community asserting their rights and ability to obtain political power and representation. just because we're doing it, there calling it a bad thing. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website. the "after words" tab to view this and all our previous. >>. >> uber

we absolutely thrilled to meet so many colleagues wherever you might be. it took all team to get his hair, a team of colleagues representing more than 17 campuses. they and others are volunteering their time and energy during these days. we would normally ask them to stand and be recognized but alas that's not possible unless you want to do so from home, please do. as you see them convening sessions are helping various capacities in the conference, please take a moment to thank them for their work. i would also like to take a moment to recognize the enormous effort taken by our assistant

director jennifer mckanry and also director of design emily goldstein are leading this year's conference. look at these amazing women, they are so talented and creative. i overcome with pride to know them and they get to work with them. it's incredible to see the creative touches to this year's conference. we would like to personally thank the support of the university of missouri st. louis leadership who places a high value on teaching and learning at our university. without the support we couldn't do what we do. please help a welcome our provost, marie mora come to share a few words of welcome and introduced today's keynote speaker. >> are right. good morning, everyone and thank you keeta and thank you c-span for broadcasting this important conference. i helped one is doing well and

staying healthy and safe. it is my sincere pleasure and privilege to welcome you to university of missouri st. louis on such a beautiful and exciting day. i would've loved to look at me to a beautiful campus and to the vibrant st. louis region in person. our region is rich with history nsa and ss-5 set of institutions of higher education all with creative and innovative faculty, staff and students. together we make the metropolitan region as strong as it is. it is my understanding this is the 19th annual focus on teaching and technology conference. that is remarkable. conferences like this one where we can exchange ideas, learn together and network how we maintain our strength and excellence in the region against the challenges many institutions of our education across the nation are facing. during this unprecedented time teaching with technology has helped us continue to keep our students engaged and on track for graduation and we all know that hasn't been easy. even under normal times it is

often not that easy. sharing ideas and strategies through venues like this one make this job a little lighter. thanks to all of you for donating over time these days to think about how to use technology to improve student learning, teaching and research. it is my pleasure to welcome you to our keynote speaker, dr. james lincoln professor of english and director of the center for teaching excellence at assumption college in worcester, massachusetts. he's authored several books, the most recent of which are small teaching everyday lessons from the times of learning, and teaching distracted mind. i'm sure we will all agree our might to been more than distracted these days. i believe give more details about his background in your conference materials. so without further delay please join in getting a warm welcome to professor lang in today's keynote address, "distracted: why students can't focus and

what you can do about , "distra: why students can't focus and what you can do about it." thank you. >> thank you, everybody. welcome. i'm grateful for your presence. i'm sorry i can't be in st. louis. my wife is from st. louis. i got my masters at st. louis university, and i would've loved to have been there with you all. i am grateful for your presence during this time, i know a difficult it is to stay focused on webinars and zoom meetings over the course of a couple of days. i was just listening to my wife tried do this with her kindergarten class and i'm going to count this as a success if no one raises their hand and asked to show me their cat. the bar is pretty low in terms of what we can do here. but imagine when you're having, struggling with potential of your students can't imagine what my wife is seen with trying to get five-year-olds to stay on that soon call and be focused. i'm going to share my screen, and i would like to be able to start our session today by talking a little bit about

thinking philosophically about what it is that, while attention is important why we want to be able to make attention a value in our teaching. that's why want to get a a stat in terms of thinking more about the bigger pictures in terms of attention. what i want to suggest to you is we should think about the idea that in some ways attention is a very fundamental part of what we do as teachers. i am used to telling in this book, the ecology of attention argues teaching in essence is the art of directing the attention of our students. the essential task of teaching consists in heightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important and what we are looking at. i would encourage you to think about that, the extent to which your discipline has a kind of vast potential terrain and that

your job as a teacher is to identify what's most important in that terrain and direct the attention of your students to that material, that content, those skills. we can think about the idea that actually attention is really fundamental in terms of how we conceive of ourselves as teachers and heavy conceive of a fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters in our disciplines and our classes. stanislas argues i will argue as well today, , that we should be paying more attention to attention. if students are not attending to their correct information or the right things in terms of the skills come the content, qualities were trying to instill in them it's unlikely they will learn anything. our greatest talent, greatest

challenge is channeling and capturing the attention of our students. i'm not going to get so much into the cognitive theory of this but one of the things we know from the research on how people learn is that process starts with attention. if students do not pay attention to whatever it is they're trying to master they are not even going to get to sort of the later steps of learning. so attention is a fundamental part of the learning process and it's the first part of the learning process. i would argue this is kind of a value that we have to make, you really delivered about in our teaching and that we have to think very carefully about how we are cultivating and sustain the attention of our students. that's true especially now when we are all dealing with working through our everything mediated through our devices. we have got this sort of global pandemic raging around us facing personal and professional

challenges but it's true at any moment as well. when we get back into our classrooms, one hopes next year, then we will still need to be thinking about how do we cultivate and sustain the attention of our students. i want to finish this little open philosophical bigger by just noticing also that not only is it our challenge to sort of capture and assisting student attention but the challenge is made difficult by the fact that attention is a limited capacity resource and we've all experienced this on our zoom calls and in their everyday lives as well paying attention to this, not paying attention to that. in fact, attention fatigues overtime that attention more difficult to pay in certain kinds of contacts so we followed these experiences on a regular everyday basis. and so we want to think about ourselves as michelle miller here argues, she's a cognitive psychologist from northern

arizona university, that we are the stewards of our students attention. she argues as stanislas dehaene does, foundation as instructors in the cognitive system it's a precious limited resource. since we are the designers of learning experiences we need to think about ourselves as stewards of the attention of our students. what kind of stewardship are we offering to our students? what are we doing to support the attention of our students in the classroom? prior to the pandemic when we were, the biggest question i get whenever i spoke to people about attention and distraction was what do i do about the devices in our room? the question has been pushed aside in our current context but the question sort of still is always what kind of stewardship are we offering to our students? are we to say no, put your devices way, students can pay attention anymore or i'm

actually trying to take a proactive positive stance to say i'm here to help support you in your efforts to pay attention in this classroom and want to be a partner with you in thinking about how we do that together, and as part of what i'm going to argue and when arguing the book as well. okay so i like to begin our conversation about attention and distraction by just sort of giving a little historical context of this. there is a lot of concern today about the extent to which our devices are not sort of slowly degrading our inability to pay attention, making us into creatures who can no longer pay attention because we're so used to this sort of constant stimulation of our phones and other devices. i think it's worth stepping back a little bit to get some historical context on that and i can help us think more carefully about the kinds of solutions that we use in order to help make attention a stronger value in our teaching. so we can go back a long way here to aristotle writes in his

ethics the people who are passionately devoted to the flute are unable to pay attention to arguments if they hear some playing the flute since they enjoy the flute playing more than the activity that presently occupies them. you may substitute here listening to arguments as being in your classroom and flute playing his youtube videos on your phone. so we can see going back almost as far as we had people writing about the mind, and goes back further than aristotle even for ancient religious texts, the people were express concern about our ability to stay focused especially on something that is cognitively challenging like listening to following along in argument. when extra temptations come along about things that are more pleasant easier for us we can to default to those things. we step away from the challenging thing and we go to the easier or more pleasant thing so we can see and actually

augustine writes about this is welcome lots of ancient writers wrote about this problem of our ability or inability to pay attention to when we want to. we have the desire to listen to the argument. we know it's going to be helpful to us in some way and yet still somehow we can't ignore that flute playing off in the distance. john donne wrote he found difficult at -- he throws himself done in this chamber to pray, put myself in the position i fight god and his angels to come and then when they arrived i neglect god and his angels for a fly or the coach was outside, the whining of a door. you notice here this splits into two parts, identify the two ways in which we typically are distracted. one is the external stuff

whether it's flute playing or that fly but there's a second part which is things that come inside my head, a memory of yesterdays pleasures, i i fearf tomorrow's dangers. noise in my mind, anything,, nothing, fintech and all these things trouble in his prayer. what you see here is we're noticing there are two kinds of things that can distract us, things outside of us and things that are inside our own heads. we probably noticed during the pandemic a lot of the distraction has been things inside her own head as we are thinking about global issues and our personal and professional challenges. that's making more and more difficult for us to stay focused. i love this with as example that we start to worry about the technological distractions that arise. so this is a cartoon from the british magazine punch and it's from 1906 and it's a series of

cartoons that are giving forecast for what could happen in 1907. you have two sort of nattily dressed edwardian store looking at the telegraph machines and who are not as resulting attention to one another. it's kind of striking up with this picture, think about a relationship to the pictures we see of teenagers all huddled over their phones at a restaurant table. there's this cultural lament we don't talk to each other anymore. when it looking one another in the eye, not communicating with one another. this is another concern we witt goes back a very long way. by the way just to note, i'm going to talk, this is basically two parts. the first part is a philosophy context, history biology part of it. i'm going to pause after that part and take questions from the chat. so please if you have questions along the way or comments feel free to put them in the chat and then our moderators will let me

know what is coming there and i will stop and respond to some of those. then we would do the second half and the second half of the same thing, you can put your questions in the chat and we will discuss them at the end of the session. so to time for questions and answers throughout the webinar. what we see is a kind of new element adding that the extern distractions that, for example, the fly and the door wherever it might be now has the sort it complication of the technologies which are drawing our attention to them. my favorite quote is from a novel called the provincial lady in london, provincially was a series of novels about the woman who deal with all the kind of challenges of household management while she was trying to start a literary career as well and one of the novels called the provincial lady in london she writes about attending a literary conference for the first time and you'll see i'm sorry to fight attention wandering to entirely unrelated

topics, companionate marriage, absence of radiators in church, difficult intricate ice. she doubled down on her attention at that point will try to stay focused by taking notes and then later discovers her notes refer to getting postcards for her children, memorandum about address that needs a stitch of finding her local bank in case she runs out of money. this is some 1936 1936 '02 disd during the conference just know you're not alone in that experience. you are the provincial lady shares your pain. i want to get now to the kind of wrapping up this sort of initial kind of historical overview by showing you a kind of, sort of before and after quote in terms of the way our contemporary technologies have affected the way we think about technology and distraction. this is a quote from 1741, isaac watts wrote a book called the

improvement of the mind and one of the things he writes about is the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the company of distraction, it makes you a more distractible person. what he's arguing is about people going to coffee shops. you might know and a 16th and 17th centuries coffee shops were swarmed into england and europe more generally and these were places of heightened activity. they were buzzing with people talking, newspapers, meeting, all kinds of stuff like that. watts was saying don't go to those places if you're trying to study because all of the things that strike your eyes and your ear have a tendency to steal the mind away from steady pursuit of any subject. that's the normal distractions we all experience when he argues is something different and thereby your soul gets into a habit of trifling and wandering.

in other words, if you spend a lot of time in the company of her distractions you become a more distracted person. now once you see that isaac watts has been arguing this in the 18th century, they can give us a little bit of context for the arguments made by people like nicholas carr in the shallows in 2010. you see nicholas carr arguing in the shallows that the calm, he's arguing about what the internet has done to our ability to pay attention, our distractibility. called, focus, undistracted, the linear mind is pushed aside by a new kind of mind that once a needs to take a mentor that information and short, disjointed overlapping verse. the faster the better. you can see now about the extent to which that concern is a very ancient one actually. so the idea that some out our new technologies are fundamentally changing us becomes less plausible when received extent to which these

concerns, we have been having this for a very long time now. another thing i hope you have seen in the quotes i have huge already is we never really had a calm, focused, undistracted and linear minds. that's not the way the human mind works. the idea that we had, there was this pre-lab syrian state in which we call may set and focus on things for as long as we wanted, that's kind of a myth. we never had a mind like that. i want you to think about this now as we go forward. humans have distractible mines and so the idea of this talk of teaching distracted minds is meant to convey the fact that all of our minds are distracted. as a result we need to think carefully about how we teach to a distracted mind. one striking thing about all those historical quotes, and the book has a look at more of this, quote from a sort of righty

cultures and time periods, and one striking thing you'll notice in all of this quote is they are laments. we are unhappy about the fact that our minds are easily distractible. we seem to want a mind that is better able to pay attention and engage in a long reach that sustain focus. whenever we talk about our distractibility we seem to be unhappy about it. that's a real kind of interesting thing to notice about all these comments about reminds and it should make us wonder, , why do we have these distracted minds? why were we given these, why did we evolve with these minds that we wish were different? that we wish we had this ability to push away our distractions and just lock in and focus. i want to spend a few minutes talking about that as well and what sort of biologist else about why we have this distractible mind. one really nice description of this comes from a psychiatrist and author of the divided brain and this comes from an animated

video lecture that he gives. if you google you can see it. he gives the example here of a bird trying to pack for seeds against a difficult background. as he points out, the bird has to have two different forms of attention. it needs to be able to focus to pick out the seed against that background. at the same time it has to be aware of its surroundings because it's got to be aware of the potential for predators, for other birds around it and for, it has to be generally aware of its surroundings. this in fact, is true for us as well. we need to be able to focus will be also need to be aware of what's going on around us to be alert to friends, enemies, dangers. we don't quite have predators, at assisting with the bird does but think about the way in which

we evolve and that evolutionary process, it was important for us to not only be able to track an animal or to be able to start a fire but to be aware of the potential dangers around us as well as the potential positive things, new food sources, new potential social groups all that kind of thing. for a long evolutionary history it's for very good reason that we have developed this ability to focus as well as kind of the ability, the capacity for awareness and our kind of to be easily distracted to the things around us that might actually be helpful to us. the striking thing about primates and some other animals as well is the extent to which that kind of divided ability to focus is intensified by the fact we especially as primates are really drawn toward novelty.

and so in the distracted mind which is one of my favorite books about this issue distraction in a more general way, and optionally an image of that at the end of the talk when i show resources. they argue we are information seeking creatures and that research shows that in addition to foraging for food and drink, our brains have evolved to forage for new information and to continually be curious about new information because i can sort of our long history it was useful for us to say i'm doing this but i wonder what's going on over there. or maybe if i tried this little bit differently something different would happen. so to be pushing ourselves to ask questions and to look for novelty and see what things are to ask ourselves questions to wonder, and to take rabbit holes

and pathways that might lead somewhere unexpected and that is ultimately helpful to us. now what has happened recently, and this is i kind of want to show you the first part of the talk so you know that distraction is an ancient problem that i also do what downplay the fact that our technologies are getting better and better at playing on these aspects of our minds. what we have now that we are dealing with here with our phones is these are machines that been carefully designed in order to appeal to our desire or novelty. i want to think about what your phone does for you in terms of providing you with novel information. it's constant so it's always available to give you something new when you are looking for something new. you can check your e-mail. you see what all your e-mails are. i'm done with that. but now you can pop over to twitter and see there's bound to be something new on twitter. when twitter is tapped that you

can go to instagram and see what's available. by the time to done with that you probably have similar e-mails. if you are looking for novelty, the phone is a perfectly designed machine in order to provide you with that. not only that but we should consider the fact this is a billion-dollar, meaning billion-dollar industry to try and capture your attention to these devices. there's a lot of time and energy that has been invested in trying to ensure that these devices capture and keep your attention. the difference is today is that the machines have gotten better at playing on aspects of her mine that have always been there. so companies are getting better at this as they put time and energy and work into it. now the question that becomes is there gotten so good at it we've

been required? you people say this all the time, like i am no longer able to pay attention. student are no longer able to pay attention. somehow these devices are rewiring our mind. my favorite, one of my favorite psychologist is dan willingham at the university of virginia. and willingham i think and what else i've read on the subject suggests we probably should step back from that concern because of of the fact attention is so central to our ability to think that to imagine somehow in the course of a few years is undergone a significant deterioration. that would require all kinds of bases as retrofitting of other cognitive functions and then kind of reorganization of our brains and the kind of species level is going to happen over evolutionary time and not just because we started playing with our smartphones.

it can change in our brains in an acute way. in other words, in the moment for short periods of time while at will with our technology afterwards but the deep rewiring we hear people talk about that you may be concerned about for yourself, it doesn't seem to be good evidence that is happening, that those architectural levels of our brain. to me that's great news. what it tells us is that our brains are still there as it always had been. they are distractible because it always been distractible but they are also able to pay attention when the circumstances are right and when we kind of put the effort into it to bring our attention to a task. the brains of your students are still there as well, available for attention, and so what this all leads me to the idea that if you want the attention of our students we have to think about how we are deliberately cultivating it.

if there's one thing i want you to take away from this talk today is what you see on the screen. we need to think, start thinking about attention as an achievement. paying attention is an achievement. it's not the default mode. sometimes we think about attention is here and then we fall away from into distraction. i'm going to suggest and what i think the research suggests is that our normal state is distraction. our thoughts are swirling around in her heads, we maybe think about one thing at the maybe something else at the same time. when were able to rise out of that and pay attention, that's an achievement. if something were able to do i'm not that we do effortlessly. and that multiple steps are needed to ensure that we get, we start paying attention and that we stay on track. i really like this concept from daniel kreisberg, cognition, that attention is an achievement

and if achieving this attention is achievement that means we need to think about how a week helping students achieve it. what are we doing in us support their attention over the course of a learning experience? that's our goal for thinking about this. that's what i want to do for the second half of this session is to think about the pedagogical strategies we are using that either support attention or that might push students away into their distractions. let's pause here and just get a review of the first principles. the first thing is remember that human mind is an easily distractible mind. like i said there's a chapter in the book that goes through all this historical, this is struggling examples. i showed you a few of them already but trust me if you're reading older work, as lifting the research for the book and reading as i normally read novels, philosophy and criticism and that sort of thing and it just started to notice people

talk about attention and distraction, you will see it everywhere and you'll see it for about as far back as you can read. human mind is an easily distractible mind. our current technologies are intensifying a pre-existing condition. these things represent what i view as the kind of right historical attitude towards us. we've been distracted but we we facing some special new challenges because of the fact that our current technologies are so good at playing on our distractible natures. so that's kind of to me the two halves of that equation. attention is a hard one and fragile achievement. i think there are two things about that. first of all in a classroom setting we first have to win the attention of our students. we have to do things in order to draw them into the experience but it's also fragile. it's easy to fall away from it and so we have to think about

what we are doing in order to support sustained attention over the course of the class. lastly and this kind of leads us to the second half of the talk, if attention matters to learning, there's a lot of good arguments for that when we think about when we review the cognitive literature, we have to cultivate it deliberately. went to make this a value in our teaching. i know you probably think i have all these other things i need to think about in teaching and i would suggest to you if you come you can view of of of those things through the lens of attention actually. one of the things we've all been talking a lot about recent is about the importance of community in the classroom and with face special challenges with that now as our classes are all, many of us are teaching only online classes. we are not having the normal opportunity to cultivate community in our classrooms that we did in the face-to-face classroom. but you can think about this

through the lens of attention as well. in a clash and community one of the things we try to do is attend to each other. i pay attention to you as an individual. i listen to you. i give you the gift of my attention and and i hope you ae doing that same thing for me. if we think about community, attention can be an avenue toward creative thinking the how we're cultivating community in the classroom. how are they getting our attention to one another? how are we ensuring that when a student speaks, other students are giving the student their attention? a lot of the challenges and problems we face in higher education i think can be viewed through the lens of attention, and the lens of attention can help us think creatively about potential solutions for some of these long-standing challenges we face in education. now usually when i would be giving this talk and i started

giving these talks about attention as i i was working on the book and the issue people always wanted to talk about of course was the vices and the classroom. what do i do about the devices in the classroom? that is less of an issue not obviously because so much of her teaching and learning is happening through our devices. i'm not going to talk so much about that today. i'm just going to say one thing about it. and that is invite you to consider the extent to which your students can be partners in helping you think about how to support and sustain attention in your classroom. your students are in three, four, five other classes. they've had lots of other classes, you're upper-class students at that plenty of other classes already. they had been in five, ten, 15, 20 of 30 classroom environments in which the teachers have different policies about the vices and about attention in which teachers use different

strategies in order to try to support and sustain their attention. so in other . so in other words, they have a wealth of experience in terms of what they could maybe offer in terms of solutions for how to cultivate and sustain their attention. they are sitting through zoom sessions all the time now. and webinars like this one. what is helping them? what is driving them away? what is a moment at which they turn away from the screen and turn to their phones? asked them these questions and see what solutions they might offer you the best help them sustain their attention throughout whatever it is you're asking them to do. it's nearing the end of september here. it's a great time, students about three to four weeks in your classes already. a breakthrough for weeks of classes and all the other classes, have seen policies, creative teachers trying to different things. ask them what's help and asked

him what hasn't been helpful to them. both in your class come in the other classes this term and may be in of they had over the course of high school and college experiences. see what kinds of ideas they might be able to offer you in terms of what you might be doing in the classroom. if you would only do a midterm evaluation, midterm evaluation is great time to ask these questions. i did this with my own students prior to the pandemic last year, asking them to help give me solutions for what would make them most, what i could do with help desk support their attention and the classroom. they gave me several ideas for things i never would've thought about, things that seem some of my colleagues doing. i just would never have had access to that. consider what you can learn from your students about how to support their attention. i would also invite you to think

about your own experiences and sessions just like this one. what's the point at which you start to fade away and what can you learn from that about what you're going to do with your own students? turn the lens of attention to yourself and think about your own distractions, when you get distracted and what draws you back into a a session like this one. speaking of which now is a time i want to pause actually and see what potential questions by that come up about the first half of this presentation. so i don't know if there's anything and the chat we should address both you want me, respond to any particular thing that has come up. >> we did have a couple questions in the chat. the first one was about people with adhd or add and some of the struggles with that. one of our attendees mentioned that is kind of like continuously being in a coffee

shop even when they're in a quiet isolated room. >> right. coffee shop inside your house, right? so as a part of my research for the book i look at like the literature on kind of attention deficit disorders, adhd, at essentially what i drew from that is the solutions that help us pay attention, help anyone pay attention, can help the students. it's course mark challenge for the students but the basic decibels and pathways are going to be similar. one of the things i recommend in the book, for example, in the face-to-face classroom so this, most of us are not worried about this particular semester but one of the things in the book i talk about is the idea of theirs this

often invisible plane and a caution. i'm in the front section others the desks and as many teachers do not crossed that invisible plane. i did a lot of observing and teachers for the research on the book as well and and i can't tl you how many teachers i saw that just state in the little empty space between the first desks and the board. one of the easiest things i think you do in a face-to-face classroom in order to pay better attention to your students is to break that and get out there in the seats to walk around, , i dressed individual students, talk from different corners of the room. one of the things that first got me thinking about that was as a mentioned only my wife is a kindergartner teacher and when she has students who come in and they have been, they have attention problems in their individual plan, one of the first recommendations they get is that student should sit near

the teacher. so the physical presence of the teacher helps support the attention of that student and i think we can start there, like that was specific to cite helpless tubes but i we can generalize that to help everyone. like, again if it, if we were in a conference room right now all of us together i would be standing right next to one of you right now if the person i'm standing next to would be very attentive. i would move around the room to make sure everybody have the times when i was speaking directly to their area. you see it in the theater as well has actors will speak to different parts of the house. what i just try to sit is the principles i'm going to argue once i think can help support attention for those tunes as well even though of course it's going to be more challenging.

>> i'm jumping out of order because this directly ties to what you are saying now. those question about standing up versus sitting down when you are lecturing. >> in a face-to-face room or in a setting like this? >> either. they said are you standing up know when you're speaking to us today for most of us are sitting down while you are lecturing? >> yeah, i am standing up right now and do that knowledge help keep my own energy up. that is a challenge especially in these face-to-face environments as karen wrote a book about teaching via video and she said the camera feature energy. i know when it during a session like if i had to be especially energetic and that's one of the many reasons why zoom is exhausting policy for students and teachers is because in order to add that energy i have to be even more energetic and i'm doing that. of course it's going be useful for you if you are the

recipient, and will probably help if your stint as well, giving more blood flow going, pacing back and forth, that kind of movement helps your cognitive functioning. so i am standing. i always stand for these. >> so the human brain has evolved to fold redundant, irrelevant information such as background noise. how does it fit in with the context of attention in the modern classroom? that's a big one. >> yeah, i mean that's a complicated question here. to filter out redundant stuff. that's going to depend upon what you come with the person thinks has done. the framework they're bringing to the experience is going to help them determine what sort of relevant are redundant or irrelevant or not. that's probably involves more

pedagogical thinking like the context you create in the learning environment, like how do you help students recognize like what matters and what doesn't matter? that's probably more about design of the content and is specifically thinking about the cultivating and sustaining of attention. that's like a deeper pedagogue oco question but going to punt. >> i think of first question also ties in with that. there's some positive aspects of action. often kitchen multiple activities of was especially when the tasks are monday. >> absolutely. two things about that. first of all -- three things. first of all as we on the whole thing about doing more things at once, like we all, there's been so much written about the myth multitasking. we think were able to do this very well. there's lots of scientists have

shown us where not very good at it or as good as we think. however, we are not good at when we're doing similar kinds of things and when both things require thought or require our full attention. you can watch tv and fold laundry. you can have a conversation and do something that doesn't require a lot of your attention. that's what a lot of us feel like we can multitask because we often can if we are doing things that are not required our full attention. when we run into problems is when you are trying to listen to webinar, for example, and also respond e-mail. both of those things require your attention and so that is going to diminish her ability to retain something from the webinar as well as write a carefully constructed email with no typos in it.

that's the way to think about it is we are bad multitasking when the task are similar or really require our attention. having said all that, i think a distractible brain can be good in some important ways. first of all it drives our curiosity so like the fact want to say i wonder what happens if i do this differently and of going to jump down this rabbit hole for a while. that might lead me to something you interesting. it's also the case creativity, creative thinking, also as a result of sometimes like juxtaposing two different things and that might be like i'm doing this as something i think about my project that i've been stuck on for a long time while something else comes up, like that can be a really created and productive thing that are distractible brain is doing for us. like jump after the current thing into some of the place and a recognized way to minute, these thinks might come together. the distractible brain is great

for curiosity and we can find structures in activities in the classroom i can help support that at i write about some of those in the book. i write about some of those in the chapter on connecting and small teaching. for those of you are in that session later on, small teaching in the afternoon, i'm going to talk about some of those strategies because we can channel the distractible brain into some really interesting, in interesting ways through structure connection activities. >> we have time for one more question. i think this is a relevant point that someone brings up about the physiological aspects of attention such as having enough to eat or being dehydrated. i know myself, stress level. if so does this become an equity issue as well? >> of course. all postings will interfere with attention. if you are hungry, if you're worried about taking care of your sibling, everything,

anxiety, depression, all these thinks it if you're with attention. of course we want to think about it to me again we are not really going to talk about, there are six principles that argue for that we can use in order to support and sustain attention. one of those is our thinking about community. absolutely it's an equity issue when we think about how are we giving attention to our students and particular challenges they're facing. attention is reciprocal. when i pay attention to you you are more likely to pay attention to me. so we need to pay attention to those students and those challenges they're facing. i'm not going to talk about that issue so much today. it's in the book so -- i will about it actually more in the afternoon session. but absolutely we need to be

aware of all the things that are drawing away the attention of her students and that has always been true of students but things like, for example, anxiety or attention or learning challenges. that's always been true. that's especially true now with all the stuff going on in the world around us and so we do need as teachers we need to be paying close attention to our students and the challenges they are facing. >> the questions keep coming side don't know if you a lot of a certain amount of time for questions? >> lets do the second half. i think i can get through it in 20, 25 minutes at most and that will still give us -- how are we doing on time? >> we have until 10:30. >> that will give us or 15 minutes for more questions and conversation. >> some of these you will address in your second half. >> okay.

good. all right. we're going to now to start to think about the solutions and about what we can do in order to help cultivate and sustain that atmosphere attention or i'm going to argue in this particular talk for three things, i want to think about structure, about how we're structuring the learning experience but want to think about the fact that attention fatigues over time and so what are we doing to renew it on a regular basis. and then i'm going to talk about the role i think assessment conflict in the attention process. all right. so i'm going to make in these first two things i'm going to argue we should think about planning playwright and planning like a poet. this is going to be an easy thing for you to hang your hat on and terms what you want to take away from this session and think about the idea of the fact that the student, the attention

of our students has limits. but that's true of not only of our students but all of us. attention is a limited capacity resource and it fatigues overtime to one of the great demonstrations of this i'd like is from this study that came out in 2014 which looked at how long did students engage with videos over, in four large groups that are been conducted for multiple years. i believe this data comes from something like 7 million users and they looked at how long did students actually watch the videos that were part of the movie works how long did they stay on the video before they sign off or did something else? what you will notice here is pretty striking. when students had to watch video in a massive open online course, which was conducted entirely online, up to about ten minutes and watch the entire video

between dying, ten, 12 minutes they started to watch only about half of it. when the videos got longer than 12 minutes, they would watch only about 20%. what you can see is the extent to which attention fades over time, and i want to kind of give you the kind of more sort of cognitive statement of that. psychologists tell it, like stephen kaplan, tell us what we're asking students to do on our classroom is to pay directed attention. directed attention as he argues here requires effort. it plays a central role in our ability to focus. it under our control some of the time as were just talking about somethings can't impinge upon and draw us way from it but the one i have bolded here's what i want to focus on now. it's susceptible to fatigue.

attention gradually fades over time and requires more and more effort for us to pay attention over the course of an experience. this is true of any kind of experience. it's going to vary in intensity some more than others but sometimes faculty will say to me students can pay attention over the course of the 75 minute lecture. no they can't but attention will also fit over the course of a 75 minute discussion. that's just how or attention works. prolonged mental effort leads to directed attention 50. we want to think about that. of course the great article at the conference organizers posted from harvard business review points out this is especially true of zoom fatigue. one of the things i love and it articles await the points out the fact that i can assume meeting or zoom classroom which are having a lot of discussion, we're looking at cases the entire time. this is not normal for us.

in real life how often do we stand within three feet of colic and stare at the phase? almost never because that constant gaze makes us uncomfortable and tired. when were talked with people in real life we're looking around all the time. we kind of scare off as a think and make a point and they would return our gaze. we're looking out the window but when were all news video calls for when the students are on the cameras in the classroom we all seem to recognize if i look away do think i'm no longer paying attention. you don't make the same judgment in a face-to-face context. you might recognize you are larry david and jerry seinfeld to one another and what of the running gags that larry david shall curb your enthusiasm is when you he wants to know whetr someone is lying he gets very close up into the faith and looks them right in the i like that. course the joke of that is we are cringe at that happens because we do want people getting up close and looking in our eyes like that for an

extended time. that's what were doing in these zoom calls frequently or in a classroom has been conducted through zoom. there's a special way in which these, are current situation is causing us attention fatigue right now. what i want you think about as you're creating a learning experience for your students and whether that's online the semester or this year or as you get back into the classroom some of you in the next hopefully next year, i'm going -- as the about the fact that a playwright, and for 2000 plus years playwrights have been having to think about how to i capture and sustain the attention of human beings over the course of a two or three hour period when they are forced to sit still in the seats and just look up at the front, right? we can learn something from what strategies they develop in order to do that. they do quite a few things. first of all if you get the program.

that program tells you have hoe experience is going to unfold. i i think there's some real strg value to that. to be able to say to your students this part will going to talk for about 20 minutes, if the conversation is good with political longer. after 20 minutes or so we will do this activity and i'm going to talk to you for about 15 or 20 minutes and we'll have many lecture. able to help people understand how long do i need to be, to sustain my focus? and when did the brakes? being able to live up the structure of a be more organized but if the attention of your students is important, it's worth thinking about. playwrights have seen changes. they have ask and there are intermissions. the acts rise and fall. they start with interesting something to draw the attention of the audience in, and just when things are getting interesting they might pause and there's a break.

i want you to think about this as we go through these next examples. daniel willingham was work i mentioned earlier, talks about the fact questions are really important to starting the learning experience. think about the playwright tries to draw the audience into some initial action or something mysterious or whatever it might be. what we have at our disposal is questions, right? willingham argues teachers come into the class and start talking about the answers to the big questions of our disciplines. but, in fact, what we need to do is do more time surfacing the questions. what's the interesting question our class is designed to answer today works beginning with that in order to get the attention of our students. i have a colleague who does this with the daily question. she begins every class by showing students a micro, a micro biology class come in asking them to quickly jump on

the phones and devices and find everything they can about microbe and in to gather the class compiles a quick little overview of that microbe for the day. it's a great way of each class. she uses it as a way to draw the students in to capture their attention to use their devices. this is not about devices are no devices, and then she uses that kind of what they discover to look into her lecture. of course she knows about the microbe, knows the things they're going to fight as she takes those and pushes them forward into the class for that day. how are you beginning in a way that draws the students in catches your attention, what questions could you ask at the beginning? secondly, how are you offering change? may be bearing active versus passive engagement. as i said i think the important thing is not so much to say i'm not lecturing. i don't think lecturing even on

assume culprits of additive because you can do what you do it now. we maybe think how we are doing that 15, 20 lecture and doing an activity and going back to that maybe it are doing lectures or videos, breaking this up into smaller chunks especially if you're doing things online. if you're having students to activities don't always go to breakout rooms. maybe their time shall have the whole class discussion. maybe their time jonathan do something individually maybe you can have them collaborate on google talk. think about how you are varying those activities you having students doing. in the classroom i think it's not a bad idea when we do group work have students get up at their desks just as a way of reenergizing and recapturing their attention. what are the transition moments for longer sessions, i think we need to be able to provide students with the brakes. the harvard business review article has good recommendations for that.

and then on and off camera. cisterns are not spending 50 minutes or whatever it might be having to look at faces the entire time. maybe you do default an activity where they can turn the scam is off and be doing some kind of engagement activity that you created for them. think about the fact that change renews potential. that's the principle here, change when used attention so how are you offering change in order to help you and reengage? you don't want to do this manically either. you will don't want to do something every five or ten minutes but to a three shifts won't go a long way helping students reengage. i sat in a workshop once with a colleague of mine michelle lemmons who did a really interesting thing. she had us write them all of our teaching strategies we know to you on index cards that you can see what i recover some of mine. then she had us start shuffling them around. seem like what was the pattern

that would be most likely to promote learning and for me i was interested to see what was a pattern that was likely to support and sustain attention. i encourage you to do something like this especially if you're struggling with your teaching right now in terms of getting attention and engagement, right and all the things you can do on a synchronous class and put them on different like postage or for index cards, shuffle them around and see what emerges. .. >> it goes on no longer than it should, things start to fade, the ending of the book which you see here talks about the idea that ass it talks about the

extent in which we can learn from experiences of how to reengage in tension, he talks about the extent with black churches and they notice the tension of their congregation is drifting they would pause and say can i get an amen and they would do that to her three times, everybody shouts back and suddenly everyone is back in the room, i want to encourage you to think about, this is probably more inappropriate for your face-to-face when you get back to, what are the strategies that you have to stop and reengage in the moment, we should have structured things that we are doing to help support but we also should have a couple of things in her pocket like this where we can say let's stop here and i want everyone to write down these three things or have an image, let's all take a look together and see what we notice, here's a new problem that is

kinda reserved for when things got a little slow, now is the time for us to look at it, like i said were gonna do a little group work, i would like everybody to get up and move because it's an opportunity for us to break and re-energize ourselves and get back into things. so you want to think how you structured the experience but also what do you have in your pocket that you can pull out that is going to help reengage in the moment, that is thinking like a playwright, thinking like a poet in teaching like a poet, what i mean by this is to think again about the fact that our attention stays over time, not only in inexperience but also as we become more and more from the year was something we tend to pay less and less attention to it. and your students are coming into classroom sitting down listening to teachers doing the same kinds of basic activity that classrooms always do lecturing, discussions, writing, all of that kind of stuff so i

would encourage you if you want to capture the attention of your students is start to think like a poet and one of the things that poetry does for us, a lot of the things that they do force is to renew our attention to the everyday world, mary all of our is the poet of the book because she had so many poem she wrote about attention to the world and i love her poem here, instructions for living a life, paying attention, the astonished intel about it, this is a great little guide for what we want our students to be able to do, we want them to pay attention to the course material, we want them to be astonished because this is amazing stuff and then we wanted to talk about it, whether that is in the discussion or through their assessments, through their papers, whatever it might be we want them to talk about the wonders they have seen in our

discipline. in order to accomplish that i argue for something called the creation of signature attention activities, signature attention activities or something that you create to reawaken your students to the wonders of your discipline, its connection to their lives in the everyday world, this is where you should practice your most creative thoughts, thinking creatively about techniques that are going to awaken the attention of your students and that is the goal, the goal is to get students to see something with brand-new eyes in the same way that painting gets us to see the fruit basket in a new way or designed to get us to think about an everyday experience in a new light, that is the goal of the signature attention activity. what do i mean by this, in the book i talk about an art historian at holy cross who died a few years ago who gave her students is incredible assignment, she asked students

to go to the art museum nearby, every week and look at the same painting and write a new response to that, one or two page response paper every single week and write 13 papers about the same painting and as she describes in the article that she wrote about, the papers that begin in a superficial way but as the students had to look and keep looking over and over aga again, it was astonishing what they were able to notice and how they were able to start linking a connection between this work in their own lives, the world around them, the things they learned in other classes so they got deeper and deeper in their analysis because the teacher had created a fascinating assignment that was designed to get them to slow down and look. >> i had an opportunity to

observe a teacher teaching introductions of the bible, what she did was another great example of his signature attention activity to having students learn about the book of genesis, the first book of the bible, what she did she had her students sit across from one another in pairs and they had to read the text aloud, just the first few paragraphs and pause after every sentence in order to think about the extent to which they had noticed something new, something thought-provoking, something fascinating in that sentence and i observed this for 20 plus minutes in the things of the students were able to draw in a first few sentences of genesis but it was because she created an activity that forced them to slow down, look at it and think about it in a new and different way.

lastly, john dewey, one of the things that john dewey recommended for teachers was to have the students take everyday objects and things around them and to dive into the more deeply and think about them. and drawing from that i like the idea of an everyday object analysis or something that you might have students in their own homes tried to do an analysis by asking these three questions, what is it, what is it, take a close look and describe it, what is important, what does it connect to, what can i learn from it, how does it connect to the course that you been teaching as well as other things that you may learn or know abo about, what can i do with that, what questions can i ask, what can i write a paper in relationship, these three steps from brown university i walked

there and provide a little bit of detail but just think about a t-shirt, this t-shirt which may have been produced in a factory on the other side of the world by people working under difficult labor condition which relates to our trade policies related to politics and economics and yet it's a fabric, a particular item which has a feel to it which relates to aesthetics, you can take that t-shirt and relate to almost anything in the world and the thing is true for any object you come up with. especially now when you're thinking about what you might do with your online students, to what sense can you invite them to look at the spaces around them and find things in those spaces that are fascinating that you can use as an avenue or window to new and creative thinking about your discipline.

, this is kind of my recommendation, try to think about what awaken or reawaken students to your course content and how can you sue those and on a regular basis. so the structured stuff i was talking about is a one-time classroom experience like they can about the structure, here i'm talking about the whole course in these signature attention activities, what you try to think about doing something like this once a week or in the four times, when you know the student attention starts to lag over the course of the semester. >> think like a playwright, think like a poet and the last thing i want to talk about is the assessment, i want to talk about the extent in which it motivates attention. , the first time i throw to the audience and i said i want you to tell me what are your

students paying the most attention in your class and they said when they're taking a test, that had me thinking about the role of assessment and i believe there is a role to play here that an assessment can help do some workforce with attention, we like to make a distinction in terms of motivation, intrinsic motivation is what we want to observe paying attention and learning because interested, they care about the subject matter and its per trade of the m&a and just doing it for the grade and that as a motivator but what we want to think about is the extent to which these things can actually work together and one kind of motivation is not good to reach all of your students and extrinsic motivation can have a role to play in directing the attention to your students, i

would invite you to think this is doctor turner everyday life that the motivators like assessments go hand-in-hand with intrinsic motivators like her own desires and that's why we get things, we know running is good for us and we know exercise is good first, we should do it because we want to but how many of us do things like enter a 5k because it gives us an extra motivation to get ready for that particular performance even if we don't care how we did, we give ourselves these motivators to help push us through when things get difficult and that's what i think like a motivator like an assessment can do, can help engage us when we might be feeling tired or out of it or not quite as interested as initially, the motivator is the assessment can push us into the engagement and ideally it's an interesting experience, you created a good learning experience and what's there into

it that intrinsic motivation will kick in. especially now during this pandemic when your students have so much to do and so much to worry about, i think this can be an equity issue as well. putting a little bit of steak on the things that you are asking your students to do during a session or out of class can help your students recognize where their attention is going to give the most bang for the buck, if you design your activities as well, you know they're going to help, why not reward your students for the work that they do on those assessments, do things like giving very low stakes, putting very low stakes like on a regular in class work that your students do, if you're in class and having students do some kind of activity, some kind of participation grade, i think

it's these kinds of things that you have your students do for example polling, worksheets, solving problems, getting together in groups to do a particular task, help your students out, help them focus their attention by finding a way to regularly reward the effort that they put into those things. i don't view this as being incompetent because some your students are really going to be motivated by that and some of your students might need that nudge to get involved, a student who has a lot of other stuff going on might at that moment say i need to check in and get working because this is going to help me, this is something that is going to help my grade for the class but it's going to help their learning as well. what i am arguing is to think about low stakes engagement, the most important activity played each day or each week such as the signature attention activity collected on paper or electronically and have it make

a minimal contribution towards her grades of your students, this is an example of something i'm asking students in my class to do, passages, we do it in class and i'll put them in groups, they get a paper copy and i tell them i want you to write down everything you can think of, keywords, things that it remind you of, the goal is to brainstorm everything they can think of and relationship with the poems, once they've done that we look at altogether and see what makes sense and what things we want to pursue, when i do this kind of thing, the students -- i counted and i say all that matters is you do it, you put effort into it and you're willing to take the ten or 15 minutes to really focus on this and get as much stuff on there as you can.

i know that's a helpful activity for them, if they attend to it will be better at doing that when i asked them to do it when their papers are on exam. that is my basic argument about assessment, assessment has a role to play in attention, either when they're doing their activities or when you're. enter preparing students for paper exam, the idea of saying this is something that's going to help you on the higher stakes assessment, i think we should be doing that kind of thing in order to help direct them to the things that will be helpful to them. let's skip that one and try to racwrap up because i want to mae sure we have time for discussion we have 15 minutes or so left, what we talked about or three things, structure renewal, assessment and some of the ideas when students have more structure, will be fought deliberately about the structure and the experience and with attention in mind, that will do a better job of keeping your

students their attention to spanned over the course of the . . . we talked about renewal, how signature attention activity complaint role in renewing or the course of the semester, that's what we talked about the sets of assessment has a role to play in so low stakes assessment on engagement activities can help direct the attention of your students and it can help promote their learning by getting them to focus on the things is going to help the. what we did not discuss today are these three elements and these are other chapters in the book, if you're interested in getting more on this, you can find these things in the book, how community supports attention, how curiosity can drive attention and the role that mindfulness can play in supporting attention in the book i know people are always curious about this one, in the book i argue, i think this can be

helpful i think it's more helpful for the teacher to think about their mindfulness then to try to be expecting students to suddenly become practitioners of mindfulness, the research is very complex in terms of what the mindfulness in the classroom, you could get into all that detail in the book and see my arguments there, i want to just finish with mary all over again and just know what i really become to believe over the course of this research is the classroom and the learning experience can be a retreat, and attention retreat, i said at the very beginning these of the ocean in which we swim and attention rises out of those the ocean like islands and pain attention getting focused and losing herself in some kind intellectual or cognitive work can be a source of well-being,

they sent me the research on the demonstration of that, we want to think about the fact that our classroom can be a place where we retreat from the distractions around us and have the opportunity to really focus on something that is important so think about your classroom is a place for attention is value, cultivated and sustained and that that is ultimately the inlets improper work of a teacher, resources, these are three books i would recommend, now you see it, the distraction of a focus on education and work, the distracted mind and the scientific overview and then there you have the distracted book where i'm talking about a little bit of history and the biology as well as the six principles. i'm going to wrap up, stop screen sharing and see what kind of discussions that we have,

what kind of questions and comments that we have. >> we have a lot of wonderful questions in the chat in the q&a and i hope we will be able to get to all of them, i know there has been a few posted in the chat as well, they were buried in great comments, if we have time i'll go through those two but we have several people asking how this relates to recurrent environment with covid, first related to the idea of getting up and moving around and moving pairs and that type of thing counters the advice were getting from those who know more about how disease spreads and we should stay in our little bubble, any suggestions. >> getting up and moving around is probably not the way to go, were in a difficult situation so, so many things that we can do right now, what i told you in this book as i did with small

teachings, and offers a variety of things, they're not all going to work in every context but if there is one or two things that we can do a little bit differently by all means, not everything -- take a couple of things if you could take one thing away from this presentation of the book that's going to help make attention, i think that would be great, you cannot expect everything to work, especially right now. >> another relevant question related to that, to what degree does the comfort predictability needed right now for students in this age of chaos and uncertainty, balance with the need to mix it up to refocus. >> the one thing that can be really helpful actually applies to both the change part in the

comfort part and that is to make the structure of the experience clear, and the face-to-face classroom, one of the things i like to do, i segment off a little side of the board and say one, two, three, for the hughes was going to happen in class, i usually don't put times on their but sometimes i talk it through and i think we can be doing the same thing as we do in the classroom. the example i like to give, you're sitting in a conference session, imagine yourself in a regular conference session and the good old days or in the future in a presenter is going on and on and this is my last point, you kinda perked up at that moment or presenter say this is my first idea and now in going to move on to the second, those are the moments in which

our attention perks up because we realize something important is happening, there is a change so planning that out gives a sense of comfort and predictability, i know it's going to happen but it also gives that we plan it in a way that change is going to happen. >> that perfectly leads into several questions about timing and attention spans, how long whether it's a video in your online class or your lecture component and someone thought it was no longer in the age of the students, i have not heard that before. >> i should call my wife in he here. >> i've never heard that, that is interesting. here's what i would say, you saw on the videos, i can't give a scientific answer but two things to keep in mind, first of all is

probably shorter online that is in the actual classroom, if you have a 45 minute video lecture to make for your students, break it out, there's no reason not to do 315 minute segments. there's a number of things that does. first of all it acknowledges the difficulty of paying attention through difficult cognitive thing online, the other thing it does about your students come out, i took an online class of summer because i wanted to see what my students work sprinting toy took a spanish class the instructor did a lot of great things, the one that he didn't do was lecture, one time there was a one hour lecture that i had to watch and most of the time i like i don't have time for that right now and maybe i did not get back to him, i was auditing so that was okay. if it hadn't broken up in 15

minutes i might've said i could do the first one right now and i'll do the second one later tonight, if you're breaking it up, you're giving the opportunity for that to happen and that is maybe going to help students who otherwise might have difficulty getting through the full hour. the other thing i would say in terms of actual classroom you could probably go a little longer and it kinda depends on you, how energetic are you, how much are you willing to get out there and draw attention, i think we all have to find our sweet spot, i can be pretty energetic in the classroom, i'm willing to go 20 - 30 minutes of talking but that's about as far as all go, some folks are quieter and have a lower level, but some might not, you have to know yourself. >> along that same line, in a classroom i see the sitter questions and i hear this a lot from her other faculty to gauge

the attention students looking at them standing in the classroom on zoom, often the videos are because of zoom in many of the reasons we are recommending, any suggestions or ideas for how to gauge the attention -- >> i don't really know what we can do about that, for reasons that we talked about another privacy reasons and forcing everyone to have the camera on because of the best solution, you can encourage people to jump in the chat, multiple modes of engagement and let's say you got a session in which you gonna do 15 minutes of talking and you're gonna put students into a shared dock to do something together, from the very beginning you could say something like in 15 minutes you're gonna be on a google doc and in order to be able to do that you gotta follow what were going to do, you need to follow through, that's the

best i can think of on the chat on the way or let me know that you understood by saying that in the chat, that's only kind of thing i can think of for this, were in a challenging situation, we all are is as far as your research, are there any issues regarding bilingual students that you found that my mentor may require a cognitive capacity for the content. >> that's another reason to think twice, otherwise the news processing in the second language, that's going to take up some of their attention, just think about attention as a bucket, there is only so much i can go on there once, if anything else is taking up space there's going to be less space for something for whatever the

content is, i just also they come up in the chat which was a good suggestion, i don't know people saw that, taking notes and submitting notes and for having a class note would be another idea, this is on the other question, of course, you want to think about things that you record and make it available and "after words" making sure that you are using captions for example, if you're given a presentation in the classroom, maybe making sure the students to have access to translation and other devices that they can use for helping the translation, you gotta think about that and think about the principal and some other stuff the cognitive research are being used up so they do probably need a little bit more help and support. >> you are watching book tv on c-span2 for television for serious readers.

here are some programs to watch out for, this afternoon your events from the virtual literary festival in new york city, to nightly commentator nancy grace provides a guide on how citizens can protect themselves and becoming a victim of crime, honor author interview program "after words" the washington post poets a prize-winning book critic for nevada offers his thoughts on the books written about president trump, find more information on booktv.org or on your program guide. >> here's a look at publishing industry news, miles taylor, former chief of staff of the department of homeland security has divulged that he was the anonymous author of a warning, 2019 book that was google president trump, mr. taylor served for two years under former homeland security secretary kirsten nielsen and left the department in june of 2019.

in other news poet diane diprima has died at the age of 86 she was the author of 50 books of poetry and part of the beat movement in san francisco in the 1950s. editor daniel medicare has also died, he was 79, he was a longtime fiction editor before becoming executive editor-in-chief of the random house where he worked with alice monroe and daniel silva to name a few. he also authored several books including a novel in a memoir. also in the news bookscan reports that they continued their strong year up 13% for the week ending october 24. adult nonfiction sales were up over 6% for the week in november is national model writing month according to a nonprofit organization that has been promoting the writing exercise for 21 years, the goal is to write up to 50000 words by the end of the month in hopes of producing a model, more information can be found on the

website. but to be will bring you new programs and publishing news, you can watch all of our past programs anytime of booktv.org. >> now and c-span2 book tv, more television for serious readers. >> next on but tvs "after words", the wall street journal's gerald seib discusses how the conservative movement has evolved since the reagan era, he is interviewed by karen tolle multi, "after words" is a weekly interview program with relevant guest host interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work, all "after words" programs are also available as podcasts. >> thank you so much for joining us today for our conversation