James M. Lang is the author of six books, including Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It and Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Jim writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education; his work has been appearing in the Chronicle since 1999. His book reviews and public scholarship on higher education have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Time. A former Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, Lang has delivered conference keynotes and workshops on teaching for faculty at more than two hundred colleges, universities, and high schools in the United States and abroad. He has consulted with the United Nations on a multi-year project to develop teaching materials in ethics and integrity for high school and college faculty, and is the recipient of a 2016 Fulbright Specialist Grant.
Zan Boag: Your book, Distracted, came out at a strange time, just before the pandemic hit. And, as you well know, the pandemic meant that educators right around the world had to make the transition from teaching face-to-face to teaching online. Now, when it comes to retaining the attention of students, are there aspects of online teaching that you think are beneficial? Are there others that are problematic?
My real goal is to think about the role that attention plays in supporting learning. We tend to focus our thinking, our problem-solving, on how we get rid of distractions. So my goal has really been to think about, “OK, distractions are everywhere.That’s been the case for a long time.” The question is: how do we cultivate attention?” And I think that it is definitely context-specific. In a face-to-face classroom, certain kinds of things are going to work well that are not going to work so well in an online environment. With the online environment, there has been some research which shows that it’s more difficult for us to stay focused on a cognitively challenging task, like trying to listen to a lecture, because there’s so much stuff that’s available to us right on the thing that we’re using to get the ideas and the words of the speaker. And there are other distractions: I might have my phone out, I’m sitting in my house and I’m hungry, I’ve got a puppy that wants to be taken out. So all these things are going to be interfering with my ability to pay attention when I’m doing something online. As a teacher in a physical classroom, I can try to control some of those things. Not controlling in a menacing way, but just in a supportive way. In
