CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Handy Tips to Make Students More Attentive

Last Updated 18 October 2023/ By Zineb DJOUB

One of the hardest struggles teachers face is grabbing and maintaining students’ attention during the lessons. You are explaining, providing instructions, and helping them practise, while they have to listen, understand, ask questions, co-construct meaning, and produce. But, students need to be attentive to achieve all of these learning tasks. Attention is the main gatekeeper to processing, storing, and retrieving information, so learning cannot proceed in its absence (Wei, Wang, and Klausner, 2012). So, how can you make students more attentive and keep them along with the whole lesson and thus defeat any moment or reason for distraction?

Here are some handy tips to make students more attentive and thus enhance their learning and memory.

1. Spark students’ curiosity: Create suspense

If you want to make your students more attentive, spark their curiosity along with your lesson’s stages by creating SUSPENSE. Suspense captures students’ attention and makes them more excited and engaged in any lesson.

When you make suspense an element of your teaching process you call upon students’ thinking, and curiosity to find out about the unknown. So, they get more attentive and compete to prove themselves capable of excellent work.

To create suspense, start your lesson with an interesting warm-up activity that can stimulate students’ prior knowledge and experience and make them more interactive and involved. An activity that raises their expectations of what comes next and makes them more curious to learn about it.

Curiosity is like a fire. You need to add fuel so that it does not go out.

Your role as a teacher is to maintain the flow of students’ curiosity during those teaching hours and even expand it beyond the classroom walls to keep your students attentive to learning.

So, to maintain such flow the kind of questions you need to address in your lessons are not the yes or no, or the ones that require students just to recall what they have learned. These are questions that prompt them to think, rethink their knowledge and understanding, search and create new ideas. Suspense is what lies behind those questions and makes students act to find possible answers for them.

You can also create suspense by integrating thought-provoking materials and tasks that challenge each student to think, search, and compete to find the answers and be worthy of reward.

Creating some suspenseful moments can also help you catch your students’ attention.

To do so, change your tone when you ask those thought-provoking questions, look at them, and show eagerness to hear their answers. Push them towards generating more answers. Then encourage them to work them out, debate, and come up with more ideas. Be the last one to intervene.

When you introduce a new lesson, material or task ask them to guess its content, objective, and use. Give them clues to increase their expectations.

Pause before asking questions, introducing a new activity, and announcing the kind of reward you have decided, or the student to be rewarded. These are suspenseful moments!

Suspense is not meant to render your teaching mysterious, full of doubts, complexity, and tough for students. Instead, it intends to make it more interesting, engaging, and capturing their attention.

2. Put students under the spotlight

The more students feel concerned about their learning the more attentive they get within. When students have certain ownership over their learning process they become more responsible and thus more attentive to achieve their goals.

So, to get your students’ attention get them involved; do not lead the ship alone but invite them to be members of the crew.

Provide ample opportunities where they can share their ideas and materials, speak in class, and make choices regarding the learning content, mode, pace, and space. Listen to their feedback and suggestions and take them into account.

Putting your students under the spotlight also implies considering their learning interests and needs and differentiating instructions accordingly.

Whatever teaching content or objective is your concern, if you connect your instructions to your students’ world (their experiences, feelings, liking, etc) you are likely to grab their attention easily. So, get to know them.

3. Value your teaching

Valuing your teaching involves being passionate and enthusiastic about it and showing this clearly to your students by caring about their learning, listening to their inquiries, and providing the necessary support. This can draw their attention because you are telling them « I am here for you»!

But, valuing is more than this.

When you value your teaching you are selecting carefully content that matches students’ needs and interests. You simplify instructions, clarify the learning objectives, and justify how your selected learning procedures and tools related to their achievement and progress.

You are doing your best to help your students progress.

So, you are paying more ATTENTION to make your teaching more conducive to learning. Such concern and attention are noticeable and are likely to rub off on your students.

But, as teachers, we have a lot on our plates. So, there are moments when we feel exhausted and our enthusiasm and attention wear off.

Those moments become exceptions and will not affect your students’ attention when your passion and enthusiasm have become the defining traits of your profession.

You are dragged down or it is not your day and your students have found out about it. Do not get upset listening to them. Because this proves their attention and care.

4. Make your students goal-oriented

When students have learning goals to pursue they are likely to focus on the process of achieving them. So, they pay more attention to their actions, plans, and emerging learning outcomes. In this case, their learning becomes more purposeful, focused, and self-directed.

Therefore, to make your students attentive support them in setting clear goals for themselves from the beginning of the school year.

You can give them worksheets or ask them to use their portfolios to indicate what they want to get from each lesson and how they intend to achieve that.

Help them track their own progress over time by evaluating which strategies are more effective for them and what decisions they need to make to enhance it further.

Students also pay more attention if they know where they are heading and why. So, explain the rationale for each lesson and assigned task, so that they understand how these relate to their own goals.

5. Use brain breaks

It is really hard for students to stay focused for hours, paying attention to what we say and do in the classroom and meanwhile contributing to tasks.

When I attend conferences I think about my students and the tough task they are going through. When listening to those speakers, I need to pay attention so that I can understand and ask questions. But, once I feel tired I get distracted even if the presentation is interesting.

So, students’ brains need short breaks during work time to increase their attention and productivity.

Use brain breaks activities for a few minutes when you see the energy level going down. These activities can include relaxing or quiet activities such as meditation exercises, doodling, students sitting still to feel their hearts, closing their eyes to imagine a given situation, etc.

You can opt for physical activities like dancing, making movements, yoga, playing fun games, etc. If you want to make them laugh tell jokes, or introduce cartoons and humorous videos.

It is important to tell your students how long the break will last and explain the activities. After that, you can start the timer.

Help your students get more attentive; make their attention your goal and plan for it in each lesson. Observe what makes them distracted and how your attention-getters affect them. Your reflection and intention to achieve this objective can make a great difference in their learning.

References

Wei, F-Y. F., Wang, Y. K., & Klausner, M. (2012). Rethinking college students’ self-regulation and sustained attention: Does text messaging during class influence cognitive learning? Communication Education, 61(3), 185-204.