I don’t know whether it’s correct that teenagers in general have experienced a reduced attention span with every year that’s passed but, in my classroom at least, the length of time a student could concentrate for had become a big issue.

Lessons at our college are one hour at their shortest, but can span up to three. Routinely, learners appeared to become disengaged. And it was the same story for other lecturers.

This had an impact not only on the students’ ability to learn but also on the tutors’ confidence in teaching. So, what did we do to address this problem?

I first chose to speak with the learners about concentration span, and discovered that 80 per cent found concentrating for one hour difficult. They also had a negative attitude towards the three-hour sessions from the start because of their duration. The content and the teaching strategies utilised were not, they said, the issue.

So, what else was going on? In conducting primary and secondary research, I found myself asking a number of questions:

• What is the maximum attention span of a young adult?
• Are learners using their attention span in the most efficient way?
• Are students being aided by tutors to use their attention span in the most efficient way?

Through my research, I identified that the average maximum attention span of a young adult is 18 minutes, with the lowest attention span being four minutes. I considered that tutors may not be considering attention span when developing one- to three-hour lessons and, consequently, may not be utilising the students’ attention spans in the most efficient way within the classroom.

In order to ensure that I was not making assumptions, I surveyed staff within the college and asked them if they were aware of the average attention span. Not one of the tutors were and neither did they consider attention span when planning their delivery.

But how could - and should - this information change the way we teach?

The college had adopted a lesson plan made up of a starter, delivery and then a plenary. That middle section could get very lengthy - wading straight through the 18 minutes and beyond. I felt we needed to keep the lessons moving to different areas so that a student’s focus was switched and the attention span countdown was refreshed.

So, I proposed a new planning structure: starter, content, activity, content and a plenary. I felt it would be beneficial if the activity was unrelated to the core focus of the lesson, but was still educational. I often find it difficult to include numeracy, the Welsh language and creativity into my taught sessions. As such, I decided to centre activities on the development of these skill sets. This “study break” method was outlined by Barbara Oakley in a Tes article last year (“Learn to learn: why we need study breaks”, Tes, 1 April 2019).

When I delivered my proposal to the principal, he was concerned about the activities reducing teaching time. However, once he had read the research on attention span and its impact on retention of knowledge, he was supportive of piloting the model and intrigued as to whether it could be effective in re-engaging learners.

Initially, the plan was to try this out with my second-year groups. I prepared a bank of activities - including origami as well as tasks based on the areas outlined above - specifically for the times that learners appeared disengaged. The 18-minute mark is a general rule; for this to work, I felt that the decision to break to a new focus had to be context dependent, so based on when I spotted that the class was drifting.

Right from the first attempt at this new mode, I found that the learners were interested in the activities and were enjoying completing the tasks. I also found that the activities led to a better rapport between us and that I was identifying different strengths and weaknesses of learners via observation, which allowed me to differentiate lessons more effectively. Most importantly, in terms of my research question, the learners, for the most part, re-engaged with the teaching with increased enthusiasm after the completion of the activity task.

Colleagues in the health and social care department in which I teach soon started asking about the interventions and they began preparing their own activities and rolling them out. These included everything from problem-solving tasks to meditation.

After this was rolled out further, an added benefit emerged: learners were now mindful of their own attention span and would ask for an activity with the view of re-engaging as soon as the activity had ended. This level of personal responsibility has also led to learners identifying tasks themselves and sharing them with me to use within class, as well as asking for an activity as a form of reward for being productive in class.

Inevitably, the rest of the college became interested and I was asked to deliver staff development on attention span. Those who attended responded well to the awareness-raising session, and a number of tutors have contacted me to say that they have found the new planning structure effective within their areas. They have also shared the activities they have utilised.

The intervention is, of course, always evolving. One issue that I faced was students enjoying the activity so much that they struggled to re-engage with the actual lesson. I now consider whether particular activities are best suited for the middle of a session or the end of a session.

I also now offer learners the opportunity to engage in the activity or to continue with their work. For the most part, all learners engage. However, there are occasions when learners are engrossed in their work and choose to remain focused on the task at hand. This has led to a more relaxed atmosphere, as the activities are not enforced.

In the future, I would like to make this research more official. To date, it is being conducted in quite an informal and subjective way. Ideally, the research could be formalised to provide statistical evidence of its effectiveness or ineffectiveness, and thus be used to inform the practice of all of those within the educational field.

Kirsty Williams is health and social care lecturer at Coleg Sir Gâr a Coleg Ceredigion in Carmarthenshire, Wales

This article originally appeared in the 21 February 2020 issue under the headline “A brief intervention to get students’ attention”