1. Encouragement: The action of giving support, confidence, or hope to someone.

2. Mindful: Conscious or aware of something; focusing one’s awareness on the present moment.

3. Intersperse: Scatter among or between other things; place at intervals.

4. Ad Free: Without advertising; not containing promotional content.

5. Boost Visibility: Increase the likelihood of being noticed or discovered by a larger audience.

6. Secular: Not connected with religious or spiritual matters; relating to worldly things.

7. Nonattachment: The state of not being attached or excessively focused on material possessions or specific outcomes.

8. Down Regulated: Reduced in intensity or activity; a decrease in a physiological response.

9. Immersive: Providing a deeply engaging or absorbing experience.

10. Cocoon: A protective covering or structure, often metaphorical, that envelops and shields.

11. Lovingkindness: A sincere and benevolent attitude or action expressing goodwill and affection.

12. Radiant: Emitting a bright light or shining with joy, love, or health.

13. Compassion: Sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress, with a desire to alleviate it.

14. Transcending: Going beyond or surpassing; rising above limitations.

15. Nonattachment: The state of being free from attachment, especially to outcomes or possessions.

16. Nonjudgment: The practice of refraining from forming opinions or evaluations based on personal beliefs.

17. Vantage Point: A position or standpoint offering a clear view or understanding, often metaphorical.

18. Surrender: The act of giving up control or resisting; accepting what is without resistance.

19. Resilience: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

20. Serenity: The state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled.

welcome to episode 289 of Angela Watson’s Truth for teachers. I’m your host, Angela Watson, and I’m here to speak encouragement into the hearts of educators and get you informed and energized for the week ahead. Today I’m offering a practical guide to building students attention stamina. Visit truthforteachers.com for an easy to read, easy to share version of this podcast episode. Did you hear that? I’ve started another podcast. It’s called the Truth for Teachers Daily Encouragement podcast, with new episodes dropping each day from Monday to Friday. Every episode is just three to five minutes long, so it’s perfect to listen when you first wake up to start your day on a positive note, or listen during your commute to school to ease into school mode. You could listen on your break to reenergize yourself in the afternoon, or listen after dismissal to ground calm and recenter when the day is done. The Truth for Teachers Daily Encouragement podcast is ad free and exclusive to subscribers for 399 a month. Click the link in the show notes to sign up. I hope this will be an easy, fun way for you to hear some positive words spoken into your heart and mind on a daily basis so you can keep showing up as the best version of yourself. Thank you for supporting me and for supporting my work. So we’re talking today about attention spans, and I want to start by thinking about us, right? Because who we are as people and how we show up in the schools is all impacted by our own habits and our own practices. So I’m wondering, how long can you read a book without getting distracted? I was a really avid reader when I was younger, and I could just lose myself in books for hours. Now, after just a page or two, I find that my brain is sort of itching for a distraction, for a link to click, for a comment section, to hop over to just more stimulation. I wonder, do you swipe through TikToks or reels before they’re over because you’re impatient? That’s a habit that I’ve noticed for me too. Like, here’s this video that’s only 30 seconds long and still. I’m going to scrub over to the right and fast forward a little bit because they’re not getting to the point fast enough. Maybe you’ve noticed that in yourself too. Or maybe you find it hard to just stream a tv show or a movie without also looking at your phone or having another device out at the same time. This is a really tough one for me as well. I find myself actually like reaching for something more engaging. If I’m just passively watching a movie or a tv show, I want to have something else to do at the same time. So the shortened attention span problem isn’t something that is unique to Gen Z. It’s something that I think almost all of us as adults, even in modern western culture, have been impacted by. And there are good reasons for that. I want you to imagine a scenario for a second. Imagine a life in which you don’t have a smartphone, a tablet, a computer, or a tv. There’s no Internet or social media, no text messaging, no video games, no streaming. Imagine also not having any device for making phone calls to people. And since you can’t text, this means you can only send letters through the mail. Imagine not having a radio or any other way to play recorded music. Imagine having no books, no newspapers, no magazines, nothing to read. This is how most humans lived throughout the majority of our time on earth. They had to make their own entertainment, and they communicated regularly with just the people in their own small local area. It’s likely that you and I encounter more information and entertainment in a single day than many of our ancestors did just a few generations back in their entire lifetimes. Can you picture someone who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago trying to make sense of our modern world? Envision them experiencing life in a city street with loud traffic noises, cell phones ringing, videos playing from screens in restaurants, gas stations, billboards, hundreds of strangers all around them. They would probably have a hard time focusing on any one thing due to the amount of stimulus that’s competing for their attention. They wouldn’t know where to look or what to listen to or what was most important to pay attention to. And they would likely feel overwhelmed by having so many decisions to make about what to focus on. Our modern human brains aren’t that much different from those of our ancient ancestors. Our brains were wired for a much quieter and less stimulating world. When your senses are completely overloaded with information, it’s extremely difficult to fully process all of the information you’re receiving. And though it may seem like everyone around us is handling this bright, noisy, overstimulating environment just fine, the truth is that almost all of us are having trouble focusing and paying attention to the things that we want to be paying attention to for the amount of time that we want to be paying attention to them. In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986. So that span right there from 1986 to 2011, five times as much information they’ve taken in so the increase has happened very quickly over the course of just a few decades. That’s not long at all in the span of human history. And we know how much it’s increased since 2011, right? Think about all the information we have around us. Did you know more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? It would take more than 200 million hour to watch everything on YouTube. Way more than we could possibly consume in a lifetime, even if we watched every minute of every day that we’re alive. So what does all this mean? Well, the more information and entertainment we have, the more demands we have on our attention. And I think we can all agree we have more information and more entertainment options surrounding us probably now more than any other time in human history, right? So this means more demands on our attention. More information to consume means that we don’t have enough time, energy, or focus to consume all of it. There’s not enough, even over the course of our entire lifetimes, to consume all of it. If you only had one movie to watch, every single month, there was just one show, one movie, your attention wouldn’t be nearly as hard to focus, right? Because you would just have that one thing. You wouldn’t have other choices, you wouldn’t have other distractions, you wouldn’t be clicking around to see what else you could be watching. You would just have that one thing. So it’s no wonder that with all of the different options and all of the different things trying to grab our attention online, that it feels like people’s attention spans are getting shorter. I think part of it is that it just seems that way. And there is some research to back up the fact that our attention spans are indeed shorter than they were decades ago. But regardless, the majority of us are finding it takes a lot of effort to focus our attention and concentrate on tasks. And we know how important that is, even though it’s harder, right? If we need to be able to focus and concentrate in order to thrive in our world, and yet, most people can’t do it easily and find it uncomfortable and resist trying. That means that focusing your attention becomes like a superpower. Knowing how to focus and concentrate is a skill that will help young people get better grades. It will set them and us apart in our chosen career paths. It will help us achieve any goals that we set our minds on, from improving in a sport or a hobby, to learning or researching more about a topic that interests us. Concentration is a superpower skill set that fewer and fewer people seem to possess. You and your students can be the exception. Together you can train your brains to focus attention wherever you’d like and build your concentration stamina. Now, everything that I’ve shared with you so far and everything that I’ll share throughout this episode is taken directly from my new curriculum line, which is called findingflow solutions@findingflowsolutions.com. So this curriculum is designed to explain all All of these concepts to young people in really relevant, easy to understand ways so that they can manage their time, energy, and attention. These are essential skills for success, not only in school, but in life. And I called it finding flow solutions because the goal is to stop forcing ourselves and our students to just buckle down, get it done, be productive, and to instead find a state of flow whenever possible. This flow state, which was first termed that by researcher Mihai Cheeksen Mihai, is when a person is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus. They’re completely involved in what they’re doing, and they’re enjoying the process. I want to make it simple for you to introduce these ideas to your students. I’m providing a ready to use slideshow in the curriculum that guides you through every element of the lesson so students hear exactly what you’re hearing in this podcast. There’s also student journal pages so kids can reflect on how these practices fit with their personalities, their preferences, their goals. Since we all need more intentionality in these areas, the idea is for teachers and students to experiment together with strategies for things like building concentration, stamina. So let’s get into it and talk about how to focus your attention and what to do when your mind wanders. When we talk about stamina for concentration, we’re referring to endurance, to the physical or mental capacity to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity. A flow state makes it easier to do that. When you’re in a flow state, your attention is focused on the thing that you want it to be focused on, and that requires being in control of your attention. So I like to teach students to think of focused attention like a flashlight. There’s many different objects in the room, but wherever you shine the flashlight is where the light is focused. Many times, our flashlight of attention feels like it’s swinging all over the place. It’s moving from the task at hand to our phones, to the noise in the hallway, to the person next to us, and so on. It’s more like swing lights on a concert stage than it is like a flashlight. Learning to focus your attention is like learning to control the direction of the flashlight. It’s choosing which things to illuminate, to light up, to bring attention to, and which to leave in relative darkness. Directing your attention requires control, and that requires practice. The more that you practice shining that flashlight of your attention in one spot and holding the flashlight there, the easier it becomes to do it again. So we can introduce this imagery to students and teach specific strategies for what to do when they’re trying to focus their attention and the mind wanders. So the approach that I teach is this, first notice that it’s happening. That’s a good thing. If you notice that your mind is wandering. Sometimes we’re not even aware of the fact that we’re not thinking about what we meant to be thinking about. So just notice, then observe, but don’t judge. Critical thoughts might pass through your mind, but don’t focus on them. There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re getting distracted, so just notice that it’s happening. Observe what’s happening, don’t judge yourself, and then bring your thought back to the thing you want to be focused on. And you can repeat that process as many times as necessary. Notice that your mind wandered. Observe it. Say, oh, I started looking out the window, wasn’t paying attention. I’m going to come back. I’m going to bring my thoughts back to the thing I want to focus on. So we can practice this with students and teach them that if they find themselves struggling to refocus more often than usual, if they’re constantly noticing that their attention is wandering, that might be a sign they need to take a break and try again a little later. So this observation process of being aware of where your mind is focused is super important. It’s the most important step to really taking charge of where your attention is focused. Over time, you can build concentration stamina. It’s a little bit like training for a marathon where it takes time and effort. You wouldn’t expect yourself to just go run a marathon without practice, right? So don’t expect your focus power to just skyrocket overnight. Be patient with yourself and celebrate those small victories along the way. So that’s a process for focusing your attention, teaching kids what that means, what it looks like, and what to do when your mind wanders. Let’s talk next about how to practice concentrating and focusing your attention. In elementary classrooms, it’s pretty common for teachers to introduce the term reading stamina and teach students how to build that. So we teach young readers what real reading is versus pretend reading, and we teach the specific behaviors that are involved when you’re focused on a book so students know exactly what reading looks like, what does it sound like, what does it feel like? We teach students over time how to increase the amount of energy and the concentration that is needed in order to focus on reading. That’s what’s meant by reading stamina. With emergent readers, it might just be for five minutes, and they’re working up to maybe ten or 15 minutes by third grade students are often expected to have the stamina to read continuously for 30 minutes. So this is a process that if you teach secondary students, they may have already been exposed to this in the concept of reading in elementary school. And this is something that can be taught to students. There’s tons of research to back it up, and I can tell you, even from my own classroom experience, it works. It’s definitely something that students are interested in, and they feel really excited about noticing that it becomes easier to read for a longer period of time as they practice. Well, we can apply these same practices and principles to concentration stamina in general. So the ability to focus your attention and direct your energy toward a particular topic or task for a sustained period of time, whether it’s reading stamina or just concentration stamina, this is what we’re talking about, directing your focus and energy toward this particular task and sustaining it. We can teach students the exact steps to follow and clarify exactly what focused attention looks like and practice doing it. The process that I use in my foundations of flow unit has five steps. Now, foundations of Flow is a unit that I’ve created a middle school version of and a high school version of, and it’s free. So if you like what you’re hearing, you can go download that and get it. Use it with your students. You’ll have the slides that teach them all of this, the student journal pages, everything. So these are the five steps in practicing concentrating and focusing with your students. The first is to eliminate distractions. Get comfortable in a quiet place, have devices silenced, then get clear on the task. Figure out what needs to be done in your next steps. Visualize the outcome. Picture the results and how you’ll feel when the task is done. Set a timer for 20 to 45 minutes. Give yourself a reasonable time period to get in and stay in flow and focus your attention. Start with what feels easier and build on that until you get into the flow. So you show these five steps to students in the slideshow, and you talk about how it can look in the classroom. And then you give students multiple opportunities to practice it. So instead of just giving an assignment and telling students you have 20 minutes to complete it, explicitly review these five steps first, and that really sets a much more intentional tone for focus. Once they’ve been introduced to this, it won’t take hardly any time at all. We’re talking about 30 to 60 seconds out of your class time. And if you can get kids to actually focus on the assignment afterwards, it’s more than worth it. So show that first step which is eliminate distractions. Talk about getting comfortable, being in a quiet place, having your devices silenced, and say, we’re going to get all our materials together now, everything that we need for this assignment, let’s get it together. Let’s get in the spot in the classroom that we’re going to be working, get everybody settled, then help students get clear on the task. That’s step two. Figure out what needs to be done and your next steps. So you might say, now that we’ve tried to remove our distractions, let’s familiarize ourselves with what needs to be done. Let’s look over the directions. We may review where we left off. We may figure out what needs to happen next. Give specifics that are related to the task. Kids They’re doing. We want them to know the starting point, what’s the first thing that they need to do, and then kind of get them mentally trained to be thinking about that step. Once students are clear on the task, remind them of the third step, which is to visualize the outcome. Picture the results. Picture how you’ll feel when the task is done. So that might sound something like this. When I’m done, I will have a complete did blank or I’ll be finished with blank. It is going to feel amazing to know that I have that part accomplished because it requires a lot of concentration. I’ll be able to do the easier and the more fun steps afterward. So you’re sort of getting them to feel that sense of satisfaction and to imagine what done looks like. Make sure you and your students are on the same page about what the completed assignment actually means. You’re then ready for step four, which is incredibly powerful. That’s the set a timer step. I like the digital kind that shows a countdown so students know exactly how much time they’re given and how much time is left anytime they glance up in the finding flow slideshows, I always embed these timers for any tasks that students are working on. When you’re helping students practice building attention stamina, you want to set that timer for a short amount of time. So for secondary students, maybe just 15 minutes. You want all your students to experience success the first time. If they try this initially and it’s just way too long and they have to keep redirecting their attention over and over again, they’re going to get frustrated and think that it’s not going to work for them. So keep it short to start with, and then maybe the second and third times you try this, increase the time period slightly. Ideally, you want students to have a long enough time period to get and stay in a state of flow. 25 minutes is usually good. Explain to students how long they’ll be expected to concentrate and set the timer. That part is really, really important. This is not going to go on forever. This is not the entire class period. It’s this very defined set of minutes that we’re going to focus our attention. Students are then ready for that fifth and final step, which is focusing your attention. So say to the class, I’m going to envision my attention like a flashlight. I’m going to shine it directly onto the task. I’m going to try to stay focused on the task for the whole time period that this timer is running, when I feel stuck, when it gets too hard, I’m going to skip around to some other part of the task that feels easier. Then I can experience some success, and I’ll come back to the harder stuff. But I’m going to stay focused on this for the entire 1520 minutes, however long the timer is set. So give students a chance to do this. You can walk around, you can support them as needed, but really try to let them grapple with this a little bit. It may be a struggle, and that’s good. We want students to be able to struggle, to be uncomfortable, to maybe feel bored, to maybe want to procrastinate on something and have to learn how to push through it. So don’t be afraid to let them experience that. And then afterward, when the timer goes off, debrief. What did students do when their mind wandered? What did they notice? How often did that happen? How did they push through the need for distractions and breaks? So you want to really normalize the fact that the brain is going to want to think about other things. The brain is going to be looking for something more interesting. It’s going to be craving a distraction, especially when we first try doing this. If we’re used to constantly just flipping to the next TikTok, it’s going to be really difficult at first to concentrate. That’s normal. So we want to normalize it, and we want to talk about strategies that work. We want students to build a toolbox of ideas they can choose from so they know, okay, when I can’t concentrate, I can try this, I can try this, I can try this. And then they can pick and choose according to how they feel in that moment. So during this debriefing, remind students that focusing means to put your undivided attention on the task, and anytime your mind wanders, that is okay. Notice, observe, but don’t judge, and bring your attention back to the task. Imagine that flashlight swinging all around, and you just bring it back to your assignment. It’s also helpful sometimes to tell kids that the first ten minutes of concentrating is usually the hardest, and if you can just push through, keep going for those first ten minutes, you’ll often wind up in a state of flow in which you’re totally immersed in what you’re doing. Now, the final piece here is about alternating periods of deep concentration and more shallow work. Because there is a limit to how long a person can concentrate, it’s not like you can just follow these five steps and then concentrate all day long. I shared in episode 287 about why Bell to Bell instruction is not best practice that I think we’re really setting kids up for failure by expecting them to focus for five plus hours a day in school and then additional hours in the evenings for homework. Most humans cannot do their best focus work for more than 3 hours total a day. For young people, that limit’s even shorter. I mean, if you think about the when you have time to work on something that you really care about, or maybe you’re planning units or you’re assessing something and you’re deeply involved in the process, if you can get three good hours out of yourself that day, that’s a lot, right? Like most people are not able to do more than that. Now, fortunately, deep concentration and highly focused tasks are not the only things that we need to get done in a day. So we can be intentional about where to place that limited amount of focused attention based on identifying shallow work versus deep work. And we can carve out time for both. So, shallow and deep work are concepts that originated from a professor and author named Cal Newport. He introduced this idea of shallow work being the types of tasks that don’t need a lot of brain power. So shallow work is replying to emails, it’s scrolling through social media, it’s entering data into a computer. It’s something where, yeah, you do need to be paying attention to it, but it’s not something that requires your brain to be all in. For students, shallow work might be something like putting the heading on your paper, or creating the Google Doc, or finding the assignment online. It might be reviewing an assignment one last time and then submitting it. So it’s something that doesn’t really require you to concentrate super hard. Deep work, on the other hand, is a type of task where you have to focus your thinking to solve problems or to create something new. For students, this might mean finishing a school project, writing an essay. Any kind of writing is almost always deep work. Explaining their thinking in math, conducting a science experiment, or designing an experiment, studying for challenging tests. These are all deep work. Your brain has to go all in. So shallow work is necessary. I mean, we do need to check and respond to email, for example. And shallow work can serve as a really important break for our brains. From concentrating deeply, we can move out of that deep work and do some shallow work for a while. After, let’s say a 25 minutes deep work period, take a five minute break, and during that break, have some movement, stretching, breathing, daydreaming, gazing out the window or going outside, socializing, whatever you and your students need. Do that focused work. Take a five minute break, and then you can decide whether you have the concentration stamina that day to do another deep work period of focused attention, or if you want to shift into a more shallow work task, maybe the kids are like, okay, that’s enough. I did mine 20 minutes. I had my break, and we have 15 minutes left in the class period. So let’s use that for a more shallow task, like reviewing the answers to a quiz or having a group discussion or playing a learning game. When you’re alternating between tasks that require a lot of concentration and tasks that allow for some distraction, some conversation, some movement, just a little less focus. Right? When you alternate those two types of tasks, that can really help make the most of your limited time with students. And when you explain your rationale, you explain the strategy to students and tell them what you’re doing that we’re going to do deep work now for 25 minutes. We’re going to take a five minute break, and then we’ll do more shallow tasks for the rest of the day that can really help them take the focused work more seriously. They know it’s okay to play around a little bit and joke with friends during the review game or whatever, but when it’s time for deep work and we’re building our concentrate stamina, we’re building that skill. We are really going all in mentally and with our energetically. We’re focusing all of our energy and attention on the task at hand. It’s for a short and very well defined Time period, something that is developmentally appropriate, and then we’re taking a break. Now, many students resist deep work and concentration at first, so you should expect that they’re resisting it because it’s difficult, right? Like, we always want to default to what’s easiest. That’s just what it is to be human, right? But deep work brings incredible gratification, and I believe it’s worth training our students to not only engage in deep work and focusing their attention, but to love it. Deep work is what really helps us achieve our goals. The most important things that we accomplish in school, in our careers, in our passions and hobbies, in our creative work, all of the most important things tend to require deep thinking. We have to be able to think deeply to produce the outcome that we want. And if we’re distracted by the shallow work, then we never get to solve the big problems and do the big stuff that really matters. Shallow work can be a way we procrastinate. Have you ever sat down to try to get something done for school and then found yourself organizing your digital files? Or, like, searching for just the right image to embed instead of writing what you needed to write? That’s because dragging files around on your desktop and looking for images online is shallow work. It doesn’t require nearly as much concentration as researching and writing, which is deep work. And yet, because the shallow work tasks do serve a purpose, we feel productive. We feel like we’re getting important things done. And this is how many people get stuck in the shallows. They never move out into the deep to do their best thinking and concentrating because staying in the shallows is easier and there’s always something to be done there. If you spend too much time going from one shallow task to the next, you actually reduce your capacity for deep work. It becomes harder to entice your brain to go out into the deep when it’s used to hanging around the shallows. Cal Newport teaches that life requires us to do both deep and shallow work, and they’re both necessary. We just have to make sure the shallow work doesn’t fill up all our time, so we never get to the deep work. Most people in our society are busy, but they’re rarely doing much deep work or deep thinking. If you’re able to harness your brain in this way, you will be a standout in life because you’ve trained your brain to do deep work instead of staying only in the shallows. Now, if you want to introduce these ideas to your students, check out findingflowsolutions.com. There’s a free unit on foundations of flow that has the complete slideshow and student journal pages. There’s a version for teenagers, and there’s one for preteens. I have some elementary resources that are coming out in early 2024, so try out that free unit on foundations of flow with your students and see how they respond. If it’s helpful for them, then you or your school can purchase individual units about time management, energy management, attention management, self directed learning, and so on. Or you can get the complete bundle of all six units for your students age group. All of the bundles are discounted right now so you can get the lowest price. And everyone who has purchased the complete bundle of six units will be invited to several live online workshops that I’m going to be conducting in 2024. These trainings will be free and are designed to help secondary teachers use these resources in their classroom and support students in productivity practices. I think it’s difficult to predict anything about the future these days, but I truly believe that the ability to do deep work and have concentration stamina will be a superpower that few people possess, but that is desperately needed in every aspect of our world. The ability to manage one’s focused attention, time and energy levels will become even more of a superpower when so much is distracting us and competing for our attention. We need deep thinkers. We need critical thinkers. We need problem solvers. We need folks who can stick with difficult issues and overwhelming challenges for long periods of time until forward progress is made. And there are students in your classroom who are not only capable of this kind of thinking right now, but who can grow and develop these abilities over time and change the world. You can support them in this and grow in these areas yourself to achieve your own vision, to create your own change, to live out your own legacy. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be worth it. Close.