This post presents the classroom as an “attention gym,” where learning requires effort, practice, and mutual encouragement. It argues that vocation and education should be understood communally rather than individually. By using interactive classroom activities, including learning each other’s names, rotating one-on-one conversations, personalized peer feedback, changing groups, and attentive discussion, teachers can foster friendships, collaboration, and students’ ability to support one another.
A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.
Last spring, two of my students told me about a conversation they had with a friend who was in a different section of first-year writing. Their friend was aghast at the amount of time they were spending on reading and writing in my class and felt that he was able to get by in a different section of the same course by putting in less effort. One of my students told him, “Dude, that’s like going to the gym and sitting on the floor and just looking at the weights.” His classmate chimed in, “Yeah, we’d never let each other phone it in like that.”
I love this story because it means that my metaphor for class as an attention gym had stuck with these two young men: they saw our class as a kind of workout, one that stretched and challenged them to get stronger.
This post discusses enhancing students’ listening abilities through class discussions, emphasizing the contrast between dialogue and conversations that function more as disconnected monologues. It advocates for viewing the classroom as an “attention gym” to strengthen active listening skills, essential for vocational discernment. The text also highlights practices to promote a culture of attentive listening among students.
A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.
When I talk with students about the purposes of class discussion, I often show them the dinner scene from my favorite Sandra Bullock film, While You Were Sleeping. I ask them to describe what they observe about the quality of the conversation happening around the dinner table, and especially to note who seems to be listening. This scene helps us distinguish between dialogue, a method of building on each other’s ideas, and conversation that proceeds more like a set of disconnected monologues (however humorous).
Students often zero in on a key difference between the two. They note that in a dialogue, participants actively listen to understand each other. In the other kind of discussion, people listen for a break in the conversation to make space for their own voice.
It is easy to make the case to students that listening is hard, and as a culture, we are not very good at it. It is harder to explain how we can get better at it. Naming the classroom an attention gym—as I described in my first post in this series—provides the framework to highlight attention as a key resource in becoming a better listener. Class discussions then become the training ground for workouts in listening.
This post discusses the importance of learning how to pay attention for undergraduate students, highlighting its decline in today’s digital age. It emphasizes fostering students’ attentiveness through classroom practices, framing the learning environment as an “attention gym” or a workout for the mind. Through various exercises, assignments, and reflections educators can help students reclaim focus and develop essential skills for vocational discernment.
A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.
Fred Rogers
In a 2022 Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, Adelia Moore recounts her experience in the 1970s as a one-time guest on an episode of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and her subsequent friendship with him. In addition to his “gentleness, kindness, and empathy,” she describes the most magnetic and distinctive part of Mr. Rogers’ persona as his attentiveness, claiming that the character trait that made him such a powerful figure was “his capacity to pay attention.” This capacity, she laments, has become increasingly rare in today’s world.
Attention as a necessary and threatened resource has been on the minds of many (if not all) of us in higher education for a long time, especially those of us who think about undergraduate education in vocational terms. For obvious reasons, that concern intensified during and after the pandemic: on this blog in 2021, Jason Stevens argued that attention may be the resource most under threat in our current moment. In the last decade, several books—by authors like Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Chris Hayes—attest to this ongoing and worsening threat. Jonathan Haidt, author of the widely read The Anxious Generation, has recently said that he increasingly sees the assault on children’s attention as on par with the mental health consequences he attributes to children’s smartphone use.
My contention is that, in order to help students develop their attentive faculties, we must not only help them see the problem clearly (which so many of them are already acutely aware of); we also need to give them active ways of reclaiming and strengthening their capacity for sustained focus. One way to do that is to name the classroom an attention gym—a space where a key goal is to develop the muscles we need to become more attentive people.
