nine strategies.

 

1. Set the Tone for Focused Work

As educators, we can be proactive about our classroom systems. In this first article, we will explore ways that we can approach classroom layout and design to reduce clutter and we can revamp our systems with a focus on reducing extraneous cognitive load. We’ll examine strategies for setting the tone of focused work through classroom rituals and goal-setting. I’ll share a practical protocol I wish I had known early on in my teaching that helps students visualize their learning ahead of time and engage in necessary work-chunking strategy.

 

2. Create Mechanisms for Slowing Down

When I was a student, I internalize the message that the goal of learning was to move quickly and acquire knowledge faster than the norm. For example, our schools emphasized reading fluency. While we didn’t have leveled reading groups based on numbers (we used large cats), I knew that it was better to be a tiger than an ocelot. So, I defined myself as being a “good reader.” By contrast, I never once believed that I was good at math because I could never pass a single timed math test. I’m dating myself here, but we used to have these computational fluency tests where students would answer the problems in tiny boxes and the teacher would time it. It wasn’t until college that I learned that speed could actually inhibit deeper learning at times. I didn’t know how to handle challenging texts that required a slower, deeper read. By contrast, I finally thrived in upper level math where we were forced to slow down.

We often use speed metaphors when referring to learning. The two largest educational policy initiatives in the US have been No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. While speed certainly matters, I sometimes wonder what the cost is when we equate learning with speed. What do we lose in the process? If technology can make tasks faster and more efficient, what role does slower, deliberate learning have in a distracted world?

In this second article, we’ll examine what it means to focus on slowing down and being deliberate. I’ll share some of the neuroscience around rehearsal and retrieval. We’ll explore pedagogical frameworks such as design thinking and project-based learning as a means of slowing down the process for deeper learning. But we’ll also look at ways that certain “traditional practices” might actually work best for long-term focused learning. I’ll share some protocols that can help students slow down when using AI tools so that they don’t fall into the trap of automatically believing everything produced by AI.

 

3. Build Up Endurance Incrementally

Earlier I mentioned how my middle school students struggled with project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and independent reading. So many of them had experienced short-term tasks with quick transitions in school. They simply lacked the experience of engaging in long-term learning tasks that required sustained focus. However, within a few weeks of deeper work, students were editing videos, writing blog posts, and crafting code. In other words, they were engaged in deep work. In this third article, I’ll explore how we can build up endurance incrementally over time. I’ll share how we can implement strategies from video games to build momentum as they build up endurance.

 

4. Focus on Motivation

It’s no surprise that the spaces I’ve observed with the best forms of focused learning at the secondary level were elective courses. For elementary levels, it was often an interdisciplinary subject or a specialized type of learning that deviated from the scripted curriculum (sustained reading time after the boxed curriculum, a lab activity, a Friday maker project, an outdoor learning excursion). These points to a deeper reality that we tend to work with longer sustained focus when we engage in tasks that are meaningful to us. I’ll be using the following Self-Determination continuum to explore the element of motivation:

In this article, I’ll focus on motivation and how we can incorporate motivational strategies into our daily practice.

 

5. Incorporate Play-Based Learning Structures

The notion of longer, sustained work can feel, well, dreary. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There was a great chapter in Adam Grant’s latest book Hidden Potential about the contrast between deliberate practice and deliberate play. Here’s a quick preview of the difference between these approaches:

While both are necessary, deliberate play can help students hit a state of both individual and collective flow.

 

6. Embrace Confusion

As an educator, I hate when my students seem confused. I try to explain things clearly so that they can master the content more quickly and in a way that’s more enjoyable. And yet, confusion is critical for learning. When done well, confusion creates a sense of mystery that we want to solve. It leads to curiosity that we want to pursue. In other words, it sets us up for focused work that requires deeper concentration. In this article, we’ll explore how to embrace intentional confusion in the classroom. I’ll share some ways that we can use AI as a way to spark curiosity rather than lead to instant answers.

 

7. Choose Single-Task Tools When Possible

Ever noticed that you can focus for a longer stretch of time when reading a book on your e-reader (like a Kindle) than you do when reading a book on your phone? Part of this has to do with the device itself. An e-reader is a single task device. The same is true for electronic notebooks. By contrast, a tablet can sometimes feel like a spork. It does everything but it doesn’t do any one thing very well. In this article, I’ll be describing why focus should actually be a part of how we select our productivity and learning tools.

 

8. Emphasize Productive Struggle

I’ve written before about my fear of AI leading to cognitive atrophy and why we need to embrace productive struggle. In this article, I’ll share strategies we can use to help students gain necessary resilience as they tackle huge challenges. We’ll examine some of the classroom structures we might need to re-imagine to emphasize productive struggle. I’ll share some teacher-tested ways to incorporate productive struggle into the classroom rituals and climate and some small elements of productive struggle we can integrate into our assignments. As a teacher, I sometimes hate watching students struggle. I often provide help too quickly. So, this is also an area where I am growing as well!

 

9. Don’t Shy Away from Boredom

Boredom can feel like a punishment. But in this article, I describe why it is actually a gift. It’s also a discipline, a mindset, and a habit that we have to cultivate. Boredom can lead to better problem-solving and improved divergent thinking. But it can also give us some of the tolerance for tedium that we sometimes need as we engage in sustained focused work. In an era of distraction and immediate amusement, we need to find ways to use boredom strategically and I hope to share some small practical strategies we can use to integrate boredom into our lessons.

 

Join Me!

Please join me on this journey toward cracking the concentration code. I would love to hear any practical strategies you are using to help students with focused learning over extended time frames. I realize that there is no secret formula for this, which is why this series will not function as an instruction manual. Instead, it will be a “big idea” series that zones in on some examples that you may or may not work in your setting.

 

References:

• Al-Furaih, S., & Al-Awidi, H. M. (2020). Fear of missing out (FoMO) among undergraduate students in relation to attention distraction and learning disengagement in lectures. Education and Information Technologies, 26, 2355–2373.
• Chen, S., Li, H., Pang, L., & Wen, D. (2023). The relationship between social media use and negative emotions among Chinese medical college students: The mediating role of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and the moderating role of resilience. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 16, 2755–2766.
• Liu, Y.-L., & Cao, Z. (2022). The impact of social support and stress on academic burnout among medical students in online learning: The mediating role of resilience. Frontiers in Public Health, 10.