The Distracted Learner

by: Chris Ouellette, NEALS’ President

Happy November Folx,

As we lean into autumn colors and cooler temperatures, with fall sports in full swing, I wanted to share a recent moment between my partner, Jennifer, and me.

One of the ways I try to support Jennifer during the busy fall season is by having dinner ready, or at least well underway, when she walks through the door around 6:00 p.m. after theater rehearsal. Last week, I was in full swing: music blasting, oven heating, water boiling, and channeling my inner Jet Tila as I prepped vegetables ("A tile to a slice, slice to a dice").

When Jennifer arrived home, I barely registered our hellos before diving right back into my culinary world. Some time later, I turned around to find Jennifer in the middle of telling me about a particularly difficult day. I smiled, and she knew instantly that she would need to start over. I hadn't been attending to a word she was saying.

Thankfully, I have a gracious partner who understands how my brain works. She has learned that when I am in a state of flow (read: attempting far too many things at once), I need a little help shifting my attention before I can fully engage in a conversation. And while we can laugh about these moments, they also remind me how easily our attention can become consumed by whatever is happening right in front of us.

If even a small part of this story feels familiar, I wonder what might happen if we turned that same lens toward the worlds our students navigate each day. What are we asking them to attend to, what might be competing for their attention, and how often do we consider the difference? Perhaps the challenge isn't always that we cannot focus, but that we are being asked to focus on so many different things, often without the time or space to transition between them.

One of the privileges I have as an adult is the ability to recognize when I have taken on too much and make decisions about what needs to change. I can pause a task, reconsider a commitment, or decide that something simply needs to wait until tomorrow. But I wonder how often our students have that same opportunity.

Our independent school programs are robust, dynamic, challenging, and, at their best, incredibly empowering. We ask our students to engage in more than academic rigor. We invite them to explore the arts, participate in athletics, build meaningful relationships, develop character, and grow as young humans in ways that extend far beyond the classroom. These opportunities are often among the very reasons families choose our schools, and they are certainly worth celebrating. And yet, I wonder how often we stop to consider the collective demands of all these opportunities.

Throughout my career, I have sat in countless student support meetings where we have gathered around a student who is struggling to meet the expectations of our program. In our efforts to identify a pathway forward, the conversation often turns toward what the student has taken on outside of school. Are they working with a tutor? Have they enrolled in an outside SAT preparation course? Are they participating in athletics beyond what our school offers?

The thinking is understandable: if we can remove some of these additional commitments, perhaps we can create the space the student needs to fully engage in, and find success within our school program. But I wonder, is that the whole picture?

I invite you to consider what a typical day might look like for one of our students. The alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m., leaving just enough time to get ready and grab breakfast before classes begin. The academic day stretches until 3:25 p.m., followed by athletics until 5:30 p.m. From there, it's a quick transition to dinner, perhaps with one eye on the clock to make sure they arrive at study hall on time. Study hall continues until 9:00, 9:30, or even 10:00 p.m., followed by the evening scramble to prepare for bed. If everything goes according to plan, and sleep comes quickly, they might manage seven hours of rest before starting the process all over again. And that's a day when everything goes according to plan. What happens when we add an away game, a meeting with a teacher, an unexpected project, a difficult conversation with a friend, or simply getting sick? Where is the space to pause, process, recover, or even enjoy a moment without another expectation waiting around the corner? I am not suggesting that we abandon the richness of our programs or the opportunities they provide. Rather, I wonder whether, in our efforts to help students meet the expectations of our schools, we sometimes overlook the possibility that those expectations themselves deserve a place in the conversation.

It goes without saying that the expectations of our school programs are only one piece of the larger picture. Our students are also navigating a digital world filled with social media, constant feedback, an overwhelming volume of information, and an increasingly divisive political climate. When we consider all these competing demands together, it becomes easier to understand how sustaining attention can become increasingly difficult. So, how do we begin to respond?

Is removing distractions enough? When faced with the growing challenge of supporting student attention, it is understandable that schools have begun looking for opportunities to reduce distractions. And perhaps nowhere has that conversation become more visible than in our relationship with technology. In recent years, we have seen a growing number of schools turn toward technology restrictions as one response to concerns about student attention, engagement, and academic integrity. Much of this conversation has centered on cell phones, though the emergence of generative AI has also prompted some Humanities classrooms to return to in-class, handwritten essays.

The conversation has extended well beyond individual school communities. As of October 8, 2026, a School Security Leadership analysis reported that “32 states have enacted laws or adopted statewide policies banning student cell phone use for all or part of the school day,” with “21 states requiring bell-to-bell cell phone bans” (Rock, 2026).

And there are certainly reasons to be curious about these approaches. Some schools have reported promising early results, including improvements in student focus and reductions in behavioral concerns. Yet, I wonder whether we risk oversimplifying the challenge if we begin to see the removal of technology as the solution rather than one possible piece of a much larger puzzle. James M. Lang offers an important perspective on this thinking when he writes, “We have only to put away our phones, sit on our meditation cushions, focus our brains really hard, and we will eventually get back the minds we have lost” (Lang, 2020). His point invites us to question an assumption that can feel particularly appealing: if we simply remove the distraction, will our students' attention return?

The research Lang shares around cognitive fatigue and novelty suggests that the answer is more complicated. As he reminds us, “The longer you try to pay attention to something, the more challenging it becomes given limited cognitive control. It stems from two things: Our attention fatigues over time... Change renews attention” (Lang, 2020). In other words, even in an environment without phones, notifications, or other digital distractions, our capacity to sustain attention is not limitless. Sometimes, what our brains need is not simply fewer distractions, but an intentional shift in how we are engaging with the learning experience.

This brings me back to my undergraduate years and a college advisor who had a particularly memorable approach to recognizing when our collective attention was beginning to wander. When he sensed that we were losing focus, he would create a sudden, loud noise to interrupt the moment and bring us back into the learning environment. While his approach has evolved over time, particularly through a more trauma-informed understanding of how unexpected sounds can impact learners, the thinking behind it has remained: novelty can create an opportunity to renew attention.

I share this not to suggest that we should begin startling our students into paying attention, but rather to invite us to consider the larger question. If attention naturally fatigues over time, and changes in our learning environment can help renew it, how might that understanding influence the way we design learning experiences?

We are still learning about the long-term impact of technology restrictions, and I suspect there is value in continuing to explore their role in our schools. But perhaps the more meaningful question is not simply whether removing technology helps students focus. Perhaps we should also be asking what we are doing to help students develop, sustain, and renew their attention in the first place.

As I reflect on these different pieces of the conversation, I keep coming back to the moment in my kitchen when Jennifer walked through the door. I wasn't ignoring her because I didn't care about what she had to say. I was simply so engaged in what I was doing that I struggled to recognize when my attention needed to shift. I wonder how often something similar happens in our classrooms and school communities.

When we see a student struggling to focus, it can be tempting to look for the distraction we can remove, the habit we can change, or the additional commitment we can eliminate. And sometimes, those responses may be exactly what a student needs. But what if we also made space to consider the environments we have created, the expectations we have established, and what we understand about how attention actually works? I am not suggesting that we abandon the richness of our programs, remove meaningful expectations, or ignore the challenges that technology presents. Rather, I hope we can continue expanding the conversation beyond what students need to do differently and begin asking what we, as educators and school communities, might also reconsider.

Perhaps supporting focus begins not with finding one more way to capture our students' attention, but with becoming more curious about everything competing for it.

Cheers,

Chris

References

Lang, J. M. (2020). Distracted: Why students can't focus and what you can do about it.

Basic Books.

Rock, A. (2026, October 8). School cell phone bans by state. School Security

Leadership | K-12 Safety Resources & News 

https://www.schoolsecurityleadership.org/school-cell-phone-bans-by-state/