I recently had a thought-provoking exchange with an early career teacher who said - and I’ve heard this before: “As adults, we’ll always stop what we’re in the middle of for a little chat about our weekend, or about our children, or something else. Why can’t children have this kind of quick, quiet chat while they work?”
It sounds so reasonable. So, why would I say that children absolutely cannot have a quiet chat while they work in your classroom?
Why can’t children multitask?
First of all, it isn’t entirely clear that even adults can have such quiet, off-task chats without their performance suffering. Study after study has shown that multitasking is a myth, as much as we’d like to believe we’re able to plan our lessons at the same time as sympathising over our colleague’s barbecue disaster.
Back in 2010, the Harvard Business Review reported that task-switching lowers efficiency by as much as 40 per cent, and that “it takes an average of 15 minutes to reorient to a primary task after a distraction”.
This price on performance is usually worth paying for adults. Building relationships is key in the workplace, and starting meetings by asking about someone’s weekend or children or pets is an investment in that relationship.
Furthermore, adults, unlike children, are usually experts. Unless you’ve just started a brand new career, you usually know quite a lot about what you’re doing. Although task-switching will slow you down, it probably won’t derail you completely.
Teachers, though, are even more expert in their subject domains. It is hard not to bring this expertise with us into the classroom. You might look at your pupils and think: they’re just doing basic maths or a simple comprehension - they can surely have a chat at the same time?
But something you’d take minimal effort to complete is a different story for your pupils. Remembering how little pupils know is really important to being able to support their learning. Pupils need to focus far more to be able to tackle the things they aren’t yet experts in - which is, usually, most of the curriculum.
The ‘motivation problem’
This lack of expertise is coupled with the motivation problem. It’s really hard to be motivated to do difficult things, and doubly so for young people. As adults, we might struggle with motivation at times, but we can generally push through on the important stuff because our salaries and livelihoods depend on it.
The children in our classrooms, on the other hand, have no such incentives. Why should a Year 7 focus on maths? Maths probably feels hard compared to chatting to a friend. And what’s at risk if they don’t do the maths? That in five years’ time they might not do as well in an exam?
Children are still developing, and that includes their ability to persevere when times are tough. Over time, they will develop the ability to invest in their own futures, rather than living in the moment, but that normally comes later.
Coupled with this developmental challenge is the increasing rise of the smartphone and its suspected impacts on pupil attention spans.
In his 2022 book, Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging, Doug Lemov notes: “The brain rewires itself constantly based on how it functions...The more time young people spend in constant half-attentive task switching, the harder it becomes for them to maintain the capacity for sustained periods of intense concentration.”
If that is to be believed, it seems that teachers could be up against a teenage brain that resists focus more than ever.
So, what can we do about it? My advice boils down to three key points:
- Be mindful of how challenging pupils are likely to find sustaining their focus on a single task and set them up for success by not allowing them to divert their attention, such as by having a quiet chat.
- Build up their stamina for focus, so they move from five to 10 to 30 or more minutes of independent, silent work: a state where they will be able to learn and understand more deeply and be prepared for the lengthy exams of their later teenage years.
- Most of all, don’t worry about children not being able to have a quick chat - that’s what break and lunchtime are for!
Jo Facer is a former headteacher and the head of the National Professional Qualifications faculty at the National Institute of Teaching
