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00:00:02

[Laura Broadbent]

It's great to be with you for the next 40, 45 minutes. I'm going to move quite quickly through the talk, so we'll have questions at the end. So if any questions come up in the middle and I don't respond, it is because, as Will and I mentioned, the comments are going really fast and I might not be able to see them whilst doing the talk. But we do have time at the end, short time to do questions and answers. So please, please do ask at.
It'll be really great to discuss your thoughts on this talk. So, first of all, how digital life is reshaping learning. So normally when we talk about digital teaching and education, we talk about tools, platforms, devices, software, which some of you love, some of you don't love so much. But today in this talk, we're going to talk about something a bit quieter and a bit deeper. And this is about, not about technology at all.

00:01:03

In fact, it's about how the digital life of our students and in fact ourselves as teachers, has reshaped the conditions under which the learning in our classrooms happens. And this actually is even more prevalent now because I think, as you well know, a lot of schools are now phoneless, no phones are allowed. But this digital cognitive kind of reshaping that has happened becomes even more silent because we don't see it. But it is completely reshaping and affecting everything that is happening in our classrooms. So what is happening with the effects of digital life?

Really? When I say digital teaching, I actually really mean digital life. So it's affecting our students attention. How long can they focus on something in class and their homework as well? It's affecting their memory.

00:02:03

Are they able to recall information, reconstruct it and produce new language, not only in the class, but then next day or the next month or in their exams as well? And also how is it affecting our reading skills? So of course it will be affecting lots of other skills, but particularly important is in our classrooms is the ability to read, to process information and to recreate different texts. And as you well know, this is still a very common assessment format. So it's still a big pressure for us as teachers to be able to help our students be able to do so.

The cognitive environment of our, of our students and of our classrooms has changed a lot recently. So what do we assume as teachers when learning begins in our class? Okay, so we're in the classroom, we're ready, we've prepared our class. What are we imagining? Our students arrive like we're imagining, hoping that they are ready to focus on the class.

00:03:12

Obviously, every class is amazing, and they're going to arrive very curious, very enthusiastic, and. And the ability to focus straight away. Also, we are assuming that they are able to hold their attention. So our class times differ slightly, but let's say, for example, 45 minutes, one hour, we are expecting our students to be able to hold their focus and then to be able to do that again in the next class and the next class and the next class. So also we are expecting them to be able to sustain.

Sustain their thinking. So this is different to attention, their ability to be able to deeply think about the information we're giving them, participate in using and processing the information and then producing new language. Let's say they're learning the past, simple. And then. So we're expecting them to be able to process the grammatical structure and then recreate it.

00:04:11

What did you do last weekend, for example? I went too. So this sustained thinking for the whole class time. We don't really question these assumptions as teachers because we're thinking so much about ticking the boxes, getting the information across to our students, keeping up with the term, creating the lessons, keeping them engaged. But these things, these assumptions that we have as teachers are actually silently shaping everything that happens in our class.

If you ask yourself, when our students arrive in class, or when my students arrive in class, what have their brains been practicing for the last six or eight hours? Ignoring the sleeping parts. So with that question, because that is what their brains have been practicing are the skills and the kind of mode, if you want, is what they're going to arrive in class with. So in reality, what actually arrives in our classroom now, it is the attention that has been trained for speed. Our students are training constantly to do things fast, very, very fast, and they're rewarded for speed as well.

00:05:34

Switching between different things that may be switching between activities, switching between apps, switching between conversations, switching between talk. Lots of different people. For example, on WhatsApp, they're constantly switching. The brain is jumping all the time, and that is normal for them. So stillness.
This may be physical as well. But particularly in today, we're thinking of their mind. Their mind, for them to be still is very difficult because that's not what they have been practicing for the past six to eight hours or in fact, longer than that. Okay, so there we can see that we've got a difference in what we are silently assuming or hoping that our students arrive with and what they are actually arriving with. And this has a big impact on the way our teaching and their learning happens.

00:06:28

So attention or our Students attention. And also this is taking into mind our own attention as well is already shaped and formed, formed before our students even begin to learn. So it's not neutral. It used to be back in the past, a neutral thing. Students would arrive, the mind was quieter.
It was used to focusing on one thing at a time. Let's say for example, and I don't know if you do this, but I do. If I sit down to watch tv, I start watching an episode and then without even realizing, I've picked up my phone and I'm checking my phone. So already my attention is jumping my. But I remember as a child I didn't have a phone and so I would sit and look at, you know, watch TV for longer, for example.

00:07:14

And now I personally prefer to watch episodes of Things rather than a whole film because I struggle to keep my attention for longer. So this is something that is also happening in our classrooms. So the digital, our digital life really has reshaped our attention, but our way of learning hasn't reshaped. So this can often present itself in class as behavior problems. Obviously there will be other causes for different behavior problems, but here we're actually talking about an adaptation problem rather than a behavior problem.

So what I'm going to present to you today are different illusions. And so I'm using this word really to talk about what we all of us assume for our classes and how this may actually not be the case anymore. So the first illusion we're going to talk about is the illusion of engagement. So this is when our students really busy, they're really active, they're really enthusiastic in our class. And as teachers, this is what we often want, this is what we're aiming for.

00:08:27

Brilliant. They're participating, they're joining in, they're not looking out of the window. Amazing. So we see this busyness as something that we're really aiming for. Now remembering as teachers, we are also finding busyness and engagement a good thing.

It's something we are rewarded for in our digital lives. So therefore we reward our students for it. However, does this engagement mean that deep learning is happening? Does being active and this constant forwards motion of activity in the classroom mean that the things we're learning will last? Is the learning deep enough?

If we are constantly in a forward motion running through lots of different things? This is something that we may say yes, something we may say no. And it also might depend on the day and on the moment. But it's just something for us to think about that when and often we're aware of but we don't explicitly say it or plan for it. So here's just a quote to kind of give us an example.

00:09:40

When our attention is always moving, meaning doesn't necessarily settle into our brain and go into the working, processing memory. So in this research, they talk about seductive details, and this may be in our context. For example, you open a textbook and you've got photos, you've got facts boxes, you've got grammar boxes, you've got all things around the page, as well as the rubrics, the instructions, the task details, and maybe a text. So when students are told that these extra details on the page are relevant, it takes them longer to process the information in this example on the page, and this actually leads to worse learning outcomes. However, when students think that these extra details are not relevant, it doesn't affect learning outcomes because they don't spend time looking at them and processing them.

And this is actually slightly different to what we often think, but this is different to when we have these seductive details that help our meaning. So it may be a photo that illustrates the meaning of the text. Now, that is useful if we use it to activate prior knowledge, because it helps our students retrieve the knowledge they have, which, as we will see in a bit, Digital Live actually really brings this skill down. So we need to bring this skill up even more. So it's just something for us to think about.

00:11:18

Do we need so many extra details, or should we remove some of them and focus in on activating the prior knowledge for this specific task to help our students learn?
So this sounds a bit controversial. Initially, engagement is not evidence of learning. Now, of course, we want both, but it's engagement really is how our students are feeling. As we mentioned, are they enthusiastic? You know, are they really curious?

Are they. Do they really want to join in? Which is great. And this is a good thing. I'm not saying it's not, but it is different to what they actually remember.

So if they have a great time in class, does this necessarily mean that tomorrow or next month or for the test, they will remember the key information we needed them to remember? Sometimes the answer will be yes, and sometimes the answer will be no. So I'm not saying don't engage your students, please do. But our learning requires the attention to stay on an idea for quite a long time, not to jump through different ideas. But our digital attention trains kind of our mind to keep moving, and this means that we don't remember things very well, and our memory formation becomes quite fragile in a class.

00:12:45

So some lessons can feel Amazing in the moment. But sometimes that means they disappear the next day. And as teachers we're thinking, why is this happening? Why, you know, we had a great class. Why are my students not necessarily remembering as I thought they would?

So in a less connected world, previously, this engagement often meant a sustained attention, so our students were able to be engaged and sustain their attention. That worked well. But in our digitally connected world, engagement often means constant motion. So our learning hasn't reshaped to that yet. So it may mean that they're having a great time, but they might not have remembered everything.

00:13:34

The illusion of strategy. So our students, they know what to do. We're always teaching them strategies for reading, strategies for learning new information, multimodal input, multimodal output. So our students, they know they're learning. We are putting so much effort into helping our students understand the strategies.

So they know it, they can name it, they've practiced it again and again. But sometimes the outcomes. So the language they produce or, you know, the way they perform in low stakes tests or high stakes tests cannot quite match what we thought they knew. Through doing all of these strategies, there can be a slight, you know, imbalance. And why is this happening?

00:14:24

What? You know what? Because this can be frustrating, not only for a teacher, but really for a student as well. They've put in all the effort, they've learned the strategies, they're doing what you know, we're really encouraging them to do. The strategies are right, we're doing the right thing.

But the cognitive mode of our students is wrong. So it's the way they enter a task in their mind. So it could be that we've given them a text and they will scan it really fast when actually we wanted them to maybe pick out key details. They rush through several steps of an activity, but actually what we really need them to do is slow down. So we just need to slightly reconfigure the entry point of a task.

00:15:12

And these are very small things to help shift our students into the right mode so they're ready to go in and learn the language and the strategy. So therefore, our learning really depends on the transitions between tasks. Also the transition from out of the classroom to coming into the classroom, not just on the skills we're teaching them. Now, the next two lines might make some of you annoyed, but the point is balance. We are over teaching strategies.

You may say we're not over teaching strategies, but we are under teaching how to enter a task. How can we get our students into the right mode? And this is sometimes, you know, As a teacher, is there something that you do just before you walk into a classroom? Let's say when the students are already all in there, do you take a moment and walk in, or do you do that when you're leaving the staff room? Because if you are, that is you transitioning from one point to another point.

00:16:19

So you are doing this already. So we're just going to be explicitly teaching this to our students. Because transitions before digital life used to be quite implicit students, they would spend most of their day in the same cognitive state as we needed them to be in the classroom. Karma focusing on one thing at a time. But in our digital life, our state is a lot more fractured.

We're moving, we're jumping, we're switching. So our transitions between going into out to into class and between tasks also need to reflect this change.
So these, as I said, these transitions are not automatic as they used to be. And this is something that is, you know, it's another thing to put into the class. But these things are tiny, but they can be extremely effective. So our next illusion is the illusion of understanding. So this may sound quite similar to our previous illusion.

00:17:24

The students, let's say we're giving them a text. They can read it fluently, they're fine. Some of them can even read it out loud, confidently. They can turn the pages. They will say, yes, I've understood it.

They may have a photo to help them with the understanding. And this is the same with the video as well. But when we ask them, can you explain the video or text? We might receive less confident responses. And we're thinking, why?

They've been engaged. They have read everything. I've seen them doing it. I've maybe asked them comprehension questions. But can you actually reconstruct and explain exactly what you have just learned?

To me now, recognition can often feel like comprehension from the outside and also from the inside. Digital life trains us to recognize things. We see familiar things, we see familiar structures, and we know what this means. But digital reading, sorry, reading for a digital mind is very different because when we're reading digitally, we're scrolling, we're looking at hyperlinks, we're looking at, you know, looking up extra information. We're.

00:18:48

But we're not monitoring ourselves at all. You know, we're just scrolling through reading things, and we may be jumping between our reading. So digital reading skills, you know, we think we are reading quite a lot, really, on our devices and things, or maybe even an audiobook. But digital reading isn't the same skill as reading on paper. It's a different skill rather than being the same skill on a different surface.

So our digital reading habits are training recognition, but they're not requiring us to remember anything or truly understand anything. So as teachers, we need to build this memory, not where the information came from. And I will show you a quote in a bit, but I will touch on it now. There is some research that's called the. The Google effect.

00:19:40

And it's the fact that when we know exactly where to find information, and we know that we will find this information immediately. So in obviously this research, we know we go to Google to find the information, and we do it so quickly, and we find the information instantly. So because we haven't spent time looking for the information and because we know it's instant, so our brains are actually not spending much time thinking about the information because the whole process happens in a matter of seconds. We would know very well where to get the information because that's where we've always got to go. But we don't actually remember the information in the same way as we used to.

So our memory skills are actually, actually declining, which is heartbreaking. So we have to reconstruct something to make us understand it. How can we do this? We explain things, paraphrase them, summarize them, you know, explain it from a different point of view. We have to recall it.

00:20:44

We have to bring it back to our minds from, say, earlier today, from yesterday, from two days ago. We have to remember it again. I don't know if you have the same, but when I listen to the radio and I listen to program or podcast or whatever, and at the moment I think that's amazing idea. I can't wait to tell my friends about that. And I get to the, you know, get to the pub or whatever, go to tell them.

I cannot remember it. I cannot at all remember it. I remember it was really interesting, and I vaguely remember what it was about, but I can't remember. And it's so frustrating. And this is the kind of things that our students are experiencing because we are not recalling information so often anymore and we're not connecting the ideas regularly.

00:21:32

And again, I'm talking about outside of the classroom here. So of course, this is what we're trying to do with our students all the time. But because our students aren't practicing this constantly in their everyday life, expecting them to suddenly be able to do this in our teaching is extremely difficult. So with all of these illusions that we've been looking at, what does this really do to reshape our Language, our language learning. So we need to stop asking ourselves, what strategy should I teach?

You know that you know the strategies you need to teach. You've been doing that a lot. We need to start asking ourselves as a teacher, what cognitive conditions does this specific task or classroom require from my students? So we need to pivot ourselves very slightly. Also have the full confidence that actually what you're already doing in class is the right thing.

00:22:32

All these digital tools you're using, you're doing a good job. You're doing, you know, you're trying to meet your students in the middle. You're trying to level onto the way they're leveling, and you're doing that right. So first of all, take that and be confident with that. And we just need to slightly ask ourselves what we can do to help.
So now I'm going to give you some design ideas, and these essentially are strategies that you can try and do to help this shift. And they're going to be small ones that we can do just to really, you know, change this mode. So how can we design our students for arrival? So our problem isn't necessarily that our students are distracted in class. It's the, as we've mentioned, the attention mode that they are already arriving with.

00:23:27

So our first job as soon as our students come into class is not to teach them anything straight away. In fact, try not to, because I think it's. I remember someone telling me, when you pick up a child from school, a good thing to do is not ask them about the day straight away, which we naturally do. How was your day? What did you learn?

What did you do? Who did you talk to? What did you have for lunch? But actually give them a few moments or minutes of silence because they need to transition from the classroom to going home. And it's exactly the same when our students are arriving, they're coming from home or somewhere else.

00:24:06

They're coming from somewhere that isn't our classroom. Our first job as a teacher is to help them arrive into the class. Don't worry about teaching for the past few minutes. Relax. Relax and allow them to be.

So we can ask ourselves, and I just want you to think about this question, and we'll return to this question. If I remember, if I don't remember, please remind me at the end of the session. I Where do our lessons assume. And you can think of one lesson in particular, if you want your last lesson, assume that our students can sustain attention without us having helped them switch into attention mode. So at what point in one lesson that you can think of.

Have you assumed that your students can sustain attention? So I'm just going to let that question sit with you and we'll come back to at the end. So what small things can we do? Lesson entry points. So for the first three minutes of every lesson, have the same routine.

00:25:08

And this is completely up to you, completely up to your class. Because you know your students and you know your environment best. And of course don't expect to choose the first routine perfectly. It will always take some experimentation. It could be a short reading, it could be a short listening, but something quiet.

A guiding question on the board, but no discussions because our cognitive digital mind is busy. As we've said, it's forward full motion really fast. It's jumping between things. So we need to calm things down before we can ask them to sustain attention. So whatever you choose for the first three minutes of your class, make it quiet and make it the same.

00:25:55

So our students will walk in knowing what they're going to do for the first three minutes and that will, if they know and they're used to it, it'll become even more effective as we do it. Now guided focus with our tasks. There are many different benefits of doing this. This could be, you know, mixed abilities, special educational needs, but also changing our attention mode one task at a time. Our students are used to jumping between things, remember?

So we, for example, let's say we give them a listening task and then so you know, it can be often that we give them a listening task and we say fill in the gaps. Now for the first time, they listen to it. Close your books, close your eyes, whatever, just listen. You could have them do one activity, for example, choose a heading and you've gone through the headings first but don't have them choose the heading and fill the gaps at the same time. So you could have the first round that is just listening, nothing else.

00:26:59

And this also with a video, just watch nothing else. And then explain what you have just seen or read or listened to. And then the second time round, they will do the task if you're doing something online. So even if this is in class, you know you've got a big screen up on
the thing. Or when your students are using a platform at home for homework or self study, full screen view so they have nothing around.

Remember we talked about those seductive elements, the extra information around that is distracting and affecting our learning outcomes. Get rid of them. Release each task when you're ready. So this could be on a platform or as a teacher, you only tell them One instruction at a time. Because if you give them four steps, there are going to be lots of students who jump from step one to step three because they want to do it faster.

00:27:54

They have been rewarded for speed in every element of their life. Why would it not be different in class unless we tell them and teach them otherwise? So these can be really helpful things. Guided.

Yeah, I think that's enough. I'm just thinking time wise. I'm not gonna overload you. So how can we design to stabilize the attention? So imagine our attention is all like this.
How can we make it still? Because the important thing here is our memory. And our understanding depends on this, our free work or our working memory. So this is our processing, memory, memory. And this, you could imagine it as your workspace.

00:28:40

Let's say for example, it's a carpenter's workshop. Without the carpenter having his workshop space to do things. Then thing you know, they will never make the table. Let's say for example. So with our students, this working memory needs to have space and time to work.

This again is really key for our, you know, kind of mixed ability classes. But it's also really key for coming in with our digital life attention. So does every moment in our class need stimulation? Or would it be better to have some stimulation and engagement and some karma activities to allow this free working processing and memory to happen Remember, we need to spend time thinking about something for it actually to embed and go deeper.

00:29:37

So what can we do in our classes? When we ask a question, everyone as a rule in our class has to think in silence for 10 seconds. This silent time will allow the attention to settle and spend time on what you're asking them. Or you could have everyone write or draw or doodle something before anyone is allowed to speak again. It's changing that mode that we talked about into a mode where they are able to produce language and respond.

Slow down key moments. So you may have fast moments in the class, of course, but other key moments you can signal. So it is simple as putting your hand up. Because a lot of students cannot sustain their attention for the whole class. They haven't practiced it.

00:30:28

They don't know how to do it. Or they might, you know, we don't know what else is happening in their lives. So how can we help them? But instead of forcing them to sustain attention for the whole hour, 45 minutes, which may not be possible, we put our hand up. This part of the class is really important.
Please focus. And then let's say they're doing activity about. Let's Go back to the past, simple. Write a sentence, I go to the beach, underline the verb, go, and then speak, say it. And then you can ask them to do exactly the same structure in the past, simple, for example, but as you can see, we are slowing down this moment in the class.

00:31:15

Then they can have a discussion afterwards about their weekend and that can speed up again. Of course, if they're doing this digitally online homework, they can type a response, choose an option. So typing a response takes a bit longer. And so if we do an option or they choose an option now, it can be sometimes if they get instant feedback again, remember the Google effect? They've forgotten it two minutes later because they've got the instant feedback.

They haven't wondered about that question for long at all. So it hasn't sat in their brain and it hasn't been processed and it hasn't gone into our long term memory. And so therefore we won't be able to recall the information. So giving feedback in class, sometimes slightly later at the end of the class, you can give feedback to an answer or work that the students have done and this can help the learning go deeper because there'll be a little part of their brain during the class. Did he answer it right?

00:32:16

Did I not? Do I want to change my answer? And this will happen and that's when they will remember information.

So now we're on to designing for our cognitive transitions. So here we are going to kind of talk about the speed, depth and purpose of a task. One thing, sorry, I wanted to say just with the past slide, a really key thing for us to remember is our worlds. Our digital worlds are constant input. So silence in class is actually one of the most expensive and effective resources we have because that is something most of our students do not have elsewhere.

So take confidence in allowing silent moments in the class. It's quite unnatural. It feels quite uncomfortable. Let's say I ask you a question now. Are you stuck on reading this slide at the moment?

00:33:30

That 10 seconds of silence for me felt quite uncomfortable? I was thinking, what are they thinking? Are they worried? Are they thinking that my Internet has frozen? What is happening?

It's really uncomfortable and it feels like a very long time, but actually that time has allowed your brain to go, oh, she's just mentioned what she did last weekend using the
past simple. Oh, and now I've got time to think about that. And everyone in our class has time to think about that. So it's just a very small thing and we can do that to help us transition into use this silence as your secret weapon. So with our working memory as well, it can be using, you know, instructions one at a time.

00:34:18

As we've mentioned, and as I kind of touched on earlier, multimodal input, what I mean by that is visual, auditory diagrams, photos, things you're used to doing, and then requiring the multimodal output as well. Students can choose whether to write or to draw or to speak, going with, you know, what works for their strengths at the same time, to build the confidence. So going into our cognitive transitions, we have now caught up with the slides. We need to give explicit signals to our students. How fast is this task?

How deep do we want our students to think? Because they need to know, because they're not used to thinking deeply all the time, and what kind of thinking are we asking them to do? So, what is the purpose of this task, which is always key because our students need to know why they're doing something. So when we tell them these things, this is transitioning them into the task so we can give them clear signals. Okay, so examples.

00:35:27

You can say to your class, this is not a fast task. And this signals to them they will not be rewarded for completing it fast or rushing through it. This is a thinking task. Thinking is silent. Well, not always, actually.

This task needs slow reading, or this task needs you to remember something from yesterday. As soon as you say that, they will start thinking, yesterday, yesterday. What were we doing yesterday? So they're already cognitively transitioning into what you're asking them to do for the task. So that is how we can help them go in.

We can also help reflect. What did you find it hard to focus on? What was one thing that you that helped you focus today? Was it easy to focus on this task or not? And why

00:36:24

So having these reflective moments, and they can be. It could be literally, was this task easy to focus on? And they hold up a piece of paper with a yes or a no or a tick or a across so that no one else can see their answer, and they pick it up and show you, and you've got instant feedback, and they have given instant feedback. So that really helps you learn as a teacher what transition transitions are working for your students and which ones aren't. Now, this is another quote from some past research, and it was about how people work with interrupted tasks.

So let's say they're doing tasks interrupted, interrupted, interrupted, which we always are in our digital lives. So actually, interestingly, people compensate by this. Compensate for this by working faster. Got to get it faster, because I'm going To be interrupted. But what actually this means is we become more stressed, we become more frustrated because obviously we make mistakes.

00:37:26

We have a time pressure and, and it's more effort. So we become tired quicker. Now this of course will depend on each person. So let's think about that in the class, if their minds are fractured and still jumping in modes, they're going to try and work faster, faster, because that's the mode their mind is in. Fast, quick, pressure, go, go.

And this is what we need to change. So this is just to show you how people react, how our students will be. This is the mode they are in our class when they arrive. Now designing for reconstruction. As we mentioned before, our memory is affected by this Google effect.

00:38:08

We can't recall what we remembered what the information, we can recall where we got it from and that's it. We can't reconstruct a video or a text and we can't produce the language so easily. We cannot retrieve the information because we need this working memory to work well. And this is because we've been given so much information immediately and this includes instant feedback. Instant feedback, forgotten it not important because I haven't had to work very hard.

So how do our students remember information?

This is the Google effects. So I won't, I won't spend time on this because this is, you know, what we mentioned before. We don't remember things. We can write or say five words or ideas from the last lesson. This could be your routine, your first three minutes of the class.

00:39:04

Compare with a partner, ask students to explain. So this is the key thing they need to explain, not locate because that is the different skill to what they're doing outside of class. Close your book, turn the video off before responding to a question because by turning that stimulus off, I've now got to recall what I listened to, read or saw. And they have to retrieve every information before going into a task. And so let's say they've watched a video, listen to an audio, explain it before you move on to for example the grammatical task or the skills task.

Put reconstructing and explaining something first. Again, multimodal as we mentioned. Allow them to do it in their different ways. So do they write it, do they draw it, do they speak it? Because this will allow the working memory to free up and then that can mean the information goes down into the long term memory.

00:40:07

As we said, one instruction at a time is even very difficult when we've got different abilities in a class. Some students will be faster than others. So you're thinking how Do I give some. The next instruction to some and, you know, sometimes another instruction to the others at a different time? So, you know, you could give instructions at the same time, but if students are finishing fast at each stage, you give them another instruction to make them go deeper into the learning before the whole class goes on to the next stage.
So you're requiring them to go deeper. Time. Give them time and give them silence. Remember your secret weapon. So.

Oh, wait, sorry, no. So more examples just before we wrap up. Quickly paraphrasing. Always paraphrase phrasing. As we mentioned, when they're reading a text, what is the claim?

00:41:02

What is the evidence? So these are quite, you know, common reading skills that we are teaching, but you're asking them to get the meaning across because that's not what they're doing. Highlight the key ideas, but do it every single time. So they are learning, even if they're. Afterwards, they're learning a different skill.

For the, for the reading. Highlight the key ideas or paraphrase boxes so that students are spending time understanding meaning and slowing down before they rush off to complete the task. We can also, as we say, ask for the reflection. What worked for you? What didn't work for you?

00:41:45

And spend time on our answers. This is really, really key. So as we are designing for depth with our students, they're distracted. Whether, you know, whether we think we've, you know, we've arrived, we can always, you know, kind of be more focused. So we need to think about the way they arrive in class as well as us, the way we help their attention maintain, and that is during the class or for little bursts during the class.

If you see your students are struggling to maintain for the whole class, how do we transition into the classroom? How do we transition into a task? And how do we reconstruct meaning with our. With our teaching? So our deep learning is absolutely still possible as it always used to be, but it's just less automatic.

00:42:38

Our attention, our focus isn't in the same. Isn't at the same level as we require it to be. So it's just not automatic. We have to help our students do that. And I've remembered that I asked you the question.

So if anyone wants to put in the chat, Is there one moment in your most recent lesson that you remember that you required students to sustain attention, but you didn't help them transition? Don't blame yourself for not helping them transitioning. None of us, none of us do. None of us have done unless we discuss it explicitly like we are today. Any ideas in the chat.

00:43:19

And I really want to just bring to your kind of mind, is the answer you give now to that question different if you had answered that question as soon as I asked you the question? Because having gone through the rest of the talk and you thinking about other things and having had some part of your brain thinking about the answer to the question, you have thought about that much more deeply than you may have if you'd done it instantly. So thank you very much, everyone. We managed to keep to time, so I'm delighted. Thank you very much for joining me.

I hope you found it useful and just a slightly different perspective to what we're used to. And I hope to see you at another time. Thank you very much.

00:44:10

[Will Rixon]

Thank you so much, Laura. Amazing. What a talk. Very. Yeah. Interesting look at it. Thank you so much. Look at all those emojis you're getting.

[Laura Broadbent]

They're great. I love it.

[Will Rixon]

So many emojis in me live.

[Laura Broadbent]

There are so many. See, my screen is busy because. Yeah, yeah, loving. And I'm fully engaged. But yeah, these ones.

00:44:32

[Will Rixon]

So we've had. We've had quite a few questions, but we haven't got time to answer too many of them. I have been trying to cherry pick, but they just keep coming. Given that interruptions don't reduce quality but increase stress and effort, what implications does this have for sustaining focus retention.

[Laura Broadbent]

In the sense of our attention is less sustained because of the constant interruptions.

[Will Rixon]

Yeah, I guess so.

[Laura Broadbent]

Exactly. So, yes, our attention is absolutely, as we keep using the word, fractured. We are interrupted. And this has a direct, direct consequence is that our attention is not sustained. Worse than that, our anxiety is increased. And when our anxiety is increased, whether that's frustration or whatever emotion that's coming out that blocks learning as well. So it's actually a double negative effect of fractured learning. So this is something we don't really notice outside because we're very good at finding coping strategies.

00:45:43

So we're very good at training ourselves to cope with that. And that's fine. But in the classroom, teaching methods and, you know, have not changed. So therefore we need to readjust to go back to basically remove of our coping mechanisms that we are using day to day and kind of go sideways, not backwards, sideways.

[Will Rixon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lovely. Thank you, Laura. Okay, so one time for one more. I think we have one at the beginning. I wanted to ask from an old favorite of ours, Sean Patrick Kang. Hi, Laura. Talking about recognition building, understanding, is there something we can do for the students to do it on their own, for doing the Three things you mentioned. Recognize, recall, connect.

00:46:29

[Laura Broadbent]

Ideas. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, sorry.

[Will Rixon]

Go, go, go.

[Laura Broadbent]

I didn't even wait for him to finish the question. Digital life thing. So. Yes. So what we can really help our students with is building and modeling these routines in class. So it may be, I don't know, choose. I'm trying to think of an example task. Talk about weekends. Let's stick with the. Yeah, right, and talk about your weekend. How am I going to do this now? I'm going to say write, write. Do a piece of writing about it. So how. How can I even try and do this on my own? Let's break it down.

00:47:13

So first, you plan. Give a template. Give a planning template. And in class, no writing is allowed until you have completed that template in whichever way you want to. Do notes, diagrams, writing. You complete that template, and no one is allowed to start writing until you say. Then you say that writing. But it may be that they're, you know, using different techniques. So by modeling that in class and repeating it all the time, when students go home and do it on their own, that's what they will naturally do because that's what they've learned to do, and that's what they feel comfortable doing. So you're.

00:47:50

You're building these structures in class for them to use outside.

[Will Rixon]

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Laura. You're making it make so much sense. Just you.

[Laura Broadbent]

Yeah.

[Will Rixon]

Thank God you're here. All right, well, thank you so much, Laura. I'm gonna let you go. You got another two times today, aren't you? So you have a little break.

[Laura Broadbent]

Thank you very much. Bye, everyone. See you.

[Will Rixon]

See you, Laura.

[Laura Broadbent]

Bye.