Students no longer know how to pay attention: "It's as if they were 'scrolling' you"

Palma"In the classroom, we have the feeling that we need to stimulate students all the time, as if you had to turn on lights, because if they lose interest, it's as if they were scrolling past you". scroll". Guillem Ensenyat, a teacher at CEIP Es Vinyet in Andratx, describes this way a situation that has become common in classrooms: if the teacher fails to maintain the children's attention, they disconnect. They do not necessarily interrupt the class or behave badly. They simply stop following it.

The difficulty in concentrating worries teachers at various educational stages. In primary school, in secondary school, and even at university, professors describe students who find it hard to follow the thread of an explanation, dedicate time to a task, or accept that learning requires effort. In an environment full of short content, notifications, and immediate stimuli, reading, studying, and listening for a while can seem like unattractive activities. But the issue is not as simple as removing mobile phones from classrooms. The voices consulted point to a broader change in the relationship with attention, boredom, and learning. While it is expected that school should constantly manage to capture students' interest, the ability to concentrate needs time, practice, and moments without stimuli.

Attention must also be learned

Eva María Aguilar, professor at the UIB and director of the Institute for Educational Research and Innovation (IRIE), points out that attention develops during childhood and matures especially throughout adolescence. For it to be strengthened, children need to be exposed to situations that require them to maintain concentration. "Society is increasingly less attentive, less constant, and is losing its capacity for attention," she states. The expert avoids attributing the problems to screens in general. It is not the same to watch a movie with appropriate content and adult supervision as it is to individually consume short videos that follow one another without interruption. What is particularly concerning is this second use when there is no supervision.

"If we expose them less and less time to content that requires attention, they will have less and less," she warns. The ability to concentrate, therefore, cannot be taken for granted: it must also be exercised. The issue is not just how many hours children spend in front of a screen, but what type of content they consume and what space is left for activities that require maintaining focus.

At IES Antoni Maura, teacher Joan Miralles observes that students find it harder to concentrate when an activity does not offer them an immediate reward. "The teacher is not an entertainer. They can make classes more dynamic, but they are not the class clown," he states. For Miralles, effort, memory, and repetition remain necessary, even if they are not always stimulating. "We schools must claim that the learning process involves effort, that not everything has to be fun and imaginative," he maintains.

Miralles also questions the idea that doing nothing must be eliminated. "There is the idea that boredom is an emotion that must be eliminated and new technologies allow us to do so," he states. But not having a stimulus within reach can also be part of learning: it forces one to tolerate frustration or continue a task even if it is not particularly attractive. "This does not mean that classes have to be rigid or that teachers have to give up trying different methodologies. The challenge is to find the balance between awakening curiosity and teaching how to maintain effort when the initial interest diminishes," he defends.

How long can they maintain their attention?

Jesús Revelles, a professor at the UIB, has also observed difficulties in sustaining long dynamics. "When I was studying, we always said we had 45 minutes of attention, but now it is very difficult to maintain dynamics of more than 15 minutes, because everyone has computers and mobile phones, and it is very complicated," he explains. The 15 minutes are a perception based on his teaching experience, not a universal measure of students' attention span. His testimony, however, coincides with the concern expressed by other teachers: maintaining an activity for a while without constantly changing the format has become a challenge.

Revelles relates it to immediacy, which he considers can foster superficiality. Reading is one of the areas where he sees most clearly the need to recover habits. He advocates for the reintroduction of four mandatory books in Baccalaureate, a practice he considers beneficial even if it requires time and work. Reading demands sustained attention and does not offer the same succession of stimuli as social media. Miralles summarizes it this way: "Any activity that does not have an immediate reward generates frustration. Studying requires perseverance, effort, and time, and you do not have an immediate reward. On the other hand, watching TikTok videos is addictive: it generates dopamine and keeps you entertained. If you are accustomed to this, everything that does not have a flood of stimuli seems boring to you".

In Primary school, Ensenyat explains that the difficulty in maintaining concentration has concrete consequences on the organization of sessions. Between getting students to listen, explaining the instructions, and starting an activity, a good part of the hour can pass. "It is not that they behave badly, but that they do not focus," she summarizes. To try to address this, she has resorted to gamification, a methodology that incorporates elements of video games into educational activities. Each teaching unit can be converted, for example, into a superhero that conveys certain values. Students get involved in the proposal and can obtain rewards as they progress.

But preparing these activities requires a lot of work, and play cannot replace everything that learning entails. Ensenyat illustrates this with the multiplication tables: to master them, an attractive activity is not enough; one must also practice at home. The teacher points out that the responsibility does not lie exclusively with the school. "The problem is not the children who use tablets, but the parents who look at their mobile phones at dinner time or who do not watch their child when they play soccer, for example," he states. He considers that adult habits influence the way children relate to screens and to the attention of others.

Recovering silence

Aguilar proposes alternating work periods with brief active breaks: standing up, moving, and sitting down again to resume activity. She also advocates for establishing clear guidelines on what will happen in class and how long each task will last. The goal is to avoid overstimulation and create an environment that facilitates concentration. Along these lines, she proposes applying to the entire classroom strategies that are also used with children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Active breaks, the anticipation of activities, and quiet spaces can help promote the attention of all students, not just those children who have more difficulty concentrating. This does not mean that attention difficulties are necessarily a disorder, but rather that some strategies designed to address specific needs can also be useful for the wider group.

The expert also points out the importance of schedules. She reminds us that adolescents have biological rhythms different from children's and considers that starting classes too early can make it difficult for them to arrive well-rested. For this reason, she argues that, at these ages, entry to schools should be later.

The proposals do not imply turning every class into a spectacle, nor do they consider any use of technology harmful. They aim to restore a balance: teaching how to make useful use of screens, giving space to reading, and accepting that learning also requires moments of concentration without constant stimuli. School cannot compete with social media regarding the speed at which they offer novelties. Its function is different: helping children sustain their attention when the novelty ends. Perhaps this is the challenge that best summarizes the image of Ensenyat: that a teacher does not have to constantly turn on lights for students to look at him, but rather that they learn, little by little, to maintain their gaze even when it is dark.