pepsmccrea.bsky.social
Keeping you (teachers) informed // Director of Education, Steplab // Author of Evidence Snacks, a weekly 5-min email read by 25k+ teachers → https://snacks.pepsmccrea.com 🎓
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Getting Started
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SUMMARY
• Distractions can incur a surprisingly large cost to learning.
• This is partly due to the aftermath that distractions cause to our attention.
• Challenge and motivation can partly mitigate this effect.
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🎓 For more, check out this article on the mechanics of distractions by Prof. Dan Willingham:
www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-will...
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Keeping our lessons challenging and our students motivated can reduce this aftermath. But it can’t eliminate it totally.
We must also work to systematically reduce distractions.
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In short, distractions leave a wake.
They have an aftermath which means that the learning time they consume can be significantly more than the duration of the distraction itself.
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(Think about our own behaviour... a simple 'ding' from our phone takes less than a second, but we can lose hours of our life in the aftermath)
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When you finally corral them back to the fractions, and they get back to where they were in their thinking, many more seconds, perhaps even minutes, may have passed.
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In this moment, several of your students shift their attention. They drop their train of thought about fractions. And now they’re more prone to shifting their attention elsewhere, to a peer, to thoughts of lunch, or out the window.
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Humans are curious. We are built to pay attention to changes in our environment. If someone pops into your classroom, it's hard for your students to ignore it, no matter how discreet.
(look out for this next time it happens)
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When they arrive, your students are practising adding fractions. They are concentrating hard because this stuff is new and challenging and there are multiple things they need to keep in mind to be successful.
But...
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Say a teacher pops into your lesson to talk to one of your students. They come in discreetly, pass on the message quietly, and depart immediately.
The whole thing lasts 15 seconds. A trivial amount of time.
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How so much?!
To answer that question, we need to look at the mechanics of distractions.
Let's consider an example...
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Distractions eat attention, and their appetite is BIG.
Some estimates suggest that, on average, schools may be losing 1/3 of learning time to distractions.
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Have scheduled to read :)
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Okay wow, that's big!
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SUMMARY
• The classroom is a distraction-rich environment, the costs of which are often more than we think.
• Eliminating all distractions could improve learning by over 50%.
• Leaders tend to underestimate this effect even more.
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🎓 For more, check out this study on the cost of interruptions:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10...
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Such as working with parents to reduce student lateness
contracting with colleagues around interruptions
developing strong behaviour systems
practising economy of language
stripping clutter from slides
eliminating smartphones
and so on...
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After that, it's just a case of identifying what distractions look like in your context, and then working through them systematically.
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Now, what can we do about all this?
Well, the first step is to take distractions seriously.
(imagine someone came to you and said they could increase learning in your school by 50%...)
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Overall, interruptions and poor behaviour consume, on average, over 1/3 of lesson time (at least).
Which means that if we eliminated distractions completely, we could increase learning by over 50% 😱
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But this doesn't take poor behaviour into account...
which earlier analyses by the DfE found consumes 23% of learning time (42 days per year).
And this is before we even begin to factor in instructional distractions...
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One study of US schools found that interruptions consume about 15% of learning time (27 days per year).
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Whatevs Peps, this is all fairly obvious.
Okay FINE… but I’m not convinced we’ve got our intuition right on the SIZE of the effect.
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Instructional → Redundant information on slides, overly complex activities, waffly explanations.
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Environmental → Clocks at the front of classrooms, stuff going on outside the window, tech notifications.
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Distractions can take various forms:
Social → Students coming in late, staff popping into lessons, disruptive behaviour.
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We want them attending to the substance of our teaching, the content of our curriculum... everything else is a distraction.
The problem is that the classroom is a potentially distraction-rich environment, unless we take deliberate steps to stem it.
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We (and our students) can only pay attention to and think about a very few number of things at once.
Managing this precious attention is important because what our students attend to is what they end up learning about.
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SUMMARY
• Personalised learning is experiencing an AI resurgence, but it is destined to flounder.
• Partly because it fails to recognise the role of social motivation in learning.
• A more promising approach may be to use AI to enhance teachers & PD.
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🎓 For more, check out this new pre-print on the effects of AI-enhanced human tutors:
edworkingpapers.com/ai24-1054
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ideally in ways that emphasise the experience of the class as a collective, rather than isolate the student as an individual.
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IMO, a more promising and equitable bet may be to use AI not to replace, but to enhance teaching (eg. as a planning thought partner) and even more powerfully: to enhance teacher development (eg. through training simulations or AI-enhanced coaching)...
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Those who already possess strong intrinsic motivation or robust support systems are best positioned to succeed, potentially further widening the disadvantage gap.
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While some highly self-motivated or academically inclined students will undoubtedly benefit from personalised AI tools, relying solely on this model risks exacerbating existing inequalities.
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The ambient energy of ‘all the people around me learning’ is the biggest (and sometimes only) reason that many students learn.
Motivation is a highly social phenomenon.
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This is largely because personalised learning approaches fail to recognise just how important social norms, authority accountability, and human interaction are when it comes to motivation (and so learning).
They have a motivation blindspot.
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The situation is not without precedent. Intelligent tutoring systems—which adapt to the prior knowledge of the learner—have been around for decades, yet few have managed to find a widespread foothold in schools.
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This is not because LLMs won’t be able to provide effective tuition...
(eventually they may be even better than most human teachers)
but because student motivation—a factor as significant as effective instruction—is something AI tutors will struggle to secure.
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The idea of a personalised learning future—where every student has their own AI tutor, and outcomes soar—is experiencing a resurgence.
However, despite the hype, this vision is likely to face significant hurdles, potentially floundering before it truly takes off.
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PS. Huge snaps to my supersmart co-authors Dr @Barker_J & @Josh_CPD, and the wide range of colleagues who provided kind and constructive feedback on various drafts...
the education community is strong and together we make progress.
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Here's the paper so you can download, read, and share:
steplab.co/resources/i...
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While we’ve worked hard to ground our proposal in the best evidence, we recognise that SEND is a complex, evolving, and emotive field.
If you have ideas for how this paper could be even more rigorous or considerate, fire them over—my email is in the paper.
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IMPORTANT
This paper focuses specifically on the pedagogical and cultural aspects within a school's influence and so is presented as only ONE SMALL PART of a much wider solution to SEND system challenges.
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These principles—which represent a shift from individualism to inclusion—offer a coherent, classroom-based suite of strategies to improve educational experiences and outcomes for all students, especially those with SEND.
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We:
→ Consider five signs that the system is under strain
→ Explore five potential drivers of this situation
→ Propose five guiding principles designed to reframe our approach to classroom teaching