How Teachers Fight Students' Shortening Attention Spans Shorter Activities, Hands-On Projects, and Meditation (msn.com) 40
The Washington Post reports that some teachers are now implementing "brain breaks" in their classrooms to cope with shorter attention spans, "including limiting screen time; cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging, hands-on projects; and practicing meditation."
Some teachers say the efforts are helping, at least a little... To engage students, teachers say they often feel the need to deliver teaching not only in shorter bursts, but also in more entertaining ways. "The new word is 'edutainment,'" said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona. "How can you make your lesson applicable, interactive? Teachers are going to have to be more engaging for students...."
In a kindergarten classroom at McKinley STEAM [a K-8 public school], students start the day with a meditation. The classroom of two dozen children is perhaps its quietest during this short activity every morning. Imagine you're in the Arctic, a voice from a meditation video tells them, with snowflakes melting on your skin. Silently, the children lay down on the carpet and close their eyes for a moment. After the meditation, the students gather in a circle and do a few deep breathing exercises before taking turns proclaiming what they are capable of each day. "I can be a good student," one little boy said before the child next to him replied: "I can listen to the teacher." The goal is that these mantras will stay with the children hours later, when they have to sit through the more tedious lessons of the day.
An instructional coach at McKinley STEAM says the strategies are working students aren't reaching for their phones during class and sometimes actually get drawn into lessons.
The article also explains why some teachers find this necessary: In recent years, educators say, it has grown more challenging to get students to pay attention. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in an international survey from 2025 of more than 3,000 teachers believed their students' attention spans were getting shorter. In a study published last year about kindergarten through second-grade classrooms in the United States, 75 percent of teachers said attention spans had dropped since the coronavirus pandemic, when the use of laptops and other technology for schooling spread rapidly. A growing body of research says that excessive screen time and short-form content such as TikTok videos are part of the problem. At least 36 states, including Ohio, have laws requiring schools to have some form of a cellphone ban.
There is debate over whether screen time reduces people's ability to focus or their desire to — many developmental experts lean toward the latter, suggesting that it is possible to help students regain longer attention spans.
In a kindergarten classroom at McKinley STEAM [a K-8 public school], students start the day with a meditation. The classroom of two dozen children is perhaps its quietest during this short activity every morning. Imagine you're in the Arctic, a voice from a meditation video tells them, with snowflakes melting on your skin. Silently, the children lay down on the carpet and close their eyes for a moment. After the meditation, the students gather in a circle and do a few deep breathing exercises before taking turns proclaiming what they are capable of each day. "I can be a good student," one little boy said before the child next to him replied: "I can listen to the teacher." The goal is that these mantras will stay with the children hours later, when they have to sit through the more tedious lessons of the day.
An instructional coach at McKinley STEAM says the strategies are working students aren't reaching for their phones during class and sometimes actually get drawn into lessons.
The article also explains why some teachers find this necessary: In recent years, educators say, it has grown more challenging to get students to pay attention. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in an international survey from 2025 of more than 3,000 teachers believed their students' attention spans were getting shorter. In a study published last year about kindergarten through second-grade classrooms in the United States, 75 percent of teachers said attention spans had dropped since the coronavirus pandemic, when the use of laptops and other technology for schooling spread rapidly. A growing body of research says that excessive screen time and short-form content such as TikTok videos are part of the problem. At least 36 states, including Ohio, have laws requiring schools to have some form of a cellphone ban.
There is debate over whether screen time reduces people's ability to focus or their desire to — many developmental experts lean toward the latter, suggesting that it is possible to help students regain longer attention spans.
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Separate the kids into the Eloi and the Morlocks and let Darwin work his magic
I don't think Wells intended people to think that this was a good thing.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
>"An instructional coach at McKinley STEAM says the strategies are working students aren't reaching for their phones during class"
Why would ANY classroom allow students to "reach for their phones during class"?? And we wonder why children have zero attention spans?
I am 100% behind trying to make classes more interesting, more interactive, more engaging, more varied in approach. Not all children learn or engage in the same way. But discipline has to play a major role as well. Allowing students to be disrespectful, disruptive, or distracted has to be a hard no. And students using phones during class is outrageous.
Re: Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Collect them in a bin/cubbies at the start of class or require them to be put in a closed compartment under their seat, and problem solved - you can satisfy the no-risk-assesment-skills kobs panicking that they won't be able to reach their children on the miniscule chance that there is a school shooting without permanently wrecking the quality of the kids' education.
If kids take the phone out during class time, send them to the principal's/give them detention (again, with no phone access) just like you would for any other major class disruption.
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The impression I get is that many districts have difficulties implementing such policies because helicopter parents panic at the thought of not being able to immediately communicate with their children.
Too, as kids get older, they get cleverer about concealing phones or providing decoys.
Re: Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite frankly, a large part of class needs to be the opposite of entertaining. "Boring!" It is our job to keep it that way. A lot of kids understand this and are willing to go through this. Bless them! You actually have to get them to wind down from the "entertain us!" mode before you can teach.
I teach math, old school. Chalk board, students make their own notes. Taking notes, very boring! It depends from year to year, but occasionally I have a class that detests that. I sell it as a way to concentrate on boring stuff. Kids know their attention span is short. They appreciate it if you tell them why you do it that way and that you are trying to help. Entertain them? Yes! Colorful glitter pens, artistic lines below titles with marker pens, find your own abbreviations,
In math, the boredom is needed, I noticed. Kids think they are stupid. They look at a question and the answer does not magically pop up in their heads. "I am stupid, I have a blackout,
I could go on for a few paragraphs. But I notice that my preachings are having effect. Everyone is getting bored. Good! No worries, you'll live.
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that's spot on. Now if we could only get the AI crack addicts to understand that. The AI crack dealers already do and they know damn well the effect it will have. They don't care as long as their get their money NOW, not tomorrow, NOW, tomorrow is too long, NOW, NOW, NOW!!
Working math problems is intellectually hard if you treat it as a chore rather than an opportunity to explore an abstract landscape. Most people are too uneducated to realize a math problem exists in a landscape. If you learn the landscape
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You can curtail classroom screen time all you want. As soon as the knee biters leave school, they are going to be on their personal gratification devices. At home, it will be similar. When the finally conk out for sleep, and wake up, it will be back on their devices again.
Some kids do not have responsible parents, some kids have no parents. Turning to parents not a solution.
And eventually we will all inherit this uneducated lot after they turn 18 and have the attention span and intellectual level of a gnat.
The headline says "fight" (Score:5, Insightful)
But the rest of the comment implies surrender
Instead of teaching concentration and focus, teachers are dumbing down the class to feed the students what they want
"a kindergarten classroom" ??? (Score:2)
Re:"a kindergarten classroom" ??? (Score:4, Informative)
This is called "Slashdot Editors Not Doing Their Jobs." Another example is the story headline: "How Teachers Fight Students' Shortening Attention Spans *(missing a : here)* Shorter Activities, Hands-On Projects, and Meditation."
I don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
I promise this old man diatribe has a point...
There were no smart phones when I was a kid. They were about a decade away from being mainstream consumer devices when I graduated high school. If you wanted to know something, you went to the library and looked it up (which almost nobody did!). If it wasn't taught in school, shown on TV, or told to you by your parents, it didn't exist.
We still managed to be distracted and bored in class, we just didn't have as many options for dealing with it and ended up p
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A connected smartphone is an awesome brain augmentation device if used correctly - to look up things in the moment you want to know them.
The key phrase is "if used correctly." Part of that is knowing when to look something up "in the moment you want to know them," and when looking up a particular thing can wait until later. Too often I see searches being made for answers to questions that don't warrant an immediate answer, interrupting the ongoing conversation or activity, or even diverting the whole train of thought onto a dead-end side spur completely unrelated to the original topic.
If it's germane to the present topic, then sure, look i
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Those are very good points. I would add that looking up things online results in the atrophy of other skills and behaviours, such as going to a library to research stuff, going to a book store and buying a book, or even asking a friend you may not have spoken with in too long a time. These activities exercise the brain, the body, and social skills in a way that looking stuff up on the internet doesn't and can't.
Also, for myself, the habit of looking things up is a kind of memory crutch that is weakening som
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Also, for myself, the habit of looking things up is a kind of memory crutch that is weakening some cognitive functions. It's so easy to look up the name of a band or an author or an actor which I've forgotten that I tend to not push my memory. Lately though, I'm refusing the bait more and more, and forcing myself to wait until my slowing memory finds the thing its looking for.
Exercise - it's not just for your body any more!
This reminds me of the line from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" when Dr. Jones (the elder one) is asked about something regarding the grail contained in his diary (at that point being in the possession of the Nazis) but he couldn't remember it. When given the scornful "what do you mean you don't remember?" look, his reply is "I wrote it down in my diary so I wouldn't HAVE to remember!"
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
Re: I don't get it (Score:2)
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You didn't pay "marginally" more attention, you paid a lot more attention because you weren't trained to favor continual short dophamine hits from short-form media. You see, it's not just the classroom environment that has changed: the entire cognitive ecology that young people live in (inside and outside school) has been re-shaped.
We are ... (Score:1)
IMO, WTF?
Interesting! (Score:3)
cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging, hands-on projects; and practicing meditation
As an ADHD sufferer, I can't help but recognize these tactics as things that help me and others of my kind.
Could it really be that living life online creates autism spectrum disorders, at least temporarily? I'm shocked!
The conspiracy theorist in me imagines that the elites know this, and are pushing internet addiction because it weakens the population's defenses against propaganda and gaslighting. But nah, they'd never do such a thing. Right?
Teach them coding .. (Score:1)
short attention span. (Score:1)
"The new word is 'edutainment'" (Score:4)
"The new word is 'edutainment'"
This is a new word? It dates back to at least the 1930s.
And in the 1990s, it was a mandate for television funding. This lead to the awesomeness of things like Bill Nye.
Seriously, you want to keep students attention? Just roll in the big fucking CRT from the closet with the VHS player on a shelf below it, throw on some Bill Nye or Myth Busters, and you'll get em all hooked instantly. This isn't hyperbole, this is tried and true. Anyone of a certain age will have endless fond stories of this experience.
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A focus on doing stuff is good but most-times it's expensive, or it interferes with someone's idea of morality, and the whole school has to obey the rules of one "karen" (Eg. condoms in sex ed. class, frog dissection, 'adult' activities in novels). Children aren't experienc
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Don't forget School House Rock!
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Bah. Just put on old Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, Mathnet, etc. /s
Meditation (Score:2)
When reading this I kept hearing medication rather than meditation.
Or just make the content interesting (Score:3)
I mean, really? Why hasn't anyone figured out that most of standard school is boring as all get-out? Who the hell wants to read what some bozo thinks is "important" literature? The only thing I learned from reading multiple Dickens books is that he got paid by the word. And who the hell wants to theorize about science? Say what you want about Elon Musk but he's 100% correct about this. Why take an entire semester class about wrenches and screwdrivers when you'll learn far more by taking and engine apart?
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The school can't afford to give each child an engine.
Disassembly is mostly busy work and while it keeps the mind busy, it explains very little. Dismantling an engine is a great project but much of that time is learning about the tools and the disassembly process, not about the engine,
"75% of teachers said attention spans had dropped" (Score:3)
Go back to books like other countries... (Score:2)
I think I see part of the issue (Score:2)
"Imagine you're in the Arctic, a voice **from a meditation video** tells them, "
Anyone else see it?
How teachers fight students (Score:2)