Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It Webinar

Faculty and staff frequently express concerns about the distractions and distractibility of our students, but our real focus should be on how we help students achieve attention. This session draws upon scholarship from history, neuroscience, and education in order to argue that distractions are endemic to the human condition and can’t be walled out of the physical classroom or online course. Instead, we should focus on creating educational experiences that cultivate and sustain attention. Participants will learn about a variety of potential pathways to developing such experiences for their students.

Our Presenter

James M. Lang is a former Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Worcester, MA. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016) and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013), and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching (Harvard UP, 2008).