As teachers, we have all asked this urgent question: "Why don’t my students pay attention?" Research from psychology and neuroscience suggests a surprising answer: we’re starting with the wrong question.

Rather than thinking of attention as one thing, we should instead consider its three sub-processes – alertness, orienting, and executive attention. Led by Michael Posner and other researchers, we should now think of attention, not as a unified mental process, but rather as a complex behavior with those three sub-processes.

With that three-part framework in mind, we can refocus our classroom work on practical goals based on those sub-processes. How can we moderate students’ alertness? How can we help them orient to the correct stimuli? How can we promote executive attention? These fresh questions easily lead to effective teaching strategies. By shifting our focus away from attention to the complex behavior behind attention, we paradoxically find powerful ways to foster attention.

This lively and interactive online seminar will begin with the research, and will include breakout discussions, and concludes with practical strategies that make learning easier and teaching more effective.