Published 2005
Voices from the Middle
Journal of the National Council of English Teachers

Attention: To Have and to Hold
Add the Science of Learning to the Art of Teaching to Enrich Classroom Instruction

By Judy Willis, M.D., M.Ed.

Never in the history of education has there been the challenge teachers face today where curriculum content and accountability are rising and educational funding is not only failing to keep up, but is becoming increasingly linked to performance on standardized tests of the material that must be successfully taught from that expanding curriculum. Teachers who know how to capture and hold the attention of their students can create excitement and creative learning environment by utilizing brain-based strategies to bring students’ enthusiastic attention into their lessons so these students can become critical thinkers with the highly developed skills of executive function to not only master state standards and the associated tests, but to make connections, judgments, and critical analysis using the information they learn.

It has been liberating and gratifying to join the professional educators who are already workings as critical analysts of education related research. Valid brain research, and not misleading statistics, must drive educational methodology. If we want to energize and enliven the minds of our students, we, as informed educators must begin in our own classrooms.

As informed teachers, we can serve as the voice of reason, first to the parents, then to the school boards and voters. The ultimate goal is for professional educators, and not the politicians, to utilize our expertise in education, to take the lead in developing and analyzing brain-based educational research and techniques and free ourselves from government dictated assumptions, into creative ways of looking for solutions that will help emancipate teachers, students, parents, and administrators from the confinements erected by uninformed legislators. Until then we can bring excitement and enrichment to our lessons and still achieve and exceed standardized requirements. Some of the strategies that have empowered me to do this in my classroom are presented in this article so other teachers can use them to rekindle the spark of joyful learning and rescue their students from the confines of teaching to the test.

Capturing Their Attention
Before students can make memories or learn, you must capture their attention. Neuroimaging and brain mapping studies have revealed the structural changes in the brain that occur when new learning becomes retained in subcortical storage areas. Although this can occur in all the lobes of the brain, it is especially noted in the subcortical memory storage areas of the frontal and occipital lobes. A recent study demonstrated increased brain growth in the occipital lobes after subjects learned and practiced juggling. Similar studies reveal memory storage becomes more efficient when memories are related to prior knowledge. The more memories in the bank, the more neuron circuits there are to connect with new information. In a similar manner, each time a student focuses attention, the activation of alerting and focusing pathways results in these neuronal circuits becoming stronger and more efficient at carrying new data into storage.

Practice or repetition of the process of focusing attention is like exercising a muscle. The neuronal circuits involved become more developed because of their repeated activation. Practice results in the circuit being easier to access and activate. Repeated stimulation of the attention circuit is like hikers along a trial who eventually carve out a depression in the road. Repeated hiking makes the path more defined and easier to follow. Similarly, with more use, the brain pathway for focusing attention becomes, with use, easier to activate and follow into the memory banks.

Awareness is the attention of the moment. The subconscious mind needs to be on automatic pilot to process the enormous amount information from the world coming in through all the senses. When our brains are working optimally, we recognize some input as familiar but unimportant and ignore them. We then automatically consider the data needing to be acknowledged at that moment. After brief consideration this is either dropped from working memory and forgotten, or selected for storage. For example, when looking for a particular highway exit you are aware of passing exit signs and pay attention to them momentarily. If an exit is not the one you are looking for, you won’t send its name to your working memory bank. Attention becomes not only one of focus, but also one of correct elimination of inappropriate or unimportant stimuli.

Optimal brain activation occurs when students are in positive emotional states. Attention is also prompted when the material holds personal meaning, connects to their interests, is presented with elements of surprise, and/or when it provokes wonder. This is why attentiveness is so closely linked to positive emotional cueing and personal meaning. When there is connection to prior knowledge or positive emotional experience, new information passage through the information filters (limbic system) is faster and more extensive. If this system of filters is positively stimulated to pay attention to the information, the new material is linked onto existing brain cell networks. If there are no emotional or intellectual connections with the new information, as is often the case in streamlined curriculum geared to teach the students facts to regurgitate on tests, their brains are less successful at developing the meaningful connections that create efficient memory circuits. When information is not presented in a way that sparks attention, it may be discarded, and attention withdrawn.

Grab Their Interest
Attention is a process of selecting the most relevant information from the mass of sensory input all around us. One of your tasks as a teacher is to emphasize the important information. What may seem obvious to you as the main point of a lesson may not be as clear to your students. You also want to help them filter out some of the distracting environmental stimuli that might interfere with focus on the critical data. Gaining and keeping students attention will promote information passage from simple momentary awareness to working memory and then to stored long-term memory banks in the subcortical areas of the brain.

I recall a poster that read, “A Mind Stretched Will Never Revert to its Original Size.” Good teachers can and do stretch their students’ brains by first stimulating their imaginations and interest to captivate their attention. One valuable attention grabbing strategy involves the same methodology you recommend to your students to encourage them to write more compelling essays by the “Show, don’t tell” technique.

Before a lesson, consider how you can “show” so students will be drawn into the topic. One strategy is to build anticipation. If you are approaching a lesson that could be rather dull, but is critical to their fund of knowledge, you can build excitement by having a sign up such as, “TWENTY FOUR HOURS UNTIL THE FORCE ARRIVES.” The next day when you lecture about forceful or powerful opening sentences for essays, you’ll have created anticipation, and that will harness attention.

A medical colleague primes the pump of the residents he teaches by telling them in advance what three or four diseases they will see in the patients they will examine the following day. In that case, knowing what to expect prompts them to read with focus about those illnesses. The information they acquire when they examination and discuss these patients then has a preexisting memory circuit to latch on to. The result is greater attention, connection, and memory retention.

To engage students in active attention and learning you can also prime their pumps to motivate their interest in the information you have to offer. Pose a question that will not have a single, definite, correct answer. Don’t permit students to respond immediately, but be available to answer a few questions that help clarify. Then, after giving them a reasonable amount of quiet think time, ask them to do a quickwrite or think-pair-share about their opinions of the answer. After this personal involvement with the information, they will be more attentive to your lecture because they’ll be seeking confirmation of their own opinions, or the facts to back them up.

It is always helpful when cross-curriculum studies can work as stimulators for student interest and critical thinking. For example, as a prompt for analytical writing in English class, after students studied the Constitution in history ask them to write about, “How would you create a law that would protect rights of free speech without having the KKK use this law to burn crosses near the homes of African Americans?” You can explain the need for substantive supporting paragraphs in this type of essay. Because the students are stimulated by the topic and the connection to their history class and empowered by thinking of themselves as lawmakers, they will feel an authentic reason to gather more interpretive knowledge about the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They will also have a motivation to learn about writing convincingly in expository essays because they are connected to the topic. If you start the process with a class or partner discussion of the subject, this verbalization of their opinions will also prime their interest in learning how to write a convincing essay.

It is valuable to rotate techniques, lest the unexpected become expected or even tedious. Greet students at the door with a riddle along with a hello, or a vocabulary word the definition of which is posted at the table at which they should sit. Give them an unusual fact or tell them a provocative quote and ask that they consider who might have said it.


As important as it is to capture your students’ attention and help them practice building attention-focusing skills, it is equally important for you know when to let their brains rest. If you are delivering complex material, especially in a lecture mode, brain rests (“syn-naps”) can be necessary after as little as 15 minutes. If you see your students becoming fidgety, distracted, and unfocused you have gone on too long. It is best to have students take the brain rest before neurotransmitter depletion occurs.

These neurotransmitters are the brain chemicals needed to carry information across synapses from nerve to nerve. They can be replenished within minutes if the break is taken before complete depletion, but their rebuilding takes longer if they are severely depleted. Observe your students for the very first signs that precede the glazed expressions of brain burnout. Try to plan brain rests before they reach that state.

In addition, if you identify these overload times before they occur and have a break before that point, the topic about which you were teaching will not be linked with or negatively reinforced by the students’ associating their bored feeling with that topic when it comes up again. You also want to avoid the cycle whereby they feel their acting out is rewarded by a break. You can do this by planning these rests to occur while they are still feeling good.

Just remember to give them a short warning before the actual brain rest. They may be so engaged in their activity that if the break comes without a few minutes to reach some closure, they will be frustrated. Also, let them know if and when they will be coming back to the activity so they learn to plan their time.

Once you have their attention, you empower your students to become engaged in their learning process. Using surprise, novelty, and variation to capture and hold their attention will activate the centers of the brain needed to begin the process. They will now be ready to sift through information, form connections and relationships, and achieve the ultimate goal of placing new knowledge into their memory storage centers. Surprise them today and they’ll reward you by retrieving the memory months from now and on standardized testing day.