Welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, Beckie considers professors’ efforts to inspire contemplation among digitally-distracted students and flags a new initiative to encourage science professors to embrace active learning. You’ll also find suggested reading material and a tip from a reader.
Fighting Digital Distraction
For the past several years, Patricia Owen-Smith has begun each class period with about five minutes of silence. Deep learning, said Owen-Smith, a professor of psychology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University, requires silence and space.
Silence, however, can feel unnatural for students, Owen-Smith said. One even remarked that she had never really experienced it before those few minutes at the start of class. After all, students — like many of us — are usually glued to their devices. “It’s like pulling teeth,” Owen-Smith said, “to get them to give up their iPhones.” (For the most part, Owen-Smith bans cellphones and laptops in her classroom.)
Early in the semester, there’s a lot of fidgeting during those first five minutes, and students seem unsure of where to look or what to do with their hands. But over time, Owen-Smith has found, students “begin to sink into it.” By the time midterm course evaluations come around, she said, no one has anything negative to say about the habit.
Beginning in silence, she observes, sets the tone for the way the whole class period unfolds.
Owen-Smith, who has written a book on contemplative practices in higher education, is not the first professor to raise alarms about digital distraction, or to seek an antidote. In 2013, our colleague Marc Parry wrote this fascinating story about the efforts of David M. Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, to help students in his “Information and Contemplation” course manage their digital habits. Like Owen-Smith, Levy began his class quietly, inviting students to meditate. He also had them use a software program to record and observe their multitasking habits. Watching footage of herself jumping from one activity to another, one student observed to Marc: “I don’t know how I get anything done.”
This past fall, I wrote about a course in which students give up speaking and electronics, among other things, for an entire month. That course, “Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life,” wasn’t developed to get students off of their smartphones — it grew instead from a question posed to the professor, Justin McDaniel, by a student in an introductory Buddhism class: Why would anyone want to live as a monk?
Still, McDaniel, a religious-studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, can point to the benefits students reap from following ascetic practices. In addition to allowing for contemplation, the restrictions help students concentrate and form deeper connections with others, he said.
How do you combat digital distraction in your class? Does it work? Have you ever asked students to practice silence, and if so, what happened? Tell me about your experience at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and it may appear in a future newsletter.
