Like many parents, over the summer holidays we dragged our reluctant children around the UK to take in assorted sites of vaguely educational significance. With cameras at the ready, our soon-to-be culturally enriched offspring set off with an important mission: to “take pictures of anything important”. 

When we came to look at these snaps later it wasn’t quite what we were expecting.  Little did we realise that the photographs would contain such a rich selection of fire extinguishers, health and safety warnings and badly painted radiators from the country’s finest attractions. 

Hundreds of images later, it became clear that either my children’s concept of importance was completely askew or maybe something else was going on here: when tasked with capturing the important facets of these tourist hotspots, it appeared that with little prior knowledge of these places, it was difficult for our children to pick out the salient features from the inane.

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My mind inevitably turned to the classroom: how many of our pupils experience lessons in much the same way?

Attentional control

For example, do we sometimes expect pupils to listen to detailed explanations and then presume they can identify the critical information they must attend to, with little guidance from us?  

We need to recognise that paying attention is not just a case of ensuring that students are listening to the teacher (although, of course, they need to do this, too), but ensuring that students attend to the right stuff in a discerning manner - separating the significant wheat from the inconsequential chaff.

So how might we go about ensuring that children are able to focus their attention on what matters and not waste precious cognitive resources attending to the wrong elements? 

Here are three ideas. 

1. Minimise extraneous information

As psychologist Herbert Simon has said: “Information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  

As attention is a limited resource, removing unnecessary information can help to direct pupils’ attention. It is well understood that if pupils’ working memories are overloaded, it is much harder to transfer knowledge into their long-term memories. 

Perhaps consider cutting out the random tangents, amusing anecdotes and flashy PowerPoint animations when covering the most complex content. 

2. Use graphic and knowledge organisers

A useful way to focus attention on key elements is to use a resource that organises the core knowledge in a coherent way. 

While students might listen to the teacher expound on the structure of volcanoes in geography, the core info is recorded and referenced throughout the lesson on a pre-prepared resource, such as a knowledge organiser. This way, pupils can easily see what is important and what is simply providing richness and context to the learning.  

Similarly, a graphic organiser, such as a labelled diagram, can be a highly efficient way of presenting information and focuses attention deliberately on the content that students are expected to learn.

3. Provide key questions

Setting out a key question to guide attention at the start of a sequence of learning can help students to direct their attention more effectively. If students understand that their learning in history is centred around an enquiry question such as “Did the Romans transform Britain?” they can more easily discriminate between the information they need to attend to and can hopefully discard whatever is inessential in a more informed way. 

Andrew Percival is deputy headteacher at Stanley Road Primary School in Oldham