Students Can’t Focus
And it has nothing to do with TikTok
The Patrick Dempsey: #0123
I write weekly articles about possibility, reinvention, and the courage to begin something new.
What The Jelly of the Month Club was to Cousin Eddie, education is to me: “the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.”
Here’s something that makes me laugh:
“Students are distracted. They can’t focus.”
We hear it all the time. We blame social media. We ban phones.
And we do this, and all the while we move students from subject to subject every fifty minutes.
We give them four or five unrelated courses at once. Each course with its own readings, announcements, assignments, rubrics, due dates, discussion boards, notifications . . . Students may also commute, work, play sports, volunteer and on and on.
And then, somehow surprised that students don’t lock-in with maximal focus and motivation exactly at 1pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we look for an excuse and find a rather convenient one: TikTok—that’s the reason students can’t focus and don’t seem engaged!
We can grant that it might be the case that frequent social media use may contribute to fragmented attention.
But, the real absurdity is that education treats fragmented attention as something happening outside the institution while structuring the entire student experience around planned interruptions and incessant context switching.
The institution blames students for failing to sustain an attention it intentionally makes almost impossible to sustain.
It Doesn’t Need to Be Like This
Colleges possess almost everything they would need to create extraordinary conditions for sustained focus and learning—time, physical space, experts, peers, laboratories, studios, libraries, equipment, and a community gathered around intellectual work.
And then it looks at all this and decides, “You know what we should do? We should divide the experience into fifty-minute fragments, three days a week! That’s the PERFECT setup for deep and sustained work!”
Literal nonsense.
In an environment where students have access to things they cannot get anywhere else. Laboratories, studios, libraries, equipment, faculty, other learners, performances, archives, physical places dedicated to thought—their entire environment is built for learning.
Then we give them a Monday/Wednesday/Friday grid and tell them to stop thinking about biology because it is time to walk across campus and start focusing on economics.
We seem to assume that attention can be started and stopped on command. At 10:00, the student should care deeply about biology. At 10:50, they should put biology away. At 11:00, they should become deeply engaged in economics.
Then perhaps history. Then lunch. Then work. Then Blackboard.
And two days later, we ask them to pick biology back up exactly where they left it and repeat the whole thing again.
Literal insanity if the goal is deep and focused learning.
Of course, the problem extends beyond class periods. It includes:
five simultaneous courses competing for cognitive possession;
assignments designed as separate products rather than parts of a continuing inquiry;
feedback arriving after the learner’s active relationship with the problem has ended;
semesters terminating work because the calendar says the work is over;
instructors determining when students must begin caring about something and when they must stop.
I can’t be the only one who finds this all incredible!
Prevent-ed
I love when ed tech companies just add “ed” to the end of a verb so we know it’s related to education.
That’s besides the point, just an observation. 😆
The point is, we say we want students deeply engaged in learning, while organizing nearly every part of their education to prevent them from remaining with anything long enough for deep engagement to occur. They are prevented ;) from deeply engaging with learning, by design!
An education serious about learning would create far more opportunities for sustained attention, appropriately difficult work, rapid interaction with the consequences of decisions, and—perhaps quite radically—the possibility of flow.
It would recognize that meaningful work often begins slowly. It would remove—to the greatest extent possible—artificial timelines recognizing that learners have to enter into a problem, find balance as they explore its contours, try approaches that go nowhere, and develop a feel for what the work is asking of them over time. Often, this means that an apparent lack of progress may be part of progress not yet evidenced.
Interrupt-ed
Here’s the problem: if we interrupt that process often enough, the student may learn something very different than intended and indeed very familiar to what we see today: finish what is due, submit the required product, collect the grade, and move on.
We want to blame motivation. We want to blame focus. We want to blame technology.
But the truth is, that’s the natural consequence of shallow, frequently interrupted work.
And today, there’s no better way to complete that shallow, disconnected work than AI.
In turn, education has turned sustained attention into a moral demand we make of students rather than a condition we create for them.
Here’s the question: when do we take a closer look at our role in fragmenting student focus and promoting shallow thinking and superficial work?