Standing in front of a lecture theatre of several hundred students, I often find myself returning to the same question: what are students really paying attention to while they sit here?
Many students who are physically present in class are simultaneously preoccupied, their earbuds visible, locked in on notifications, messages and short-form videos. While at the back of their mind they are juggling financial pressures, social anxiety and uncertainty about the future.
They arrive with their attention fragmented, leaving them vulnerable to overwhelm, less able to relate to the present moment and doubting their own competence – factors vital for self-determination. No wonder the well-being of these students, and their teachers, is suffering. Student engagement is compromised because attention is depleted.
We know that attention, and thus the cognitive ability to focus and process information, is a limited resource. Yet, traditional educational formats such as lectures and seminars operate on the assumption that we have unlimited attention and can focus it on demand. Even though we know it is a myth, we still design educational sessions based on a linear economy model – take, make and waste. We take students’ attention whether they are focused or not, we make them think and engage whether they have the capacity to or not and then we let them go, wasting their finite attention.
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Businesses have long understood attention is a valuable resource, as explained by Davenport and Beck more than 20 years ago. Leaders need to enable employees to pay attention, in order to achieve short-term or long-term goals. This requires a shift towards capturing, managing and sustaining attention.
Perhaps the problem for university educators is that we tend to measure student engagement without understanding how attention contributes to it. Engagement is defined as the emotional, behavioural and cognitive investment of students. It is usually measured through attendance, participation and grades, because in theory they can easily be quantified. While these measures matter, they don’t help us understand or gain the attention needed for such investment to take place. This matters because attention is the gateway to learning.
I have discovered four ways to move students’ attention towards learning based on the concepts of circular economy, Kaizen philosophy, friction and a bit of mindfulness.
Four ways to regenerate student attention
1. Help students understand their attention as a resource
When I explain that attention is a finite resource, actively competed for by digital systems, many students immediately recognise their own experience and describe feeling mentally overstimulated and relieved to have language for why focusing has become so difficult. This is not simply about telling students to concentrate harder. It is about helping them understand that attention can either be depleted or restored depending on how learning environments are designed. Once students recognise this, they often become more intentional about how they engage in class. This awareness is reinforced through shorter learning cycles, reflective pauses, discussion and activities that repeatedly bring attention back into the room.
2. Design lectures and seminars as circular learning systems that protect attention
Rather than treating attention as something to be consumed during a lecture and depleted by the end, circular learning systems continually return attention back into the room through reflection, discussion and application. Break teaching into shorter conceptual blocks and use stories, questions and peer interaction to reactivate attention before it drifts away. Give students space to think through possible answers rather than immediately filling silence. As students contribute, reflect and reconnect ideas to their own experience, attention is not simply spent; it is reused, renewed and redirected towards learning.
3. Infuse circular learning systems with Kaizen philosophy
The Japanese Kaizen philosophy focuses on achieving continuous improvement through small, ongoing changes shaped by participation, reflection and feedback. It can offer useful guidance for the design of circular learning systems and improve student participation. Involve students from the outset, sharing thoughts about the topic you are going to teach and finding elements that are relevant to them so they can relate. These connections to course topics, based on students’ personal experiences, can be revisited throughout class to regenerate attention.
4. Reintroduce productive friction and create flow states
The most valuable learning experiences are often not the most convenient and there is growing recognition that reintroducing friction can be helpful. There is a move among senior leaders to return to analogue tools such as handwritten notes and diaries, for instance, because paper-based thinking slows cognition, deepens reflection and leads to sustained focused. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi showed, sustained focus emerges when challenge and skill are well balanced, which we experience as flow state. Carefully chosen friction can help students enter this state. For example, after introducing a difficult concept, ask students to spend one minute writing down what feels most clear and what still feels unclear using pen and paper or Post-it notes. These can then be grouped on a wall and used to shape discussion and reconnect attention back into the room.
These small adaptations can result in big improvements in student engagement by nurturing rather than squandering their valuable attention.
Christine Rivers is professor of mindfulness and business at Surrey Business School (SBS), University of Surrey.
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